Project Overview

Goals

• Build interdisciplinarity to enhance scientific knowledge about multiple stressors affecting arid and semiarid ecosystems of the US Southwest and Mexico borderlands.
• Establish strong networks for bringing science and expertise to bear on decision making in the context of environmental and societal variability and change.
• Create sustainable partnerships and synergies for long-term research, monitoring, and management of the region’s resources, ecosystems, and communities.
• Hold two workshops to initiate the program: the first to establish working groups to write synthesis papers reflecting knowledge about the region and the second to design the program and identify leaders who will shepherd key grant proposal-writing activities for funding an ongoing program in ecosystem sustainability under conditions of uncertainty in arid and semiarid areas.

Deliverables

• Publication of peer-reviewed interdisciplinary synthesis papers on the state of scientific knowledge about the region’s ecosystems, biophysical processes, and human factors; the syntheses will focus on interactions among these components and the implications for achieving sustainability.
• Construction of a tractable interdisciplinary and collaborative research agenda that will fill important knowledge gaps emerging from the synthesis process.
• Identification of synergies with existing UA Centers, projects, and programs.
• Input to efforts to develop a Conservation Biology program at the University of Arizona.
• Publication on the Web of information developed in the workshops.
• If sufficient interest and cohesion exists, development of a plan for building a Center for Sustainability in Arid and Semiarid Ecosystems.
• Identification of potential grant possibilities, and grant writing teams, to generate resources for the initiatives agreed upon at the workshops.