CO-PI in ABRESO Taiwan team: Abandonment and Rebound - Societal views on landscape- and land-use change and their impacts on water and soils (video)

Particpating countries include: USA, France, Italy, Japan, Taiwan

Perceptions of Land Use Working Group

Taiwan Team: Led by PI in National Taiwan University, Department of Geography; I serve as Co-PI as representative for Social Science Team

Belmont Forum announced a CRA (collaborative research actions) this summer and this CRA focuses on the issue, “Towards Sustainability and Soils and Groundwater for Society”. We organized an international research group, which is comprised of American, Italian, Japan, French and Taiwan scientists, to propose a framework, namely “Abandonment and rebound: Societal views on landscape- and land-use change and their impacts on water and soils (ABRESO)”, for this issue. This project addresses soil and water sustainability in landscapes undergoing transitions. 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 due to their different perspectives of land management strategies. The main theme of this project is to determine actual and perceived effects of land use transitions on critical zone (CZ) function in the context of land abandonment. Actual effects will consider water, nutrient, and biogeochemical cycles under changing inputs of altered land management. With input from stakeholders, perceived effects will consider stakeholder expectation, preference and evaluation of ecosystem services and disservices. We will test the extent to which heterogeneity in such perceptions is a function of differences between and within stakeholders (e.g., urban vs. rural, resident vs. visitor, and endorsement of environmental values), and how change is framed across different spatial scales from a local to watershed scale or beyond (e.g., whether change reflects more vs. less human use of land and the reasons for change). Applying this framework onto the various study sites across countries can bridge the knowledge gaps among scientists, government officers, and stakeholders for developing sustainability. Below, we will introduce the background and scientific questions that we addressed in the first part and then we address the research plan of Taiwan group. Finally, we show the project activities of ABRESO to assess the progress of Taiwan team and our research group.