David Hulse is Director of the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience and Professor in Landscape Architecture at the University of Florida. His expertise is in social-ecological systems and using computer-based tools to facilitate land and water use planning and natural resource decision-making. He has worked extensively as a landscape planner in the U.S. and abroad. Recent efforts include alternative future scenario work with colleagues at the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Meyer Memorial Trust, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and many universities on development of spatial decision support systems for creating and evaluating alternative land and water use futures in the Pacific Northwest U.S.A.
David collaborates on efforts to anticipate how, where and when people will benefit from enhanced social network capacities to adapt to emerging future risks. With a focus on the things that people can do at local and regional scales to reduce these risks, Dave works with interdisciplinary teams to explain the mechanisms controlling how social-ecological systems cope with and adapt to intensifying landscape disturbance regimes. The effort is based on two overarching ideas: 1) Social networks manage risk from disturbances by regulating feedbacks between biophysical and sociocultural subsystems; 2) When the magnitude or frequency of disturbances exceed the coping capacity of the social network, the network must adaptively reorganize to sustain valued landscape qualities. By connecting the understanding of landscape processes from the sciences with the value-laden public policy-making and land planning processes that influence land and water use, the process allows interested groups to compare and contrast the effects of various alternative plans on the land and water uses of their place.
Sources: Hulse, D., A. Branscomb, C. Enright, J. Bolte. 2009. Anticipating floodplain trajectories through alternative futures analysis. Journal of Landscape Ecology. (24) 8:1067-1090. doi:10.1007/s10980-008-9255-2.
Hulse, D., A. Branscomb, C. Enright, B. Johnson, C. Evers, J. Bolte, A. Ager. 2016. Anticipating surprise: Using agent-based alternative futures simulation modeling to identify and map surprising fires in the Willamette Valley, Oregon USA. Landscape Urban Plan.156:26-43. doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.05.012