Integrating Climate Change and Metacoupling into Panda Conservation  

Principal Investigators: Jianguo Liu, Sue Nichols, Andrés Viña

Funding Agency: Pandas International 

Period: 2024 - 2025

Conservation of the charismatic giant panda, a global wildlife icon, has received strong support from the public, governments, and various organizations. Such support has helped reduce the panda’s traditional threats such as poaching and land use, transformed the long-term loss of panda habitats into recovery, and enabled the panda’s removal from the endangered species list. However, these successes may be compromised by climate change and metacoupling (human- nature interactions within a place, as well as between a place and other places near and far around the world, including external forces such as tourism and investments in the construction of infrastructure). The ultimate goal of this proposed project is to integrate climate change and metacoupling into panda conservation across the panda distribution range in China. To accomplish this goal, we will address four interrelated objectives: (1) Evaluate climate change impacts on bamboo and panda habitats across the panda distribution range, (2) Assess the effects of metacoupling on bamboo and panda habitat across the panda distribution range, (3) Untangle the complex interactive effects of climate change and metacoupling on panda habitat, and (4) Incorporate research findings into future panda conservation and disseminate the research findings worldwide to promote awareness and actions related to climate change and metacoupling. 

To achieve the objectives, we will integrate relevant field data (including the distribution of bamboo and panda habitat), remote sensing techniques, species distribution modeling, and climate change projections. Through appropriate methods for collecting, analyzing and integrating various datasets, we will quantify the effects of metacoupling on panda habitat. We will perform comparisons among areas throughout the panda range projected to experience gains/losses of panda habitat under different climate change scenarios, and under the influence of different metacoupling processes. We will engage with relevant government officials and other stakeholders in China to incorporate climate change and metacoupling impacts into panda conservation plans through meetings, focus group discussions, and hands-on workshops. We will also develop a virtual resource center that integrates results from the project, such as narratives, graphics, presentations, publications, and maps related to climate change, metacoupling and their impacts on panda habitats. Our interdisciplinary and international team includes long-term collaborators and leading experts covering all project topics and methods. A partnership with Pandas International could be a powerful alliance to reach new audiences. The results and methods will provide insights such as where to place new protected areas to maximize their capacity for climate mitigation and adaptation across the metacoupled world.

Building Resilience to Shocks and Disruptions: Creating Sustainable and Equitable Local and Regional Food Systems in the US Midwest Region and Beyond  

Principal Investigators: Ross, R., Whipple, J., Marshall, M., Todey, D., Winkler, J., Knipe, R., Wu, F., Knipe, D., Konar, M., Varshney, L., Liu, J., Liang, C., Beverly, B., Frank, K., Nichols, S., Viña, A., Ellefson, N., Gardner, J., Naik, S., Ripmaster, C., Robinson, J., Thur, T. 

Funding Agency: USDA-NIFA 

Period: 2023 - 2028

Recent multiple shocks (e.g., COVID-19 combined with climate shocks and foodborne pathogens) have revealed critical vulnerabilities of agri-food systems. These shocks uniquely challenge local and regional food supply chains, many of which produce, process, and distribute food products critical to the food and nutritional security of the US population. The goal of this project is to build local and regional food systems that are resilient to multiple shocks. This goal will be accomplished through nine interrelated objectives. Objectives 1-3 evaluate key characteristics of supply chains, impacts of historical and projected shocks, and alternative mitigation/adaptation strategies. Objectives 4-5 center on innovative systems modeling, simulation, and decision support using artificial intelligence. Objective 6 examines the impact of shocks and mitigation strategies on food and nutrition security, particularly among vulnerable US populations. Objectives 7-8 apply novel research findings to extension and education. Objective 9 promotes a holistic integration of research, extension, and education to inspire futuristic, equitable solutions to policymakers and stakeholders. The project will result in fundamental insights and knowledge surrounding the effects of multiple shocks on local and regional food systems as well as a suite of mitigation strategies and decision-making, extension, and educational tools. These results will fill critical knowledge gaps in our understanding of how to build more resilient local and regional food systems, empower stakeholders (especially disadvantaged and vulnerable communities) to mitigate and adapt to multiple shocks, and develop a new and diverse workforce that supports agri-food resilience. Ultimately, the project will lead to more resilient and sustainable agri-food systems that improve food and nutritional security, prosperity, and well-being in the Midwest U.S. and beyond. 

Cooperative Agreement: Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE)  

Institutional Principal Investigators: Jianguo Liu, Sue Nichols and Andrés Viña 

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation 

Period: 2021 - 2026 

This project establishes the Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE). In today’s interconnected world, disasters such as floods and droughts are rarely isolated events, and their cascading effects are often felt far beyond their locations of origin. I-GUIDE creates an integrative discovery environment that enables the harnessing of geospatial data for understanding interconnected interactions across diverse socioeconomic-environmental systems to enhance community resilience and environmental sustainability. I-GUIDE nurtures a diverse and inclusive geospatial discovery community across many disciplines by bridging disciplinary digital data divides with broader impacts amplified through a well-trained and diverse workforce and proactive engagement of minority and underrepresented groups. The project leverages existing collaborations with its diverse member and partner organizations, representing academic, governmental, and industrial institutions, thereby extending its reach across the U.S. and the globe. The influence of I-GUIDE’s new knowledge frontiers impact solutions to real-world problems and geospatial decisions, with significance ranging from the nation’s economic development to security. I-GUIDE builds upon relationships with the museum and informal science education communities as well as libraries and news media to raise public awareness about the contributions of the geospatial data revolution to society.

Globalization has intensified and extended the impacts of socioeconomic-environmental interactions across long distances, a process known as telecoupling. I-GUIDE’s integrative discovery environment is vital to transform innovative theories, concepts, methods, and tools focusing geospatial synthesis that drive novel capabilities for addressing scientific questions of how to harness geospatial data for multi-scale and telecoupling discoveries to enhance community resilience and environmental sustainability. Two substantive and convergent scientific problems are addressed: (1) Water security, to evaluate geospatial and socioeconomic impacts of hydroclimatic extremes that are related to environmental and infrastructure sustainability, and (2) Biodiversity and food security, to enhance basic understanding of biodiversity dynamics in the face of nearby and distant disasters, global change, international trade, and dynamic land use transitions. Transformative geospatial understanding gained from solving these interrelated problems are translated into digital resources and tools made available online through an open I-GUIDE platform for a variety of educational and training activities to serve a broad and diverse audience. Through this platform, the next-generation workforce can acquire geospatial knowledge coupled with data-driven technological skills for decision-making and problem-solving experiences.

This project is part of the National Science Foundation's Big Idea activities in Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR). The award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, the Division of Social and Economic Sciences, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities within the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences; the Division of Earth Sciences within the Directorate for Geosciences; the Division of Mathematical Sciences within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and by the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. 

Collaborative Research: Complex Effects of Telecoupled Activities in the Changing Environment of the Arctic  

Principal Investigators: Jianguo Liu, Andrés Viña, Sue Nichols, Matthew Berman, and Jennifer Schmidt 

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation 

Period: 2021 - 2026 

Arctic communities and ecosystems are experiencing dramatic changes, not just from a changing climate, but also from economic globalization and increased development of Arctic natural resources. Although these economic and climatic forces are often studied separately, they may interact, generating potentially complex effects on ecosystems and the wellbeing of Arctic human communities. As an essential step toward mitigating threats and promoting human wellbeing, this research project seeks to understand how forces from outside Alaska, such as marine traffic, tourism, and natural resource extraction, combine to affect marine ecosystems and coastal human communities. 

To examine the interactive effects of multiple distant drivers on Arctic systems, the researchers will develop a dynamic systems model focusing on the Bering Strait region of Alaska. As the only marine access point to the Arctic from the Pacific Ocean, the Bering Strait represents a critical corridor for both migratory marine wildlife and marine vessel traffic, making it an ideal study region for this project. The model will be based on the framework of telecoupling, which examines socioeconomic and environmental interactions across long distances. The interdisciplinary team will apply this model to address three important and interrelated objectives: (1) understand how telecouplings influence the habitat of marine mammal species crucial to subsistence economies and cultures, (2) determine the effects of telecouplings on community economies and wellbeing, and (3) develop different telecoupling-induced change scenarios and assess their potential effects on human communities and marine mammal habitats. Researchers and community partners will collaborate to incorporate local knowledge into the model and improve its ability to reflect on-the-ground experiences, as well as document concerns and local knowledge. Furthermore, the team will train four junior interdisciplinary systems scientists, and will disseminate research results widely to various stakeholders to help with the sustainability of Arctic human and natural systems. 

Uncovering Metacoupled Socio-Environmental Systems 

Principal Investigators: Jianguo Liu, Emilio Moran, Thomas Hertel, Andrés Viña, Sue Nichols 

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation 

Period: 2019 - 2024 

Today's global socio-environmental challenges place unprecedented demands on natural and social sciences to understand and forecast a tightly interconnected world. Yet most studies on socio-environmental interactions have focused on a single socio-environmental system. While some studies have separately examined socio-environmental interactions between adjacent or distant systems, they usually focused on one-way impacts. Although these separate studies have generated useful information, little is known about the relationships among socio-environmental interactions within and across adjacent and distant systems systematically and simultaneously. This award will fill these key knowledge gaps by addressing some of the world's biggest challenges such as land use and food security across scales and across borders. The results are expected to reveal transformational insights into global food production, trade, and labor dynamics. They can also shine light on the potential cascading consequences of land use decisions. This innovative research represents an exciting new frontier, with pioneering contributions to the theory, methods, and applications of socio-environmental systems research. It will be tightly integrated with ambitious education and outreach efforts, elevating the public's understanding of the socioeconomic and environmental effects of complex trade relationships. Students and postdoc will gain broad knowledge and learn important skills to become future visionary leaders and globally engaged scholars. 

The interdisciplinary research team will apply and quantify the holistic metacoupling framework that integrates socioeconomic-environmental interactions within as well as between adjacent and distant systems. Fundamental questions include: How do intracouplings (e.g., food production within a coupled system), pericouplings (e.g., labor movement between adjacent systems), and telecouplings (e.g., trade between distant systems) complement, enhance and/or offset their effects on socio-environmental feedbacks? To address this and other questions, the project will leverage existing and new data on global trade of a major agricultural commodity -- soybeans -- and associated labor and financial flows for commodity production. Analyses at the international/national scales will be conducted with new global grid-based models and other state-of-the-art tools. They will be complemented by in-depth studies at regional/local scales in key soybean exporting and importing countries through population census and agricultural data, ecological fieldwork and face-to-face interviews to inform the development and validation of a novel metacoupled agent-based model. These studies, spanning local to international scales, will be joined via systems integration. The international researchers will understand and simulate complex dynamics and feedbacks of metacoupled systems under various scenarios co-designed with stakeholders. 

Complex Effects of Climate Change on Nature Reserve Networks at Macroscales 

Principal Investigators: Jianguo Liu, Andrés Viña, Julie Winkler 

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation 

Period: 2014 - 2020 

Protected areas such as nature reserves have been a major cornerstone of biodiversity conservation. However, human activities have compromised conservation goals in many nature reserves, and climate change poses additional threats to their long-term viability and success. Although some studies have analyzed climate change impacts on the conservation effectiveness of nature reserves, most have focused on individual nature reserves in localized regions. The goals of this project are to assess the changes in species distribution within and across networks of nature reserves in broad geographic regions, and to analyze the effects of climate change on the long-term survival of plant and animal species. An exceptional setting for achieving the objectives is the globally important forested macrosystem that is the historical geographic range of the world-famous endangered giant panda (2.2 million km2 across 19 provinces of China). Across this vast macrosystem there are currently 67 panda reserves and over 1,000 reserves for other purposes, which together constitute a reserve meta-network (network of networks). 

Using state-of-the-art climate change projections, remote sensing techniques, meta-uncertainty analyses, and species distribution models, a multi-disciplinary and international team of researchers will analyze climate change impacts on conservation effectiveness of this meta-network of reserves as well as current and future geographic distribution of the panda and around 30 bamboo species that comprise 99% of its diet. This National Science Foundation-funded project will lead to transformative and significant outcomes, such as testing and extending two fundamental theories (niche theory and connectivity theory) at macroscales. It will also generate powerful and lasting broader impacts. Through active engagement with stakeholders, the research team will use project results to develop and evaluate effective and efficient conservation strategies of global importance in the context of climate change. Improving conservation strategies for a well-known charismatic endangered species will help to increase the public awareness of the potential climate change impacts on biodiversity, and encourage public engagement on climate change mitigation and adaptation. Through strategic communication and hands-on workshops, the results and methods will be widely disseminated to inspire others to analyze the impacts of climate change on other species and other nature reserve networks around the world. Furthermore, the project will train undergraduate and graduate students as well as post-doctoral scholars, who will gain broad and deep knowledge and learn important skills to become future visionary leaders and globally-engaged researchers who can creatively address future challenges to biodiversity research and conservation. 

Complex Dynamics of Telecoupled Human and Natural Systems 

Principal Investigators: Jianguo Liu, Thomas Hertel, Sue Nichols, Emilio Moran, Andrés Viña 

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation 

Period: 2015 - 2019 

The globalization of trade in agricultural commodities is increasingly connecting consumers and producers around the world. A growing fraction of forest conversion and other land placed into agricultural production is associated with commodities produced for global markets. Much of the demand for food that was historically met by local agriculture is increasingly being met by global trade, while in the past three decades food exports have increased 10-fold. This project will quantify and model this type of global scale connection that links natural and human systems by studying how agricultural markets and land use in China and Brazil are linked via commodity trade. The natural environment is incorporated in this model in two ways: first, the local land use choices affect soil quality and water, which in turn affects subsequent agricultural choices; second, the expansion of agriculture into tropical forest has an effect on global climate and biodiversity. The models produced by this project will increase our understanding of how human and natural systems change in concert even when the connections are over great distances (telecoupled). This project is a first effort to quantify complex dynamics of distantly coupled agricultural and economic systems by going beyond the traditional focus on a single system, one-way impacts, or comparative analysis of systems. It represents an exciting new frontier of research in coupled systems, with substantial contributions to the theory, methods, and applications of telecoupled systems. The work is of further importance in providing a broader view and new perspective on international commodity trade, which is in the national interest, and in training the next generation of scientists. 

The project will quantify the telecoupling framework to address fundamental questions about human and natural systems such as: What are the effects of telecouplings on human-nature dynamics across scales in distant systems? How do telecouplings and local couplings enhance or offset each other in terms of their effects on human-nature dynamics? To address these questions and associated hypotheses, the project will focus on major telecouplings involving the trade of agricultural products (e.g., soybeans for food and animal feed) between Brazil and China, two of the world's most important emerging economies. These two countries constitute an excellent example of telecoupled systems, but little is known about the effects of their rapidly increasing trade on human-nature dynamics. By leveraging existing remote sensing and socioeconomic data and collecting complementary new data, researchers will model complex dynamics and relationships among key components of telecoupled systems. Analyses at the international and national scales will be conducted with the widely used Global Trade Analysis Project model. They will be complemented by in-depth studies at the regional and local scales through ecological fieldwork and socioeconomic surveys, as well as through developing and validating a telecoupled agent-based model. These studies, spanning local to international scales, will be joined via systems integration.