Three Frontiers of the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region and SYPR Project

Frontiers advance and retreat, both figuratively and literally. At this moment they are advancing in three ways relevant to the subject of this book and the ongoing project on which it is based. First, after more than a century of reductionist hegemony, various science communities worldwide increasingly recognize the need to improve complementary, synthesis understanding—a way of putting the reductionist pieces of the problem back together again in order to understand how the ‘whole’ system works and to identify the emergent properties that follow from the complex interactions of the pieces. Synthesis understanding is not, of course, new. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant argued for it as one of the pillars of science in the reorganization of knowledge in the European academy (Turner 2002a) and designated geography as one of the ‘synthesis sciences’. Its contemporary rediscovery, however, rests in the science of global environmental change (Lawton 2001; Steffen et al. 2002), especially efforts to model complex systems, such as those in ocean–atmosphere–land interactions, and has been expanded by emerging research agendas seeking to couple human and environment systems, often registered under the label of ‘sustainability science’ (e.g. Kates et al. 2001; NRC 1999). Second, within these developments landuse and land-cover change (or, simply, land change) is singled out because of its centrality to a wide range of environmental concerns, including global climate change, regional–local hydrological impacts, biodiversity, and, of course, human development and ecosystem integrity (e.g. Brookfield 1995; NRC 2000; Watson et al. 2001). The need to advance an integrated land-change science is also increasingly recognized, one in which human, ecological, and remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) sciences are intertwined in problem-solving (Liverman et al. 1998; Klepeis and Turner 2001; Turner 2002b). And central to this effort is the need to advance geographically (spatially) explicit land-change models that can explain and project coupled human-ecological systems, and thus serve a wide range of research and assessment constituencies, from carbon to biodiversity to human vulnerability (IGBP 1999; Irwin and Geoghegan 2001; Kates et al. 2001; Liverman et al. 1998; Veldkamp and Lambin 2001). These two developments—synthesis science and integrated land science directed towards geographically explicit land-change models—constitute the broader intellectual and research frontiers to which this work contributes.