Margaret A. Cavanaugh

Understanding Human Impacts: Processes, Platforms, and Partnerships

Margaret A. Cavanaugh
National Science Foundation

     Human and natural systems are intertwined in a complex web of environmental feedbacks. The forces that influence the dynamics of human resource use and development come not only from individuals, households, and local communities, but also from natural and social processes at diverse temporal and spatial scales. Research on the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone” is a well-known example of an exploration of the interaction between humans and natural systems that led to understanding how marine organisms are affected by decisions made by humans, in this case, often a thousand miles away. This finding along with many others raises important questions not only about how ecosystems and the environment function, but also about how human use changes the environment, and how the resultant environmental changes affect people.
     Answering these questions is necessarily an interdisciplinary pursuit, requiring contributions from ecologists, hydrologists, economists, and oceanic and atmospheric systems scientists, social scientists, and many others. The natural processes affecting environmental change must continue to be investigated, but increasingly human social systems, political and institutional structures, and economic relationships must also be taken into account.
     Understanding these systems depends, too, on the capacity for long-term observations and associated improvements in data management, modeling, and communication.  NSF’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) will support infrastructure that will address the ocean research community’s needs for long-term, in situ measurements of biological, chemical, geological, and physical variables over a variety of scales. The NSF observatories will be used to examine the processes that drive atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial systems and will serve as an incubator for new technologies to monitor these processes.  OOI and the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) are interdependent, with each program supplying ingredients essential to each other and to other partners. 
     Improved understanding of the interactions between marine organisms and the physical, geological and chemical characteristics of the ocean will enhance predictive capabilities and inform resource management. The Preliminary Report of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy released this past April stressed the importance of science and technology and, in particular, the worthy goal of implementing ecosystem-based resource management. This strategy is consistent with the opinion of many independent scientific organizations, but the management questions being asked of the ecosystem-based approach require a level of understanding not yet attained. Current research programs are providing some of the answers, but the pace of discovery and understanding needs to be accelerated.
     Furthermore, taking full advantage of new research results will require effective outreach and education to increase national awareness of ocean issues. To adopt ecosystem-based management, resource managers and policy makers need more sophisticated understanding of ocean and Earth processes. If the recommendations of the report are to be effectively implemented, disseminating new developments and products from research to decision makers is of importance equal to that of making the initial discoveries.  Research in the open ocean and along coastlines is valuable to society and will play an increasingly important role in revealing and shaping the effect of human activities and decisions on the marine environment, ecosystems, and climate.