Managing Landscapes to Meet Emerging Global Challenges

Our vision is to create a program dedicated to accelerating innovation that improves the quality, efficiency, and resilience of human dominated landscapes, including our cities, farms, and industrial lands. Humans dramatically alter and manipulate the global landscape for food and fiber production, mineral extraction, urban development, waste disposal and many other purposes. Impacts to essential ecosystem functions and values range from local (e.g. mining and land development) to global (e.g. carbon emissions) with a clear need for development of appropriate management systems for their mitigation. By using a systems approach that interfaces environmental scientists and ecologists with relevant disciplines, this proposed signature area within Global Systems Science (GSS) will build upon existing group strengths in soil remediation, water quality, hydrology, urban soils, land reclamation, agroecosystem management, forest ecology, wetland restoration, soil-waste management and integrated modeling across multiple spatial and temporal scales to develop a more holistic approach to landscape management. We will also...