Ecology and Society最新文献

Marine managers commonly use ecological indicators in planning and evaluations; however, few programs monitor social and cultural impacts of management. Practical approaches to identifying and monitoring social and cultural aspects of communities’ relationships with their environment could assist many agencies in understanding the impacts of their efforts to achieve conservation goals. The Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of Aquatic Resources (DAR) launched the Holomua Marine Initiative to collaborate and engage with communities to strengthen co-management efforts, which included integrating socio-cultural aspects into the planning and assessment of marine management. Our team, which included resource managers, Western and indigenous scientists, community leaders, students, agency, and university staff engaged in collaborative management efforts in Hawaiʻi, developed an approach to monitor the social and cultural impacts of DAR’s management actions. Through online collaborative workshops with community members and non-profit leaders engaged in marine conservation in Hawaiʻi, we co-developed socio-cultural principles and indicators based on their reciprocal relationships with the nearshore environment. During the workshops, we used small group activities, snow cards, sorting, and categorization to generate nine fundamental principles, with associated indicators, to guide marine management in Hawaiʻi. Many of the principles and indicators are comparable to those developed in other parts of the Pacific, revolving around themes including the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge across generations, and access to land and natural resources. Participants also suggested themes less prevalent in other research, such as the need to evaluate impacts of tourism on community relationships with coastal areas. We offer recommendations for the development of socio-cultural principles and indicators in other place-based contexts, and emphasize the importance of on-going community collaboration. Developing a socio-cultural monitoring framework with community members impacted by marine management decisions could enable others engaged in collaborative efforts, including government agencies, to holistically understand and address impacts of their policies and actions. Monitoring layered socio-cultural impacts of marine management on local and indigenous communities has the potential to shift management goals, and enhance long-term effectiveness and support for initiatives to protect coastal resources worldwide.

The post Holomua Marine Initiative: community-generated socio-cultural principles and indicators for marine conservation and management in Hawaiʻi first appeared on Ecology & Society.

Forest managers working in dry forest ecosystems must contend with the costs and benefits of fire, and they are seeking forest management strategies that enhance the resilience of forests and landscapes to future disturbances in a changing climate. An interdisciplinary science team worked with resource managers and stakeholders to assess future forest ecosystem dynamics, given potential climatic changes and management strategies, across a 23,000-ha landscape in the Lake Tahoe basin of California and Nevada in support of the Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership. We projected forest growth and fire dynamics using a landscape change model, upon which the science team layered additional modeling to evaluate changes in wildlife habitat, water, and economics. Managers and stakeholders used the findings of this integrated modeling effort to inform the design of a landscape restoration strategy that balanced risks and benefits based on a robust scientific foundation. The results, published in this Special Feature, suggest that a continuation of status quo management would be less effective at protecting and improving desired outcomes than more active and extensive management approaches. In addition, the types of management activity also affected ecosystem outcomes. Results from across the studies in this special feature suggest that thinning and prescribed fire were complementary, although they resulted in somewhat different effects, and that low-severity use of fire had the greatest array and magnitude of ecosystem benefits. A notable exception was carbon storage, which declined with more active management and prescribed fire in particular. We highlight key findings from this Special Feature and summarize key challenges and some lessons learned in our experience of co-producing science. In short, science-management partnerships require cooperation, patience, and skill, but they are effective in increasing the capacity of land managers to navigate in an environment of rapid change and increasing uncertainty.

The post Keeping up with the landscapes: promoting resilience in dynamic social-ecological systems first appeared on Ecology & Society.

Adapting to the anthropogenic environmental change while transitioning to a more sustainable and more productive natural resource management places unprecedented demands on natural resource production. Meeting this complex challenge without unwarranted environmental degradation or loss of livelihoods requires understanding and managing the resilience of properties that produce natural resources. However, insufficient attention has been paid in research and natural resource governance to the capacity of natural resource producers to adapt and achieve sustainable outcomes at the property-level, potentially leading to unintended environmental and social outcomes. We used a large and detailed survey data of farmers, foresters, and growers in New Zealand to identify factors that correlate with property-level outcomes that are desirable from the perspective of sustainable natural resource production: strong environmental performance, good financial situation, and high well-being. The results detail how these outcomes correlate with diverse individual traits and outlooks, property-level agroecosystem characteristics, economic resources, and social interactions. However, different factors drive individual outcomes, and a factor that is positively correlated with one desirable outcome may negatively correlate with another. The only factor that positively correlated with all three outcomes was the goal to have strong environmental performance in future, which may reflect optimism as a resilience determinant. Thus, the difficulty of achieving good outcomes across all three dimensions may arise from conflicting effects of different factors on property-level environmental, economic, and well-being outcomes. In conclusion, our results indicate that natural resource governance must more carefully consider interdependencies between environmental, financial, and well-being outcomes at the property-level to support the ability of natural resource producers to meet society’s demands.

The post Resilient and sustainable natural resource production: how are farmers and foresters coping? first appeared on Ecology & Society.

Ecological practices such as intercropping maize (Zea mays) with cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L.) have been promoted to combat parasitic weeds like Striga (Striga asiatica). Intercropping has been promoted across Africa as a Striga control practice (SCP) and food security measure. Despite past efforts, millions of smallholder farmers (cultivating < 2 ha of maize) still struggle to implement SCPs. Social and ecological factors that prevent SCP implementation are well documented in the literature, but their underlying interactions have remained elusive. System dynamics modeling can uncover these interactions and assess their effect on intercropping rates as well as Striga emergence. This study presents a participatory mixed methods approach to build a system dynamics model based on two theories: diffusion of innovations and resource pool dynamics. The model estimates the population of fields where Striga emerged in response to intercropped fields when various interventions were implemented. According to model simulations, if new policies are not enacted to support intercropping, Striga is likely to spread to 2,625,000 maize fields, parasitizing almost 75% of smallholder farms across Central Malawi by 2036. The participatory approach allowed us to evaluate several policies, one of which sustained enough adopters to limit Striga emergence to < 500,000 fields, reducing the weed’s threat to food security. This policy considers how input costs and erratic rainfall can lead to disadoption, therefore, supporting the implementation of five to six consecutive years of intercropping by providing both fertilizer subsidies and demonstration plots. In this study, our participatory approach has shown to develop a model that can highlight interactions in social ecological systems, their leverage points, and how they can be exploited to develop effective food security policies.

The post Technology adoption and weed emergence dynamics: social ecological modeling for maize-legume systems across Africa first appeared on Ecology & Society.

From communities rooted in place to transnational coalitions, this special feature applies concepts of collaborative care rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems to the field of environmental governance. We highlight restorative, liberatory practices rooted in caretaking ethics and reciprocal human-nature relations. Our approach also centers decision making by those most connected to a given resource and the sustenance it provides. Despite global extraction, dispossession, and other colonial legacies, these efforts build toward collective action and community self-determination, both through formal policy change and informal practices. Three facets of collaborative care in environmental governance are threaded through the special feature: (1) care in place, (2) care in power, and (3) care in commoning. These themes connect both Indigenous-led and allied scholarship from the United States to the Netherlands, Japan to Madagascar, and Aotearoa to Canada. Though diverse in their interests and challenges, the authors and communities featured in this research build toward collective action and community self-determination in caring for the places that are the source of collective abundance.

The post Collaborative care in environmental governance: restoring reciprocal relations and community self-determination first appeared on Ecology & Society.

Adapting to climate change is a pressing societal imperative. Here, we examine water governance arrangements in Australia’s Murray-Darling basin, evaluating their attributes and adequacy for fostering climate adaptation. We synthesize data from expert interviews and review water and climate policies, analyzing their framing, logic, and dominant discourses. Our analysis indicates that prescriptive top-down planning and administratively rational approaches constrain Australia’s climate adaptation. Current governance regimes inhibit innovation due to dominant governance approaches that are centralist and managerial, reinforcing the status quo and privileging irrigation-based economies. In the Murray-Darling basin, reforms to policy settings and institutional arrangements are needed to mobilize industries and communities in exploring alternative water futures that support transformations. We offer two contrasting archetypes for climate-adaptive water policy based on foundationally different assumptions about what drives climate vulnerability and builds adaptive capacities.

The post Climate adaptive water policy in Australia’s Murray Darling basin: soft options or hard commitments? first appeared on Ecology & Society.

Common-pool resource theory suggests that the direct participation of local natural resource users in the management of common-pool resources can lead to effective management regimes. Nevertheless, the drivers of participation in common-pool resource management, including policy decision processes, and the effects of participation on stakeholder attitudes and policy preferences are relatively understudied. Here, we combine the social-ecological system (SES) framework with the political science concept of political efficacy to examine both contextual and personal drivers of farmer participation in California, USA’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), as well as the effect of participation on support for policy mechanisms from the SGMA. We surveyed a total of 553 farmers in three counties across the California Central Valley and Central Coast. Overall, we find that < 50% of the farmers surveyed have participated in any SGMA-related events, with attending a meeting being the most common (45%), and testifying before a board being the least common (6%). Participation in any type of SGMA policy event was associated with multiple characteristics of the groundwater SES context, including the resource system (farm size) and actor attributes (farm bureau membership and receiving information about the policy), that likely combine to indicate a higher level of social, financial, and built capital. Higher participation was also associated with higher internal efficacy ratings, i.e., an individual’s self-assessment of their ability to understand and participate in the political process. Higher levels of internal efficacy were also correlated with support for both incentive- and regulatory-based policy mechanisms, as well as the perception that groundwater impacts are occurring now or soon, and exclusive reliance on groundwater. These results demonstrate that political competence and experience with policy processes and programs are not only associated with participation in current policy issues, which is widely recognized in existing research, but are also associated with policy mechanisms, in particular, with potentially more costly regulatory-based mechanisms.

The post Individual and collective political efficacy predict farmer engagement and support for groundwater policies: implications from the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act first appeared on Ecology & Society.

Globally, wildfires are increasing in extent, frequency, and severity. Although global climate change is a major driver and large-scale governance interventions are essential, focusing on governance at smaller scales is of great importance for fostering resilience to wildfires. Inherent tensions in managing wildfire risk are evident at such scales, as objectives and mandates may conflict, and trade-offs and impacts vary across ecosystems and communities. Our study feeds into debates about how to manage wildfire risk to life and property in a way that does not undermine biodiversity and amenity values in social-ecological systems. Here, we describe a case study where features of adaptive governance emerged organically from a dedicated planning process for wildfire governance in Australia. We found that a governance process that is context specific, allows for dialogue about risk, benefits, and trade-offs, and allows for responsibility and risk to be distributed amongst many different actors, can provide the conditions needed to break down rigidity traps that constrain adaptation. The process enabled actors to question whether the default risk management option (in this case, prescribed burning) is aligned with place-based risks and values so they could make an informed choice, built from their participation in the governance process. Ultimately, the community supported a move away from prescribed burning in favor of other wildfire risk management strategies. We found that the emergent governance system has many features of adaptive governance, even though higher level governance has remained resistant to change. Our study offers positive insights for other governments around the world interested in pursuing alternative strategies to confronting wildfire risk.

The post To burn or not to burn: governance of wildfires in Australia first appeared on Ecology & Society.

Coral reef resilience is eroding at multiple spatial scales globally, with broad implications for coastal communities, and is thus a critical challenge for managing marine social-ecological systems (SESs). Many researchers believe that external stressors will cause key coral reefs to die by the end of the 21st century, virtually eliminating essential ecological and societal benefits. Here, we propose the use of resilience-based approaches to understand the dynamics of coral reef SESs and subsequent drivers of coral reef decline. Previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of these methods, not only for tracking environmental change, but also for providing warning in advance of transitions, possibly allowing time for management interventions. The flexibility and utility of these methods make them ideal for assessing complex systems; however, they have not been used to study aquatic ecosystem dynamics at the global scale. Here, we evaluate these methods for examining spatiotemporal change in coral reef SESs across the global seascape and assess the subsequent impacts on coral reef resilience. We found that while univariate indicators failed to provide clear signals, multivariate resilience-based approaches effectively captured coral reef SES dynamics, unveiling distinctive patterns of variation throughout the global coral reef seascape. Additionally, our findings highlight global spatiotemporal variation, indicating patterns of degraded resilience. This degradation was reflected regionally, particularly in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean SESs. These results underscore the utility of resilience-based approaches in assessing environmental change in SESs, detecting spatiotemporal variation at the global and regional scales, and facilitating more effective monitoring and management of coral reef SESs.

Ecosystem services and the biodiversity that supports them directly provision food and livelihoods to millions around the world within environments increasingly facing multifaceted changes. Yet the perspectives of resource users on the value of those resources and the challenges they face amid social-ecological change are still too often poorly understood. In this study, we use Photovoice methodology and a social-ecological systems perspective to understand the value of access to fish resources and the impacts of changing access for small-scale fishing communities in Cambodia. Contrasting the perspectives of households in different ecological settings, including adjacent to the Tonle Sap Lake and within its floodplain, revealed stark differences in the experiences of regulation enforcement and fisheries management for communities that had viable alternatives to fishing compared to those without options beyond fishing. The study addresses the need to understand both the lived experiences of those on the frontlines of environmental changes, and to disentangle the heterogeneous experiences across and within communities to improve resource management and community support in complex, changing social-ecological systems.

The post Environmental change and resource access in aquatic food systems: a Photovoice case study of Cambodian fisheries first appeared on Ecology & Society.