Introduction

Vulnerability is a concept that captures the dynamic interactions between complex human systems and complex environmental systems. Thus, a vulnerability assessment that produces a static view of human–environment interactions (i.e., by examining one place at one time) will likely provide only limited – and potentially misleading – insight into how the coupled system works. Of course, such static pictures are common in this research domain because it is challenging to establish the temporal evolution of vulnerability (i.e., one place or many places over time). Especially in the context of having limited resources to conduct a vulnerability assessment, a solution to this challenge is to ignore variations over time in favor of examining variations over geographic space (i.e., many places at one time; see Mendelsohn et al. 1994; Carbone 1995; Polsky 2004). We argue that executing a many-places-at-one-time approach requires that all the places adopt a common research protocol; to our knowledge such a networked vulnerability assessment has yet to be reported in the literature. In this chapter, we report results from our effort to examine vulnerabilities – using a rapidly executable and commonly executed methodology – in four distinct study sites in the United States.

As explained in Chapter 1, the HERO project sought to develop infrastructure for studying and monitoring human–environment interactions at individual sites and to enable cross-site comparisons and generalizations. To test how well these concepts and tools work in practice, the project addressed the question, “How does land-use change influence vulnerability to droughts and floods?