Environmental solutions sparked by environmental history

Environmental solutions require a decision-making process that is ultimately political, in that they involve decisions with uncertain outcomes and stakeholders with conflicting viewpoints. If this process seeks broad alignment between the government and public, then reconciling conflicting viewpoints is a key to the legitimacy of these decisions. We show that ecological baselines can be particularly powerful tools for creating a common understanding for public support (legitimacy) and conformity to new rules or regulations (legality) that enable the solution. They are powerful because they move the discussion of solutions from the abstract to the concrete by providing a conceptual model for a common expectation (e.g., restoring habitat). They provide narratives of the past (ecological histories) that readjust the future expectations of individuals on how to perceive and respond to new policy. While ecological baselines offer scientists benchmarks for reinstating ecological functions, they also normalize public and government discussion of solutions. This social normalization of public issues may assist government policy and influence social views, practices, and behaviors that adopt the policy. For science to more effectively inform conservation, we encourage interdisciplinary thinking (science- and human-centered) because it can provide public support and government legitimacy for investing in environmental solutions.     

Knowledge co‐production and boundary work to promote implementation of conservation plans

Knowledge co‐production and boundary work offer planners a new frame for critically designing a social process that fosters collaborative implementation of resulting plans. Knowledge co‐production involves stakeholders from diverse knowledge systems working iteratively toward common vision and action. Boundary work is a means of creating permeable knowledge boundaries that satisfy the needs of multiple social groups while guarding the functional integrity of contributing knowledge systems. Resulting products are boundary objects of mutual interest that maintain coherence across all knowledge boundaries. We examined how knowledge co‐production and boundary work can bridge the gap between planning and implementation and promote cross‐sectoral cooperation. We applied these concepts to well‐established stages in regional conservation planning within a national scale conservation planning project aimed at identifying areas for conserving rivers and wetlands of South Africa and developing an institutional environment for promoting their conservation. Knowledge co‐production occurred iteratively over 4 years in interactive stake‐holder workshops that included co‐development of national freshwater conservation goals and spatial data on freshwater biodiversity and local conservation feasibility; translation of goals into quantitative inputs that were used in Marxan to select draft priority conservation areas; review of draft priority areas; and packaging of resulting map products into an atlas and implementation manual to promote application of the priority area maps in 37 different decision‐making contexts. Knowledge co‐production stimulated dialogue and negotiation and built capacity for multi‐scale implementation beyond the project. The resulting maps and information integrated diverse knowledge types of over 450 stakeholders and represented >1000 years of collective experience. The maps provided a consistent national source of information on priority conservation areas for rivers and wetlands and have been applied in 25 of the 37 use contexts since their launch just over 3 years ago. When framed as a knowledge co‐production process supported by boundary work, regional conservation plans can be developed into valuable boundary objects that offer a tangible tool for multi‐agency cooperation around conservation. Our work provides practical guidance for promoting uptake of conservation science and contributes to an evidence base on how conservation efforts can be improved.     

Spatial and Temporal Assessment of Cumulative Disturbance Impacts Due to Military Training,Burning, Haying,and Their Interactions on Land Condition of Fort Riley

The effects of military training activities on the land condition of Army installations vary spatially and temporally. Training activities observably degrade land condition while also increasing biodiversity and stabilizing ecosystems. Moreover, other anthropogenic activities regularly occur on military lands such as prescribed burns and agricultural haying—adding to the dynamics of land condition. Thus, spatially and temporally assessing the impacts of military training, prescribed burning, agricultural haying, and their interactions is critical to the management of military lands. In this study, the spatial distributions and patterns of military training-induced disturbance frequency were derived using plot observation and point observation-based method, at Fort Riley, Kansas from 1989 to 2001. Moreover, spatial and variance analysis of cumulative impacts due to military training, burning, haying, and their interactions on the land condition of Fort Riley were conducted. The results showed that: (1) low disturbance intensity dominated the majority of the study area with exception of concentrated training within centralized areas; (2) high and low values of disturbance frequency were spatially clustered and had spatial patterns that differed significantly from a random distribution; and (3) interactions between prescribed burning and agricultural haying were not significant in terms of either soil erosion or disturbance intensity although their means and variances differed significantly between the burned and non-burned areas and between the hayed and non-hayed areas.     

The role of uncertainty in climate change adaptation strategies—A Danish water management example

We propose a generic framework to characterize climate change adaptation uncertainty according to three dimensions: level, source and nature. Our framework is different, and in this respect more comprehensive, than the present UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) approach and could be used to address concerns that the IPCC approach is oversimplified. We have studied the role of uncertainty in climate change adaptation planning using examples from four Danish water related sectors. The dominating sources of uncertainty differ greatly among issues; most uncertainties on impacts are epistemic (reducible) by nature but uncertainties on adaptation measures are complex, with ambiguity often being added to impact uncertainties. Strategies to deal with uncertainty in climate change adaptation should reflect the nature of the uncertainty sources and how they interact with risk level and decision making: (i) epistemic uncertainties can be reduced by gaining more knowledge; (ii) uncertainties related to ambiguity can be reduced by dialogue and knowledge sharing between the different stakeholders; and (iii) aleatory uncertainty is, by its nature, non-reducible. The uncertainty cascade includes many sources and their propagation through technical and socio-economic models may add substantially to prediction uncertainties, but they may also cancel each other. Thus, even large uncertainties may have small consequences for decision making, because multiple sources of information provide sufficient knowledge to justify action in climate change adaptation.     

Climate-induced reaction norms for life-history traits in pythons

Climate change modelers predict increasingly frequent "extreme events," so it is critical to quantify whether organismal responses (such as reproductive output) measured over the range of usual climatic conditions can predict responses under more extreme conditions. In a 20-year field study on water pythons (Liasis fuscus), we quantified the effects of climatically driven annual variation in food supply on demographic traits of female pythons (feeding rate, body size, body mass, and reproductive output). Reaction norms linking food supply to feeding rates and residual body mass were broadly linear, whereas norms linking food supply to female body size became curvilinear when a dramatic (flooding-induced) famine reduced the mean body size at sexual maturity. Thus, the reaction norms recorded over 16 years of mal" (albeit highly variable) climatic conditions gave little insight into the population's response to a more extreme nutritional crisis.     

Impact of municipal solid waste incineration bottom ash on the properties and frost resistance of clay bricks

Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management - This paper presents an experimental study on the properties, structure and durability (frost resistance: one-side and all-sides freezing and...     

Ethical considerations for community-based participatory research with Sami communities in North Finland

This study examines the perspectives of Sami community members and university researchers regarding the ethical considerations for engagement in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) with Sami communities in northern Finland. Key informant interviews were conducted with Sami people from Finland who were exposed to or participated in research in their communities as well as with researchers who have conducted research with the Sami in Finland across diverse topics. Five themes were identified: establishing trust, research preparation, research comprehension, research ethics, and inclusion in research. The differences in participant perspectives were compared based on their community versus researcher roles. Our findings emphasize the need for (1) strategies to develop and maintain trust between Sami communities and researchers; (2) methods to bridge concepts of bias projected onto Sami communities and researchers by the others’ differing world views and beliefs about research; and (3) increased education in community-engaged methods for social and natural scientists working with Sami communities. This study supports the need for the development of formalized ethical protocols for conducting community-based engaged research with and for Sami people in Finland that ensure mutually beneficial research for all involved.