A "dead zone" of more than 5,000 square miles doesn't have enough oxygen to support fish in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana/Texas coasts, and the oxygen-depleted zone is growing. One of the major causes: nitrogen runoff in the Midwest from agricultural activities up the Mississippi River that drain into the Gulf of Mexico.

"On average, about half of nitrogen fertilizer that is applied to agricultural crops is lost to the environment," said Laurie Drinkwater, professor of horticulture at Cornell University. But those who pollute don't pay the costs associated with resource degradation, and responses to address the problem don't always target the right problem in the right place. Or do they?

To find out, Drinkwater, as the lead scientist, and a team of colleagues at five other institutions have been awarded $1.6 million over three years from a National Science Foundation program, called Biocomplexity in the Environment -- Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems. The idea is to determine the correlation between biogeochemical processes in agriculture, such as nitrogen pollution and carbon/nitrogen cycling, and institutional processes, such as research and extension efforts, changes in regulations, property rights and subsidies and responses of businesses, public agencies and civil society organizations.

"Our project asks questions about feedback between environmental change and institutional change. To the extent that resources and innovation efforts are being mobilized in response to the hypoxia [insufficient oxygen] problem, are these investments geographically targeted relative to sources of pollution?" asked Steven Wolf, a co-principal investigator and assistant professor of natural resources at Cornell. "What is news here is that social scientists and biophysical scientists are working together in a rather novel collaboration to tackle big questions associated with environmental management."

Other co-investigators include researchers at Michigan State University, University of Illinois, Louisiana State University, University of New Hampshire and the World Resources Institute.

Drinkwater noted that human activities have doubled the amount of nitrogen polluting the planet and that agriculture accounts for 75 percent of the human-derived nitrogen. But human responses to biophysical, ecological processes don't always match up in optimal ways.

The researchers, therefore, will develop a database of pollution and other ecosystem dynamics as well as a database of institutional responses and compare the two for correlations to better understand how well societal responses correlate with biogeochemical processes associated with agriculture. They also seek to determine which policy changes are likely to be most effective in promoting more efficient nitrogen fertilizer management practices and to model and simulate multiscale interactions among policies, farm managers and institutions, and nitrogen pollution across space and time.

"This study is novel on two levels," explained Drinkwater. "We will investigate a broad range of conventional as well as ecologically based management strategies that improve nitrogen retention by managing carbon and nitrogen flows simultaneously. The study is also designed to test theories about how human institutions are influenced by the environment and vice versa. Our long-term goal is to understand how we can promote natural resource management strategies that are based on a more realistic view of complex ecological processes.

"Linkages between socio-economic and ecological processes are crucial to pursue sustainable ecosystem management and improve nitrogen use efficiency," said Drinkwater. "Disconnects between human and natural systems must be addressed."

The grant is one of 17 made by the NSF to better understand the interrelationships among living things -- from their genes to the ecosystems they inhabit and how they interact with their environment. The studies are intended to provide a better understanding of natural processes and of human behavior and decisions concerning the natural world.