In the field of medicine, the ability to screen for diseases before they wreak havoc on the human body has been revolutionary. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln team, including Faculty Fellows Craig Allen and Simanti Banerjee working with ecologist, Dirac Twidwell, is working to transplant this model of proactive screening to a field very different from medicine, but equally consequential: agricultural resilience, or the ability of ecosystems to withstand rapid and sudden transitions to an undesired state.
Increasingly fueled by global environmental change, ecosystem shifts - from grassland to a cedar woodland or from fertile farmland to desert - can spark chaos in communities, with consequences ranging from reduced food and water security, to heightened wildfire risks, to decreased funding for public schools.
With a four-year, nearly $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, the team is collaborating with University of Montana researchers to develop and implement first-of-their-kind screening tools that enable earlier, more precise detection of subtle changes that foreshadow destabilizing ecological transitions. The team will also use cuttingedge, big-data-based social science methods to identify groups most likely to adopt the tools.