In collaboration with the Department of Agriculture and Land in Kosrae, Micronesia, the Center for Environmental Science and Policy, Stanford University, and the Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry in Hawaii, Princeton University proposes a study of mangrove forests in Micronesia in which researchers will model for the first time the quantitative, dynamic roles that selected economic, sociocultural, and ecological factors play in interactions among population, resource demand, and coastal environments. The projected overall budget for the project, $193,645, will support a three-year research program to be conducted by the participating institutions.

Over the past year, several of the prospective collaborators in this project have begun to research the ecology and economic values of mangrove forests in Kosrae State, Micronesia. Their preliminary findings suggest that a suite of factors mediates the relationships between population size, demand for mangrove resources, and the state of the mangrove forest ecosystem. Further investigation of factors influencing firewood demand and its ecological impacts will pinpoint effective strategies, such as fuel subsidies, wood harvest regulations, and community outreach initiatives, to offset the impacts of Micronesia's growing population on its mangrove forests. To investigate the viability of such strategies, a three-year research program, is proposed, that will link analyses of mangrove forest disturbance and the dynamics of firewood demand, enabling the development of a computer model capable of quantifying the roles of selected economic, sociocultural, and ecological factors in population-environment interactions in Micronesia. The study will explicitly consider the importance of local ecological dynamics in characterizing environmental response and will analyze variations in mediating factors to quantify their relative and interacting influences on population-environment processes.

Stanford University will conduct the field study components of the project in collaboration with Princeton University. These components will be carried out by Prof. Rosamond Naylor and a Research Assistant. The project will consist of two parts.

First, we will investigate factors that influence forest ecological response to firewood demand, including wood harvest patterns and methods, agricultural runoff, and land tenure structure. We will build on an ongoing collaboration between the Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry and Micronesia's Department of Agriculture and Land to measure the responses of mangrove forest communities to anthropogenic gap formation and increased nutrient and sediment inputs. We will expand this investigation to quantify the importance of harvest pattern and methods in shaping the impacts of wood extraction on forest regeneration, diversity, and species composition. Because changes in land use associated with development affect coastal runoff processes, we will also measure the impacts of increased nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment inputs on mangrove dynamics and assess the interacting effects of harvesting and terrestrial inputs.

As the second component of our project we will assess current and potential demands for firewood and will evaluate the mediating roles of income; price; household time, labor, and purchase priorities; and cooking technology. We will combine existing population data and survey results with additional household questionnaires and measurements of cookstove energy efficiency to characterize how these four factors interact to influence the consumption of mangrove wood in a given population.

Results from the two project components will be used to construct a dynamic model of population-demand-environment interactions that can project impacts on mangrove ecosystems over time as a function of the presence and values of mediating factors and population trends, specifying not only the direction of influence of mediating factors but also their actual magnitudes and the changing effects of their interactions over time. We expect that these findings will be of significant value to planning efforts by Micronesia's Development Review Commission and its Departments of Marine Resources and of Agriculture and Land, and that they will also prove to be of broader significance for the large areas of the world where mangrove forests have a role in both human economies and ecological systems.