Simple landscape model:
Polop valley
before and after Holocene erosion |
All of modern society
depends ultimately on the products of agriculture and animal herding.
This agropastoral economy first appeared in the Mediterranean basin
in the early Holocene, nearly 10,000 years ago, and represented a dramatic
reorganization of human ecology. It involved increasingly intensive
efforts by farming peoples to control environmental factors favorable
to the life cycle of domestic plants and animals, with a consequent
cascade of complexly interlinked effects on regional landscapes and
human society.
Agropastoral landuse
remains the most significant way in which humans impact natural landscapes,
and the recursive social effects of these impacts are important global
issues. However, landscape evolution takes place over the course of
decades, centuries, and even millennia. Even the loss of a landscape's
ability to support a people and their subsistence economy is often the
result of longer term changes that are most apparent at the resolution
of the prehistoric record. Only by studying this long-term record can
we truly begin to appreciate the real consequences of past and present
landuse decisions on earth's landscapes and society, and use this understanding
to make more informed decisions today.
he longest and best-studied
record of the ways in which human activities have transformed the
world is found in the Mediterranean Basin, encompassing both the
earliest known agricultural landuse and the earliest civilizations
to become dependent on these human-managed socioecosystems. Decades
of intensive study by archaeologists, geoscientists, and ecologists,
has amassed rich and diverse data about human-environmental interaction
in this region. This information is integrated with recent advances
in geospatial modeling and agent simulation to create a natural laboratory
for investigating the long-term social and ecological consequences
of alternate landuse practices. In this project, the modeling laboratory
is used to study: 1) the effects of growth in agropastoral systems
on biodiversity; 2) the changing impacts of landuse
intensification and diversification on landscapes, their resilience, and vulnerability
to degradation;and 3) the long-term sustainability of human maintained
socioecosystems in varying environmental and social contexts. The
study focuses on two ecologically diverse regions at opposite ends
of the Mediterranean Basin, eastern Spain and the southern Levant
in Jordan, that encompass much of the social and natural variability
of the entire region.
Geospatial modeling of landscape dynamics |
This work will generate significant new knowledge about long-term consequences
of alternative landuse practices that can help communities make more
responsible and effective decisions about landuse today. It will also
generate integrated archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets,
and dynamic landuse-landscape modeling algorithms that will be disseminated
via the internet, conferences, and publications for use by researchers
addressing other socioecological questions. The research is tightly
integrated with an active educational program for undergraduate and
graduate students especially geared towards hands on training in the
research process, and collaborative transdisciplinary work. This includes
a K-12 outreach partnership with the Arizona Geographic Alliance, and
collaboration with educators to co-develop and disseminate curricula
that enables science learning within the context of core requirements
of the No Child Left Behind legislation.
