CUNY Graduate Center: Science and the Arts: LIMULUS POLYPHEMUS & RESILIENCY

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Horseshoe Crab

ACSS

IACERE

Resiliency

The Graduate Center
New Media Lab
365 Fifth Avenue

ESTUARY BIOCOMPLEXITY RESILIENCE MODELLING

The Resilient Horseshoe Crab Event

What makes estuaries resilient to the shocks and stresses of urban and industrial development? This is the central question to be explored by the Inter-American Comparative Ecosystems and Regional Economies (IACERE), a multi-disciplinary, multi-national team of natural and social scientists. Among the earth's most productive ecosystems, estuaries exist at the edge of ocean and shore. Estuaries are often composed of large areas of tidal wetlands, dominated by Spartina grasses in the north or Mangroves toward the equator. They have historically been among the most heavily damaged ecosystems in urbanizing regions. Over half the original wetland habitat has been destroyed by human activities along the U.S. Gulf Coast and throughout the Northeast. Today however, as the immense biological and social value of estuaries is becoming more fully understood, there are major scientific and social developments that are producing more sustainable relations between human communities and tidal estuaries throughout the Americas. IACERE is an agent of that positive change.

The IACERE project explores the proposition that essential to the resilience of estuaries as ecosystems are their patterns of symbiotic associations. These interactions are the total of mutually beneficial relationships that sustain estuarine life forms of all kinds. Among the primary objectives of the project, therefore, are to:

identify - through existing research, field monitoring, and selected critical experiments -- the symbiotic relationships which are characteristic of estuaries in different regions of the Americas and which are undergoing differing types and degrees of human impact;
identify and fully describe these symbiotic associations for each of five estuaries, which, when altered by human impacts, can serve as bioindicators of potential risks to estuarine resilience;
develop and test a method for summarizing the human impacts on each estuary in the study such that these measures can themselves serve as indicators of comparative threats to resilience (or positive changes in levels of threat) and can be used to analyze environmental adaptations at the level of symbiotic interactions;
disseminate the results of this comparative estuarine research through on-going workshops, presentations to local environmental planning groups and to stakeholder groups, as well as to all relevant scientific communities, such that the IACERE model of resilience: the Biocomplexity Resilience Threshold Model (BRTM) can serve as a basis for the evolution of more sustainable ecosystems in urban-industrial environments.

In sum, the IACERE team working on five estuary systems in the U.S., Mexico and Chile is devoted to applying a unified set of concepts and research questions to the comparative study of estuarine resilience. Its methods include demographic and human ecological research, field and laboratory biological experiments on estuarine symbiosis, multivariate analysis of bio-social data, and the use of G.I.S. and simulation techniques. The project has established strong connections with public and scientific communities in each region of its activities.