Tropical Coastal Resilience

Conditions in coastal zones worldwide, barraged by multiple stressors, are deteriorating rapidly. Due to a lack of integration across human and natural sciences, we have a limited understanding and ability to solve resilience-related problems, despite the importance of these systems in supporting human populations and biodiversity.

This Venture will use a Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) model of coastal resilience to illustrate the principal dynamics that govern coastal systems with an international team of researchers, local managers, and key stakeholders. Group members will refine an existing conceptual framework and generate testable hypotheses of the critical linkages among ecological, biophysical, social, governmental, and economic drivers of coastal system resilience. Guided by that framework, they will use spatially-explicit layers to integrate available social and natural science data (e.g., remotely sensed images, landscape complexity, governance structure and market access) to evaluate these linked-process hypotheses.

The Venture's discovery-driven, participatory workshops at SESYNC will engage scientists, natural resource managers, and planners from two representative coastal sites. By building partnerships between scientists and management agencies from disparate geographic areas, the group's comparative approach will introduce new technological applications and create an innovative framework to guide critically-needed, integrated approaches that will advance coastal resilience and resource management.