Colleen Strawhacker

Climate challenges, vulnerabilities, and food security

Significance Climate-induced disasters are impacting human well-being in ever-increasing ways. Disaster research and management recognize and emphasize the need to reduce vulnerabilities, although extant policy is not in line with this realization. This paper assesses the extent to which vulnerability to food shortage, as a result of social, demographic, and resource conditions at times of climatic challenge, correlates with subsequent declines in social and food security. Extreme climate challenges are identified in the prehispanic US Southwest and historic Norse occupations of the North Atlantic Islands. Cases with such different environmental, climatic, demographic, and cultural and social traditions allow us to demonstrate a consistent relationship between vulnerability and consequent social and food security conditions, applicable in multiple contexts. This paper identifies rare climate challenges in the long-term history of seven areas, three in the subpolar North Atlantic Islands and four in the arid-to-semiarid deserts of the US Southwest. For each case, the vulnerability to food shortage before the climate challenge is quantified based on eight variables encompassing both environmental and social domains. These data are used to evaluate the relationship between the “weight” of vulnerability before a climate challenge and the nature of social change and food security following a challenge. The outcome of this work is directly applicable to debates about disaster management policy.

Legacies of Prehistoric Agricultural Practices Within Plant and Soil Properties Across an Arid Ecosystem

Closely integrated research between archaeologists and ecologists provides a long-term view of human land use that is rare in the ecological literature, allowing for investigation of activities that lead to enduring environmental outcomes. This extended temporal perspective is particularly important in aridlands where succession occurs slowly and ecosystem processes are mediated by abiotic, geomorphic factors. Numerous studies show that impacts from ancient human actions can persist, but few have explored the types of practices or mechanisms that lead to either transient or long-term environmental change. We compared plant and soil properties and processes from a range of landscape patch types in the Sonoran Desert of the US Southwest that supported different, well-documented prehistoric farming practices from AD 750–1300. Our results show that the types of ancient human activities that leave long-term ecological legacies in aridlands are those that fundamentally alter “slow variables” such as soil properties that regulate the timing and supply of water. Prehistoric Hohokam floodwater-irrigation practices, but not dryland farming techniques, substantially altered soil texture, which was strongly associated with desert plant community and functional composition. However, prehistoric agriculture did not consistently alter long-term nutrient availability and thus had no impact on “fast variables” such as production of seasonal annual plants that are restricted to periods of ample rainfall. In this arid ecosystem, the inverse texture model explained patterns in plant functional composition at large scales, but is less predictive of production of short-lived desert annuals that experience a more mesic precipitation regime.

Building Cyberinfrastructure from the Ground Up for the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization : Introducing the cyberNABO Project

The cyberNABO Project is designed to solidify a developing multidisciplinary community through the development of cyberinfrastructure (CI) to study the long-term human ecodynamics of North Atlantic, a region that is especially vulnerable to ongoing climate and environmental change. It builds build upon prior sustained field and laboratory research, rich and diverse datasets, and a strong involvement by local communities and institutions. cyberNABO is currently hosting a series of workshops aimed at taking these collaborators and stakeholder communities to a new level of integration and to develop capacity for building CI and visualizations in subsequent funding cycles. Research on the long-term sustainability in the Arctic requires compiling data from over thousands of square miles, hundreds of years, and multiple disciplines, from climatology to archaeology to folklore. The complexity of datasets of this scale presents a unique challenge to create a CI system that results in interoperability and accessibility of data - a task that needs an explicit plan and extensive expertise from a variety of fields. Investing in a comprehensive CI system provides the opportunity to integrate collaborators and data from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, thus providing the opportunity for a holistic approach to long-term human ecodynamics in the context of rapid social and environmental change and for the creation of digital tools for expanded northern community involvement in global change research. In order to address questions of this scale, however, this collaborative group needs to integrate multiple sources, types, and formats of data to address multidisciplinary questions and provide effective support for visualization and modeling efforts that can connect knowledge systems.