Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
12
From Global Environmental
Change to Sustainability Science:
Ecosystem Studies in the
Y
aqui Valley, Mexic
o
Pamela A. Matson
Stanford University, Stanford, California
The 1980s and early 1990s were exhilarating times for ecologists engaging in the analy-
sis of global environmental change. We were just beginning to understand the global
nature of environmental change, thanks to new tools such as remote sensing and global-
scale mathematical models and perspectives. International programs such as the
International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) began bringing disciplines together—
ecologists, atmospheric chemists, oceanographers, geographers, climatologists, and
others—to learn each other's languages and work together to understand
environmental change. Ecologists rejected the physical scientists' description of the bio-
sphere as a homogeneous green carpet over the planet (the “green slime” model), and
brought to bear ecologically based models that accounted for the spatial and temporal var-
iability in ecosystem structure and function across the planet. Moreover, ecological
understanding of the causes of that natural variation helped frame the analysis of the plan-
etary system both in terms of measurements and models.
One of the emerging questions of the time had to do with change in the global nitrogen
cycle and key components of the cycle such as emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous
oxide. With Peter Vitousek and other collaborators, our research team developed an eco-
logical framework for studying emissions of nitrogen trace gases from ecosystems,
explicitly using gradients of climate and soil development to estimate fluxes from tropical
ecosystems and develop a global budget for the gas (
Matson and Vitousek 1987, 1990;
