Research Themes | Cyberinfrastructure | Technical Reports 

CAREER:  Innovation of Institutional Rules in the Governance of Common Resources [NSF] Management of shared or "common pool" resources - like shared grazing or fishing grounds -- is a hard problem. The possibility that some parties will overconsume, pollute or otherwise damage the resource as they extract their personal value from it is always present. 

Project website:  The Virtual Commons

 

CAREER: Local Context and the Dynamics of Social-Ecological Systems: Beyond One-size-fits-all Solutions to Environmental Problems [NSF] Globalization is fundamentally changing the way humans interact with natural resources. Many people no longer rely on local resources but, rather, on a set of distant resources linked through a global economic network. Unfortunately, this integration of local resource systems across several temporal and spatial scales has the potential to amplify local resource degradation problems to the global scale.   

Project website: The Electronic Library of Social-Ecological Systems

 

Community Development Proposal:  Integrating Socio-Ecological Sciences Through a Community Modeling Framework [NSF] The dynamic complexity that characterizes interactions between humans and the natural environment, has intersected over the past century with increasingly rapid population growth, urbanization, and technological development to make human society an important driver of environmental changes that threaten to exceed our abilities to adapt using traditional means. 

Project website:  Open ABM Consortium

 

Culture, Health and Environment in Urban South Phoenix [NSF] This project uses a combination of tools from Anthropology, Human Geography, and the Health Sciences to examine the ways in which cultural variation becomes embodied as health differentials within resource-poor urban neighborhoods.

 

Determinants of Grassland Dynamics in Tibetan Highlands: Livestock, Wildlife, and the Culture and Political Economy of Pastoralism [NSF] Grassland degradation is a global concern, affecting not only wild species and pastoralists who rely on healthy grasslands for their survival, but also non-local people who suffer from resultant hydrological disturbances, dust storms, commodity scarcity, and social consequences of uprooted people.

 

The Dynamics of Rules in Commons Dilemmas [NFS] Various social sciences have contributed to understanding how humans make decisions in a given rule set of experimental games, such as social dilemmas, coordination, and bargaining. However, the rules of the games are not fixed in real-life settings. No systematic studies have been performed on the question of how humans are able to change the rules in commons dilemmas.  

Project websites:  The Virtual Commons and The Dynamics of Rules in Commons Dilemmas

 

Enabling the Study of Long-Term Human and Social Dynamics: A Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology [NSF] Traditional scientific research is focused within academic disciplines with a marked divide between social and natural sciences. However, scientific research is now crossing disciplinary boundaries, seeing human and natural systems as inextricably linked. This project is ultimately concerned with understanding long-term change in linked human-natural systems.

 

Ethnohydrology in a Desert City We construct a model based on an integrated collection of quantitative models to represent water consumption and availability in central Arizona under scenarios of population growth, climatic uncertainty, individual behavior, and policy choices.

  

An Ethnohydrologic Evaluation of Water Quality and Quantity in CAP The Phoenix Ethnohydrology Study is a follow-up study to the DCDC/LTER-funded Phoenix Area Social Survey II (PASS II), a 40-neighborhood survey conducted in greater Phoenix in the summer of 2006.

 

Global Ethnohydrology Study Concern over not only water quantity but water quality is understood as a major global issue, affecting almost all people in some way or other. The Global Ethnohydrology Study is a multi-year, multi-site study that examines local ecological knowledge of water issues, also known as “ethnohydrology.”

Integrated Analysis of Robustness in Dynamic Social Ecological Systems [NSF] There are many examples of societies which have endured for long periods, successfully coping with uncertainty, disturbance, and change in the environment. There are also many examples of societies that have failed in this regard. The core question addressed in this interdisciplinary research project is why some social-ecological systems are more successful in navigating disturbances and change in the environment than others.

 

Interdisciplinary Training for Undergraduates in Biological and Mathematical Sciences at ASU [NSF] An interdisciplinary team of investigators carry out an undergraduate training initiative at Arizona State University. The training plan intimately combines new cross-disciplinary courses and summer research programs.

 

Investigating Majority Rule Voting in Common Pool Resource Settings [NSF] Large scale resource systems, such as ocean fisheries and national forests, are managed by a variety of governance systems. Over the past few decades, these resource systems have been the subject of numerous case studies and large-sample analyses investigating the efficiency of alternative forms of governance at encouraging long run sustainable harvesting.

 

Knowledge, Values and Environmental Decision Making This study examines policymaker responses to is a systems dynamics model known as WaterSim. WaterSim produces profiles of water shortage conditions under different climate change scenarios, drought conditions, population growth rates, and policy decisions.

 

Late Lessons From Early History  ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change is breaking down disciplinary borders and raising the bar for intellectual fusion with an exciting new research initiative. Titled Late Lessons from Early History, the program is dedicated to exploring our past, present and future through the work of transdisciplinary teams focused on specific aspects of the human experience.

 

Legacies on the Landscape: Prehistoric Human Land Use and Long-Term Ecological Change  This project is a collaborative effort by archaeologists and ecologists to investigate the legacy of prehistoric and modern human land use on the mesas of Agua Fria National Monument north of the Phoenix Basin.

 

Long-Term Coupled Socioecological Change in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico [NSF] Each generation transforms an inherited social and environmental world and leaves it as a legacy to succeeding generations. Long-term interactions among social and ecological processes give rise to complex dynamics on multiple temporal and spatial scales - cycles of change followed by relative stasis, followed by change.

 

Phoenix Area Social Survey The first Phoenix Area Social Survey (PASS) was conducted as a pilot study in 2001. Our main objective was to examine the reciprocal relationships, or the interplay, between the social and natural environments in an urban ecosystem.

 

The Project on Global and Comparative Knowledges is an interdisciplinary community of scholars examining the global politics of science and knowledge. The project’s mission is to improve international governance by focusing in depth, critical research on the ideas that underpin decisions of global significance.

 

Research on Human and Environmental Systems Interactions [NSF] When shaped by the information humans derive from their contexts, beliefs are the basic parameters around which humans construct their preferences and actions.

 

Social Dynamics in Response to Shifting Immigration Policy and Practice: Latino Social Networks, Resource Flow, and Household Reorganization [NSF] Immigration is a major area of concern shaping contemporary policy, practice and debate in the United States. As a large scale agent of change, shifts in policy and perceptions concerning immigrants ripple through social networks, affecting household arrangements and resources that impact not only individuals, but families and whole communities.

 

South Phoenix Collaborative: Leveraging Culture & History to Support Healthy, Resilient and Just Communities Given the massive cultural, social and ecological transformations created by such linked global processes as migration, urbanization and the emergence of new diseases, a major challenge we now confront is how to create and maintain healthy, just and resilient communities.

 

Urban Bird Dynamics: The Credit Card Theory Bird population densities in urban settings are higher than in wildlands. This established global patterns has been suggested to be the result of increased food abundance (bottom-up effect), decrease in predation pressure (top-down effect), or both.

 

Urban Organization through the Ages: Neighborhoods, Open Spaces and Urban Life From the earliest cities to the present, two universals of urban form are the organization of residential areas into neighborhoods and the presence of open spaces within cities. Neighborhoods can differ greatly in their ethnic, political, religious and economic dynamics; open spaces include a broad range of uses, from gardens to civic plazas to empty lots.