| NSF Org: |
DEB Division Of Environmental Biology |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 15, 2018 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | January 28, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1826668 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Paco Moore
fbmoore@nsf.gov (703)292-5376 DEB Division Of Environmental Biology BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2018 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,359,998.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,359,998.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1033 MASSACHUSETTS AVE STE 3 CAMBRIDGE MA US 02138-5366 (617)495-5501 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
677 Huntington Avenue Boston MA US 02115-6028 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Program Planning and Policy De, DYN COUPLED NATURAL-HUMAN |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
Coral reefs are the most biologically diverse marine ecosystems and provide food, jobs, and protection from storms for coastal communities. The foods derived from coral reefs play a critical role in supporting nutritional health in many countries. Under optimal conditions, an intact coral reef can provide an abundant supply of food resources to coastal communities. However, overfishing, pollution, environmental change, and economic globalization are currently transforming reefs and the surrounding communities, placing both the health of the reef and the health of people at risk. This research seeks to understand the interactions between coral reefs and human communities. The project seeks to identify effective reef management practices that lead to levels and types of seafood consumption that promote human nutrition. Undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and local inhabitants will be trained in methods of surveying reef health, human health, and fisheries management practices. Through this convergent research, the investigators will develop generalizable principles that can lead to harmonious management of the health of fisheries and seafood-dependent people.
This award will identify the environmental and economic factors that lead to the decline in reef-based food systems. In addition to filling key gaps in our understanding of the human health impacts, this project will advance social-ecological trap theory by empirically testing the extent to which certain feedbacks produce trap dynamics and estimating critical drivers of transitions. To accomplish this, the investigators will dovetail their research efforts with a scheduled socio-economic survey. This project offers a unique quasi-experimental design to study roughly independent and isolated yet culturally similar sites, along a gradient of reef health, market access, and fisheries management strategies. Researchers will collect data on fisheries management approaches and the current status of reef fish and conduct clinical health surveys to determine levels of anemia, obesity, diabetes, and other nutritional disorders that can arise from lacking seafood in one's diet. This award will address pressing questions about the thresholds for reef transitions; the feedbacks between the diversity and abundance of reef-based fisheries; and fisheries activities, management, and consumption. Collectively, this project will illuminate the pathways by which healthy reefs translate into healthy people and the opportunities to maintain healthy and sustainable reef-based food systems.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Food systems represent an emblematic social-ecological system, as both cultivated and wild foods are directly reliant on natural ecosystems and their processes. While healthy ecosystems are a necessary precondition of food production, they are not themselves sufficient to ensure continued benefits from local food systems. Mediating between food production and nutritional security are myriad governance and market institutions that shape differential access to food resources. Moreover, globalization and urbanization may shift communities from non-market to market-based economies, with profound implications for local environments and food systems. Specifically, in studying coral reef food systems in Kiribati, we found that it is this feedback between coupled socioeconomic and natural dynamics within food systems that reinforces specific nutritional outcomes (either under- or overnourishment). Throughout the course of our grant, we supported four early career researchers that formed the PI collaborative, and two postdoctoral researchers, four graduate students, two research techs, 6 health professionals, and many fisheries extension officers. We published 18 peer-reviewed journal articles (2 in Nature; 1 in PNAS; 2 in Global Food Security; 1 in Nature Ecology & Evolution; 1 in Nature Communications; 1 in Scientific Reports; 1 in Nature Food; and 2 in Fish and Fisheries). Beyond the intellectual merit of these publications and the creation of a planetary health research framework that links ecological and market conditions to nutritional outcomes, we also created substantial societal impact. It is exceedingly rare that a research team can truly claim societal impact, and we feel enormously grateful that our team was thanked by the Government of Kiribati for propelling a Parliamentary action to create a new governmental committee to research and oversee ways to improve a balanced diet for the general public and the required dietary intake for children’s intellectual development in Kiribati. We also provided the government with the first national baseline assessment of standardized coral reef, lagoon, and back reef ecological health and fisheries indicators, including fish, invertebrate, and coral data, and national statistics of hypertension, hyperglycemia, and diabetes, while providing updated statistics on anemia and stunting, wasting, underweight, and obesity.
Last Modified: 12/21/2023
Modified by: Christopher D Golden
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