NSF Award
2408904
This research project will investigate the role of learning in the management of interacting ecosystem and public health threats. Private woodland owners in northern New England confront multiple environmental problems. Those problems include range expansion of invasive plants and an increase in disease vector tick abundance. Ticks and invasive plants also interact with each other ecologically, making human efforts to develop and share effective practices challenging. Managing the forest-tick system relies on a combination of individual and social learning. This project will address critical knowledge gaps related to human social learning and environmental adaptation. It will explore ecosystem and human health, and the feedback loops between them. This will lead to more sustainable forest and public health management strategies. The project will benefit society by offering interdisciplinary education and training opportunities in ecology, behavioral science, and human dimensions of natural resources. It will train undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in the U.S. It will also inform policies and management strategies within the unique socio-environmental context of privately owned forestland and other complex ecological systems.<br/>In cooperation with a state agency and a non-profit, this project also will develop the Forest Land-owner Education & Research Network (LEARN) outreach program to train peer leaders to ex-change ideas and information with others within their peer network.<br/><br/>The project will combine ecological field studies, social science survey and experimental research, and agent-based modeling to address the following 4 aims: 1) Determine how social learning and cultural adaptation of forest management practices among private woodland owners influences the tick-forest system. 2) conduct applied ecological research to devise effective and acceptable strategies to manage invasive plants in the context of tick control. 3) Explore the socio-environmental dynamics of the tick-forest system using integrated models to inform policy and management options. 4) Translate research findings into practice through the creation, development, and evaluation of a woodland owner train-the-trainer outreach program involving peer-to-peer learning. The project will provide an important application of cultural adaptation theory, testing whether social learning can increase the chances of beneficial health and environmental outcomes in a novel context. This research will reveal if task complexity dampens cultural adaptation, with important implications for any policy scenario in which individual learning is challenging. In the biophysical system, applied ecological research will address underexplored questions concerning the impact of invasive plants on tick densities and infection prevalence to reduce barriers to the development of practical, effective, and socially acceptable management recommendations for landowners.<br/><br/>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.
