Coupling fishery dynamics,human health and social learning in a model of fish-borne pollution exposure

Pollution-induced illnesses are caused by toxicants that result from human activity and are often entirely preventable. However, where industrial priorities have undermined responsible governance, exposed populations must reduce their exposure by resorting to voluntary protective measures and demanding emissions abatement. This paper presents a coupled human–environment system model that represents the effects of water pollution on the health and livelihood of a fishing community. The model is motivated by an incident from 1949 to 1968 in Minamata, Japan, where methylmercury effluent from a local factory poisoned fish populations and humans who ate them. We model the critical role of risk perception in driving both social learning and the protective feedbacks against pollution exposure. These feedbacks are undermined in the presence of social misperceptions such as stigmatization of the injured. Through numerical simulation and scenario analysis, we compare our model results with historical datasets from Minamata, and find that the conditions for an ongoing pollution epidemic are highly unlikely without social misperception. We also find trade-offs between human health outcomes, the viability of the polluting industry and the survival of the fishery. We conclude that an understanding of human–environment interactions and misperception effects is highly relevant to the resolution of contemporary pollution problems, and merits further study.     

Drilling Is Just the Beginning: Romanticizing Rust Belt identities in the campaign for shale gas

ABSTRACT

Public apprehension over the environmental, social, and health impacts of unconventional gas drilling, or fracking, prompts various responses from oil and gas industries. Natural gas discourses operating in the Marcellus Shale Region, USA, for example, counter claims of environmental harm by emphasizing the economic growth that industry spurs. This article argues that corporate narratives operating in the Marcellus renew the jobs versus environment dichotomy by romanticizing labor identities in the region, binding Rust Belt identities to extraction in the past, present, and future of the region. The danger of this discursive move is the exclusion of alternative possibilities for working, living, and being without fossil fuel industries. I employ a critical analysis of one corporate advertising campaign, “Drilling Is Just the Beginning,” produced by the natural gas drilling company Range Resources, to demonstrate how extraction discourses construct futures that depend on shale gas development, thereby marginalizing possibilities for ecologically sensible alternatives.     

Framing for resilience through social learning: impacts of environmental stewardship on youth in post-disturbance communities

Civic ecology practices, such as community gardening and citizen-led urban reforestation and wetland restoration, provide opportunities for social learning. Because social learning is an important component of community resilience, we suggest that civic ecology practices can be a strategy for responding to and mitigating environmental disturbances in an era threatened by climate change. Despite the links between civic ecology, social learning and community resilience, empirical research that systematically considers these connections is limited. This study addresses this gap by introducing ‘frames’ as an approach to considering social learning outcomes and process. More specifically, we provide a model for investigating the role civic ecology education programs play in shaping youths’ capacity to understand and respond to environmental disturbance. We used participant observation and cognitive mapping to assess social learning among three youth restoration programs working in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in New York, NY, and after the 2013 floods in Boulder, CO. In all three programs, youth demonstrated social learning and cognitive change by shifting their emphasis from the impacts of disturbance towards a solutions-based framing that focused on community, action, and mitigation. However, the depth of these changes was not uniform across all programs, suggesting that variations in program length, community context, social identity, and opportunities for self-defined action may shape overall impacts of programs and youth capacity for future action.     

Ecosystem services in coupled social–ecological systems: Closing the cycle of service provision and societal feedback

Both the ‘cascade model’ of ecosystem service provision and the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response framework individually contribute to the understanding of human–nature interactions in social–ecological systems (SES). Yet, as several points of criticism show, they are limited analytical tools when it comes to reproducing complex cause–effect relationships in such systems. However, in this paper, we point out that by merging the two models, they can mutually enhance their comprehensiveness and overcome their individual conceptual deficits. Therefore we closed a cycle of ecosystem service provision and societal feedback by rethinking and reassembling the core elements of both models. That way, we established a causal sequence apt to describe the causes of change to SES, their effects and their consequences. Finally, to illustrate its functioning we exemplified and discussed our approach based on a case study conducted in the Alpujarra de la Sierra in southern Spain.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0651-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Consequences of increased terrestrial dissolved organic matter and temperature on bacterioplankton community composition during a Baltic Sea mesocosm experiment

Predicted increases in runoff of terrestrial dissolved organic matter (DOM) and sea surface temperatures implicate substantial changes in energy fluxes of coastal marine ecosystems. Despite marine bacteria being critical drivers of marine carbon cycling, knowledge of compositional responses within bacterioplankton communities to such disturbances is strongly limited. Using 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing, we examined bacterioplankton population dynamics in Baltic Sea mesocosms with treatments combining terrestrial DOM enrichment and increased temperature. Among the 200 most abundant taxa, 62 % either increased or decreased in relative abundance under changed environmental conditions. For example, SAR11 and SAR86 populations proliferated in combined increased terrestrial DOM/temperature mesocosms, while the hgcI and CL500-29 clades (Actinobacteria) decreased in the same mesocosms. Bacteroidetes increased in both control mesocosms and in the combined increased terrestrial DOM/temperature mesocosms. These results indicate considerable and differential responses among distinct bacterial populations to combined climate change effects, emphasizing the potential of such effects to induce shifts in ecosystem function and carbon cycling in the future Baltic Sea.     

Nitrogen fixation by cyanobacteria stimulates production in Baltic food webs

Filamentous, nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria form extensive summer blooms in the Baltic Sea. Their ability to fix dissolved N₂ allows cyanobacteria to circumvent the general summer nitrogen limitation, while also generating a supply of novel bioavailable nitrogen for the food web. However, the fate of the nitrogen fixed by cyanobacteria remains unresolved, as does its importance for secondary production in the Baltic Sea. Here, we synthesize recent experimental and field studies providing strong empirical evidence that cyanobacterial nitrogen is efficiently assimilated and transferred in Baltic food webs via two major pathways: directly by grazing on fresh or decaying cyanobacteria and indirectly through the uptake by other phytoplankton and microbes of bioavailable nitrogen exuded from cyanobacterial cells. This information is an essential step toward guiding nutrient management to minimize noxious blooms without overly reducing secondary production, and ultimately most probably fish production in the Baltic Sea.     

Baltic Sea ecosystem-based management under climate change: Synthesis and future challenges

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has emerged as the generally agreed strategy for managing ecosystems, with humans as integral parts of the managed system. Human activities have substantial effects on marine ecosystems, through overfishing, eutrophication, toxic pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change. It is important to advance the scientific knowledge of the cumulative, integrative, and interacting effects of these diverse activities, to support effective implementation of EBM. Based on contributions to this special issue of AMBIO, we synthesize the scientific findings into four components: pollution and legal frameworks, ecosystem processes, scale-dependent effects, and innovative tools and methods. We conclude with challenges for the future, and identify the next steps needed for successful implementation of EBM in general and specifically for the Baltic Sea.     

Interannual variability of phyto-bacterioplankton biomass and production in coastal and offshore waters of the Baltic Sea

The microbial part of the pelagic food web is seldom characterized in models despite its major contribution to biogeochemical cycles. In the Baltic Sea, spatial and temporal high frequency sampling over three years revealed changes in heterotrophic bacteria and phytoplankton coupling (biomass and production) related to hydrographic properties of the ecosystem. Phyto- and bacterioplankton were bottom-up driven in both coastal and offshore areas. Cold winter temperature was essential for phytoplankton to conform to the successional sequence in temperate waters. In terms of annual carbon production, the loss of the spring bloom (diatoms and dinoflagellates) after mild winters tended not to be compensated for by other taxa, not even summer cyanobacteria. These results improve our ability to project Baltic Sea ecosystem response to short- and long-term environmental changes.     

Technology for nature conservation: An industry perspective

Information age technology has the potential to change the game for conservation by continuously monitoring the pulse of the natural world. Whether or not it will depends on the ability of the conservation sector to build a community of practice, come together to define key technology challenges and work with a wide variety of partners to create, implement, and sustain solutions. I describe why these steps are necessary, outline the latest developments in the field and offer actionable ways forward for conservation agencies, universities, funding bodies, professional societies, and technology corporations to come together to realize the revolution that computational technologies can bring for biodiversity conservation.