Apr 12, 2016
Each year the journal Ecology & Society awards a prize that recognizes novel ways of doing research (more about the award). The award is made possible through the Foundation of Scientific Symbiosis. This year's recipients used videos posted on YouTubeTM to study illegal hunting practices and opinions in Brazil. "The thrill of the chase: uncovering illegal sport hunting in Brazil through YouTubeTM posts" by El Bizri and colleagues examined both the videos and online comments to learn more about which species are being hunted and when, as well as the hunter's views on and insights into management strategies.
Full citation:
El Bizri, H. R., T. Q. Morcatty, J. J. S. Lima, and J. Valsecchi. 2015. The thrill of the chase: uncovering illegal sport hunting in Brazil through YouTubeTM posts. Ecology and Society 20(3):30.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-07882-200330
Abstract:
The impacts of unregulated sport hunting can severely affect populations of target game species. Because hunting in Brazil is limited by law, obtaining data on illegal sport hunting in this country is challenging. We used an unusual online resource, YouTubeTM, to detect the occurrence of sport hunting in Brazil, measure the impacts of the activity on the main Brazilian game species and biomes, evaluate the opinions of hunters and internet users on sport hunting, and discuss the need for policy interventions in wildlife conservation in this country. We found 383 videos related to Brazilian sport hunting on YouTubeTM, accounting for more than 15 million views. Most videos were produced in the Cerrado (Brazilian savannah) and approximately 70% of them depicted events of pursuit and killing of wild animals, especially lowland pacas (Cuniculus paca) and armadillos (Family Dasypodidae). Videos were posted primarily in July and December, coinciding with the two main Brazilian vacation periods. Furthermore, the shotguns identified on videos show that sport hunters expend large sums of money to undertake their hunts. These results indicate that Brazilian sport hunters are possibly wealthier urban residents who travel to rural areas to hunt, contrasting with previous hunting studies in the country. Most viewers declared themselves in favor of sport hunting in comments (n = 2893) and ratings (n = 36,570) of the videos. Discussions generated by comments suggest that Brazilian sport hunters employ several informal management strategies to maintain game species stocks for future hunting and intensely question the restrictions of Brazilian environmental policies. Our results demonstrate that solutions are needed for the regulation of sport hunting in Brazil. Government actions, whether to increase surveillance or legalize hunting programs, should take into account the opinions of sport hunters and their perceptions on hunting dynamics to support effective policy decisions on wildlife conservation in Brazil.
Apr 07, 2016
The severity of coral bleaching along Australia's Great Barrier Reef, is 3-4 times greater than in 1998 or 2002 reported Terry Hughes to thousands of Twitter followers. Triggered by El Niño's warming, the coral bleaching was not unexpected, but these first reports of changes seen during on-going flyover surveys and disseminated in near-real time still deliver a visual punch. One gets the feeling that our 'borrowed time' is running out.
Regime shifts in coral reefs are a familiar example among resilience researchers. Hughes has numerous publications documenting human impacts on coral reefs over the years, with climate change increasingly recognized as a key driver in a complex system. In a paper published in 2012, Hughes and colleagues proposed the concept of "living on borrowed time, a critical window of time when slow regime shifts might be reversed to prevent the new alternate state from fully eventuating".
In a news story on the aerial coral surveys in Science last week, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the University of Queensland, asserts "the only way out of this bind is to rapidly contain further increases in global warming".
Refs:
El Niño's warmth devastating reefs worldwide. Recent aerial surveys of Australia's Great Barrier Reef find massive coral bleaching. By Dennis Normile. 1 April 2016 Science Vol. 352 Iss. 6281: 15-16.
Living dangerously on borrowed time during slow, unrecognized regime shifts. Hughes, T.P. et al. 2013. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 28(3):149-155.
Climate change, human impacts, and the resilience of coral reefs. Hughes, T.P. et al. 2003. Science 301: 929-933.
Mar 16, 2016
New research by Xavier Basurto and colleagues explores the influence of Marine Protected Areas on local communities along the coast of Baja. The "friendly rivalry" that emerges highlights the need to integrate prosocial and antisocial behavior into theories of collective action. Published earlier this month in Science Advances, the paper "Integrating simultaneous prosocial and antisocial behaviour into theories of collective action" is open access and can be downloaded here.
As stated in the abstract "Trust and cooperation constitute cornerstones of common-pool resource theory, showing that "prosocial" strategies among resource users can overcome collective action problems and lead to sustainable resource governance. Yet, antisocial behavior and especially the coexistence of prosocial and antisocial behaviors have received less attention. We broaden the analysis to include the effects of both "prosocial" and "antisocial" interactions."
Basing their study along the coast of Baja California, Mexico where the authors have worked for more than 15 years, Basurto and colleagues compare two MPA communities and two non-MPA communities and employ gaming experiments, interviews and a standardized survey to explore the effects of prosocial and antisocial behaviours. The MPA communities were found to have higher levels of both competition and collaboration.
A 4 min summary video highlights implications for marine protected areas and beyond: Marine protected areas intensify cooperation and competition among fishers.
Washington Post's coverage and interpretation of the research:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/03/04/how-protecting-the-environment-changes-human-nature/
Citation:
Basurto, Xavier, Esther Blanco, Mateja Nenadovic1 and Björn Vollan 2016. Integrating simultaneous prosocial and antisocial behavior into theories of collective action. Science Advances Vol. 2, no. 3, e1501220. DOI:10.1126/sciadv.1501220.
Mar 09, 2016
'The Promise of climate fiction: Imagination, storytelling, and the politics of the future' by Manjana Milkoreit takes a fresh look at climate change and challenges readers to consider how our collective capacity to cope with this great challenge of our times is limited in large part by our lack of imagination, both in terms of how we conceptualize the problem and in the solutions we put forward. Milkoreit explores the role of climate fiction as a tool for the imagination and examines how this genre of storytelling can help one think differently about the problem and perhaps approach it from an alternative perspective. Analyzing three pieces of fiction: Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy, and George Turner's The Sea and the Summer, Milkoreit's book chapter offers several lessons learned including meaning-making and complex systems thinking. The promise of climate fiction offers something new and begins an exploration into an area of research that is working at, if not dismantling, the boundaries of social science, arts, and the humanities.
Visit the publisher's website.
Full Citation:
Milkoreit, M. (2016). The Promise of Climate Fiction - Imagination, Storytelling and the Politics of the Future. In Wapner, Paul and Hilal Elver (eds.) Reimagining Climate Change. Routledge Publishing.
Feb 10, 2016
"Disentangling the Pathways and Effects of Ecosystem Service Co-Production" by I. Palomo and co-authors describes how ecosystem services are co-produced with natural capital and human capital inputs. The authors assert that acknowledging ecosystem services require some form of human intervention for humans to 'receive' benefits has implications including: the need for ES assessments to consider human capital inputs that contribute to ES delivery and also the need to broaden the concept of ES by embedding it in social-ecological systems (SES) to include the complexity of co-produced ecosystem services in environmental management and policy.
The paper presents a framework for ES co-production and explores the variety of ways in which different forms of capital (e.g., human capital, manufactured capital, social capital, financial capital) contribute to ecosystem service delivery and potential implications for policy, trade-offs and interactions among ecosystem services, equity, and also for the resilience of the SES.
Ignacio Palomo, Maria R. Felipe-Lucia, Elena M. Bennett, Berta Martin-Lopez, Unai Pascual. 2016. Disentangling the Pathways and Effects of Ecosystem Service Co-Production. Advances in Ecological Research, Volume 54: 245 - 272. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.aecr.2015.09.003
Jan 26, 2016
FULL CITATION:
Burnsilver, S., J. Magdanz, R. Stotts, M. Berman, G. Kofinas. 2016. Are Mixed Economies Persistent or Transitional? Evidence Using Social Networks from Arctic Alaska. American Anthropologist Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1-9, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.
Jan 12, 2016
The Stewardship Network focuses on collaboration among researchers and practitioners to solve common problems in the Great Lakes region, North America. The paper entitled "A boundary-spanning organization for transdisciplinary science on land stewardship: The Stewardship Network" published recently in Ecology and Society, describes how TSN has continued to work with stakeholders and grow the network to more than 10,000 practitioners. Through on-going workshops, web seminars, and an annual conference, community-based conservation initiatives benefit from the cumulative knowledge and practical experience of network members.
The Science and Practice of Ecology & Society Award recognizes practitioners or organizations applying interdisciplinary science to challenges at the intersection of ecosystems and society. By publishing their stories E&S aims to share examples and innovative applications with others. Read more about the award and browse a collection of papers authored by past recipients edited by Dr. Marco Janssen here.
Citation: Fischer, A. P. 2015. A boundary-spanning organization for transdisciplinary science on land stewardship: The Stewardship Network. Ecology and Society 20(4):38.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08121-200438
Dec 16, 2015
Resilience, Development and Global Change presents a sophisticated, theoretically informed synthesis of resilience thinking across disciplines, including social ecological systems and human development. It proposes a re-visioning of resilience to meet contemporary international development challenges, highlighting hitherto neglected areas of resistance, rootedness and resourcefulness. This re-visioning brings novel insights to transform responses to climate change, understandings of poverty dynamics, and conceptualisation of social ecological systems.
Published by Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-66347-2
https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415663472
Dec 09, 2015
Large conferences can be an ideal setting to meet other people with shared research interests and more often now when the conference ends the dialogue continues. Such was the case with a group of researchers who met at the 2014 Resilience conference in Montpellier, France to share their experiences conducting participatory scenarios as part of their research projects. An initial core group grew to include researchers involved with 23 case studies using a participatory scenario planning approach. Now the results of their discussions and comparative analysis have been published as part of a special feature on Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS): Knowledge for Sustainable Stewardship in Social-ecological systems in Ecology & Society.
The systematic comparison of the 23 participatory scenario planning (PSP) cases offered several key insights into lessons learned as well as some of the challenges with this methodological approach. In addition to a large variety of scenario outputs that help communicate findings to diverse groups of stakeholders, the process of creating scenarios was valuable in and of itself and contributed to increasing dialogue, resolving conflicts, encouraging complexity thinking and legitimacy in decision making.
Full citation:
Oteros-Rozas, E., B. Martín-López, T. Daw, E. L. Bohensky, J. Butler, R. Hill, J. Martin-Ortega, A. Quinlan, F. Ravera, I. Ruiz-
Mallén, M. Thyresson, J. Mistry, I. Palomo, G. D. Peterson, T. Plieninger, K. A. Waylen, D. Beach, I. C. Bohnet, M. Hamann, J.
Hanspach, K. Hubacek, S. Lavorel and S. Vilardy 2015. Participatory scenario planning in place-based social-ecological research:
insights and experiences from 23 case studies. Ecology and Society 20(4):32. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-07985-200432
Dec 04, 2015
The idea of facilitating connections among resilience researchers and practitioners across a wide variety of sectors and contexts has been an important objective of the RA for many years. Now with the recently launched Resilience Connections Network (RCN), there is an online home for this initiative. The virtual space aims to boost interaction between global and local thought leaders, transition entrepreneurs, resilience science experts, and practitioners. Through the platform members can share insights and experiences, find future collaborators, contribute to a shared library of resources, engage in dialogue, and learn best practices in building resilience and making sustainability happen.
Professor Gail Whiteman, Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business and Professor-in-Residence at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, has played a key role in making RCN happen and extends an invitation to future members in a welcome video message. Already more than 95 people have joined RCN from government, multinational business, small and medium sized enterprise, non-governmental organizations, community initiatives, social innovation hubs, citizens groups and academia. The next phase of development for the RCN will highlight stories of collaboration.
Participation in this network is both free and open to all. The RA gratefully acknowledges funding from the EU ARTS program Accelerating Transitions.