Geo-Geography and Environment最新文献

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) occur when pathogens unpredictably spread into new contexts. EID surveillance systems seek to rapidly identify EID outbreaks to contain spread and improve public health outcomes. Sequencing data has historically not been integrated into real-time responses, but portable DNA sequencing technology has prompted optimism among epidemiologists. Specifically, attention has focused on the goal of a “sequencing singularity”: the integration of portable sequencers in a worldwide event-based surveillance network with other digital data (Gardy & Loman, Nature Reviews Genetics, 19, 2018, p. 9). The sequencing singularity vision is a powerful socio-technical imaginary, shaping the discourse around the future of portable sequencing. Ethical and practical issues are bound by the vision in two ways: they are framed only as obstacles, and they are formulated only at the scales made visible by its implicit geography. This geography privileges two extremes of scale – the genomic and the global – and leaves intermediate scales comparatively unmapped. We explore how widespread portable sequencing could challenge this geography. Portable sequencers put the ability to produce genomic data in the hands of the individual. The explicit assertion of rights over data may therefore become a matter disputed more at an interpersonal scale than an international one. Portable sequencers also promise ubiquitous, indiscriminate sequencing of the total metagenomic content of samples, raising the question of what (or who) is under surveillance and inviting consideration of the human microbiome and more-than-human geographies. We call into question a conception of a globally integrated stream of sequencing data as composed mostly of “noise,” within which signals of pathogen “emergence” are “hidden,” considering it instead from the perspective of recent work into more-than-human geographies. Our work highlights a practical need for researchers to consider both the alternative possibilities they foreclose as well as the exciting opportunities they move towards when they deploy their visions of the future.

There has been an upsurge in tools for measuring resilience of the past decade. Despite this progress, we argue, there are few studies focusing on the spatial quantification of resilience in the context of multiple hazards, particularly in developing countries. Placing a particular emphasis on the contribution of geography to resilience studies, this paper examines the spatial variation of community resilience to disasters in Muzarabani, Zimbabwe. Place-specific resilience variables are selected from the 2012 national census report to develop a disaster resilience index for Muzarabani district. A principal component analysis technique was used to analyse the overall and subcomponents of resilience to identify wards that needed policy intervention. Using the Geographical Information Systems tool to model the spatial variation of community resilience and its subcomponents, we found a geographic variation in community resilience across Muzarabani district, with the majority of the wards scoring low to below low levels of overall resilience. Although we view this study as being complementary to qualitative studies, it would appear quantifying and visualising resilience provide possible explanations and actions required for decision-makers to address the resilience gaps and disaster risk reduction broadly.

A response to the LTE commenting on Turner (2017).

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Peatlands are globally important carbon stores, yet both natural and human impacts can influence peatland carbon accumulation. While changes in climate can alter peatland water tables leading to changes in peat decomposition, managed burning of vegetation has also been claimed to reduce peat accumulation. Particularly in the UK, blanket bog peatlands are rotationally burned to encourage heather re-growth on grouse shooting estates. However, the evidence of burning impacts on peat carbon stocks is very limited and contradictory. We assessed peat carbon accumulation over the last few hundred years in peat cores from three UK blanket bog sites under rotational grouse moor burn management. High resolution (0.5 cm) peat core analysis included dating based on spheroidal carbonaceous particles, determining fire frequency based on macro-charcoal counts and assessing peat properties such as carbon content and bulk density. All sites showed considerable net carbon accumulation during active grouse moor management periods. Averaged over the three sites, burns were more frequent, and carbon accumulation rates were also higher, over the period since 1950 than in the period 1700–1950. Carbon accumulation rates during the periods 1950–2015 and 1700–1850 were greater on the most frequently burnt site, which was linked to bulk density and carbon accumulation rates showing a positive relationship with charcoal abundance. Charcoal input from burning was identified as a potentially crucial component in explaining reported differences in burning impacts on peat carbon accumulation, as assessed by carbon fluxes or stocks. Both direct and indirect charcoal impacts on decomposition processes are discussed to be important factors, namely charcoal production converting otherwise decomposable carbon into an inert carbon pool, increasing peat bulk density, altering peat moisture and possibly negative impacts on soil microbial activity. This study highlights the value of peat core records in understanding management impacts on peat accumulation and carbon storage in peatlands.

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus-based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of government environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue movement. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from saving environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data: Data Together. Through this project, EDGI seeks to make data more accessible and environmental decision-making more accountable through new social and technical infrastructures. The shift from DataRescue to Data Together exemplifies EDGI's ongoing attempts to put an “environmental data justice” prioritising community self-determination into practice. By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerging data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement in projects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship.

In studies of natural resource governance, agency is commonly treated as a property that evolves in conditions of socio-ecological systems (SESs). While the SES framework has established its position within a multidisciplinary scholarship, it remains controversial. Critical scholars note that the social component has been left under-theorised. Yet, it is argued that once developed, the framework can provide a useful foundation for studying human–environment relations. This article critically examines such a position. Drawing from actor-network theory, it analyses the assumptions the SES framework makes about the social forms constitutive for natural resource governance. The focus is on the entities in terms of which governance and management are envisioned to evolve. The analysis shows that the descriptions of SES dynamics often treat social forms as unambiguous and a priori existing. The paper argues that the material ordering that is enacted downplays potentials of politics. Management and governance of natural resources rest on demarcations that are not supposed to be challenged. At the same time radical un-restrictedness is claimed to co-exist and to open up potentials for social learning. The promise of management enacted by the SES framework seems thus to be based on a very particular kind of fluctuation between opening up and closing down of system spaces.