Abstract del progetto
ABRESO addresses soil and water sustainability in landscapes undergoing transitions. Management and social-cultural changes create transitions, altering watershed properties in a manner that stakeholders may not understand or appreciate. Yet changes affect stakeholders, what they want to preserve or change, and their views of land management strategies. The general theme of this project, to occur in France, Italy, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, is to determine actual and perceived effects of land use transitions on critical zone (CZ). Actual effects will consider biogeochemical cycles under changing inputs of altered land management. Perceived effects will consider stakeholder expectation, preference and evaluation of ecosystem services and disservices. We will investigate whether heterogeneity in perceptions depends on stakeholders’ characteristics (e.g., urban vs. rural, resident vs. visitor, etc.), and how change is framed across different spatial scales (e.g., local and watershed scale or beyond). Finally, we will examine associations between perceptions and support for land use change and management decisions.
The general theme of this project is to determine actual and perceived effects of land use transitions on CZ function in the context of land abandonment. Management and social-cultural changes create transitions, altering watershed properties (soil and water quality, and related ecosystem services) in a manner that stakeholders may not understand or appreciate. Yet changes affect stakeholders, what they want to preserve or change, and their views of land management strategies.
The project team is diverse and highly accomplished, ranging from an environmental psychologist to an isotope geochemist to a landscape ecologist. Together the project leaders have selected 25 geographically diverse watersheds from 5 culturally diverse countries with broad variation in climate, geology, watershed size, human density, drivers of land use and management, and stakeholders (Figure 2). Our study regions include sites in France, Italy, Japan, Taiwan, and the USA, with research catchments that are large enough to incorporate a mosaic of land uses and management approaches including abandonment and redevelopment, while small enough to allow detailed assessment of biophysical conditions in different watersheds and regional variation in stakeholder views. Most of our study watersheds already have extensive biophysical data to characterize the CZ, with data sets spanning decades.
- describe social and natural forcing functions that drive land abandonment and subsequent land use change;
- quantify impacts on water quality due to this abandonment;
- identify gaps in understanding of actual impacts and those perceived by stakeholders such that stakeholder reactions to land use change can be better understood and modeled; and
- use a modeling framework to assess sustainability of various land use and land abandonment scenarios in the context of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
National Research Council, Italy
French Geological Survey
Hokkaido University
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris
Institute for Global Environmental Strategies
National Taiwan University
Systèmes d'Information à Références Spatiales
University of New Hampshire, Natural Resources & the Environment
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
University of Tsukuba
Maria Adamo
Cristina Tarantino
Saverio Vicario