DISES: Between maintenance and transformation: a socio-environmental systems framework for restoration decision-making under climate change

This project will develop a framework for understanding the range of responses, and their potential drivers, in restoration decision-making under climate change. Following an extreme event such as a drought, storm, or heat wave, restoration actions might seek to recover and maintain a historically representative state. Alternately, restoration actions might seek transformation to a new state that is anticipated to be more robust to future extreme events with climate change.

Both outcomes represent adaptation to climate change, but with distinct management goals for the end state. Therefore, by analyzing the drivers of restoration outcomes on a continuum from maintenance to transformation, this project will identify drivers of adaptive capacity to climate change framed in terms of concrete, actionable goals. In addition, by focusing on marine systems, this project will benefit society by informing active restoration efforts.

With fishery declines and closures, public agencies, NGOs, fishing organizations, and citizen groups are implementing novel restoration interventions. Partnership with these entities throughout the project will account for community and management needs in project activities and inform time-sensitive management decisions. The project advances STEM educational training at three institutions, and broadens the participation of groups historically underrepresented in science.

This project will explore kelp forests off the California coast as a model system to evaluate environmental and social drivers influencing efforts at restoration. Following a series of marine heat wave events, California kelp have recently experienced unprecedented decline, with associated increases in kelp-consuming urchins impeding kelp recovery. Kelp declines are associated with declines in biodiversity as well as declines in recreational and commercial fisheries that are vital to the associated coastal communities.

The goal of this project is to characterize the drivers of maintenance and transformation outcomes in different socio-environmental system (SES) components and explore their interactions through three integrated approaches. First, empirical investigation will characterize the drivers of ecological, social, and institutional capacity to respond to extreme events with a combination of oceanographic analysis, ecological field studies, and interviews and a survey of resource users, other stakeholders, managers, and regulators.

Second, informed by this empirical characterization, a dynamically coupled SES model will explore how the achievement of identified management goals on the maintenance-transformation continuum depends on uncertainty in system components and the relative time scales of ecological recovery and social response. Third, linking the SES model to governance network analysis will indicate how SES network configurations affect the ability to realize goals on the maintenance-transformation continuum in fragmented institutional contexts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.