Developing a collaborative model for environmental planning and management

Methods for involving the public in natural resource management are changing as agencies adjust to an increasingly turbulent social and political environment. There is growing interest among managers and scholars in collaborative approaches to public involvement. Collaboration is conceptually defined and elaborated using examples from the natural resource management field. This paper then examines how collaboration theory from the organizational behavior field can help environmental managers to better understand those factors that facilitate and inhibit collaborative solutions to resource problems. A process-oriented model is presented that proposes that collaboration emerges out of an environmental context and then proceeds sequentially through a problem-setting, direction-setting, and structuring phase. Factors constraining collaboration are also specified, including organizational culture and power differentials. Designs for managing collaboration are identified, which include appreciative planning, joint agreements, dialogues, and negotiated settlements. Environmental managers need new skills to manage collaboration within a dynamic social and political environment. Further research is needed to test the propositions outlined here.     

Site search and multicriteria evaluation

Geographic information systems (GIS) are potentially powerful collections of tools which planners can use in the manipulation and analysis of spatial information. One traditional area of interest in this context is site search. Here, the functionality of GIS is, however, limited to certain deterministic analyses which serve merely as a computerised automation of the manual sieve mapping approach. The integration of multicriteria evaluation (MCE) techniques with GIS, is forwarded as a means of providing the user with the means to evaluate sites identified by sieve mapping techniques on the basis of multiple and conflicting criteria and objectives. An example application based on the search for suitable radioactive waste disposal sites in Britain using the Arc/Info GIS is included. The potential use of a combined GIS/MCE approach in the development of spatial decision support systems (SDSS) is considered.     

The impact of choice of rewards and feedback on task performance

A laboratory experiment (N = 149) tested two hypotheses: that choice of reward will have a positive impact on task performance and that choice would lead to arousal, as measured by reaction speed. The role that feedback information concerning whether subjects were being rewarded for performance on a prior task was also examined. The results revealed that choice and choice interacting with feedback were related to performance, but the choice had no impact on arousal. Self-determination theory may be used to help interpret these findings. The choice and feedback are non-controlling and informational to recipients which may increase perceptions of competence and self-initiative with an accompanying increase in intrinsic motivation to perform well on the task. These theoretical implications and some questions for future research and practical applications are discussed.     

A model for improving endangered species recovery programs

This paper discusses common organizational problems that cause inadequate planning and implementation processes of endangered species recovery across biologically dissimilar species. If these problems occur, even proven biological conservation techniques are jeopardized. We propose a solution that requires accountability in all phases of the restoration process and is based on cooperative input among government agencies, nongovernmental conservation organizations, and the academic community. The first step is formation of a task-oriented recovery team that integrates the best expertise into the planning process. This interdisciplinary team should be composed of people whose skills directly address issues critical for recovery. Once goals and procedures are established, the responsible agency (for example, in the United States, the US Fish and Wildlife Service) could divest some or all of its obligation for implementing the plan, yet still maintain oversight by holding implementing entities contractually accountable. Regular, periodic outside review and public documentation of the recovery team, lead agency, and the accomplishments of implementing bodies would permit evaluation necessary to improve performance. Increased cooperation among agency and nongovernmental organizations provided by this model promises a more efficient use of limited resources toward the conservation of biodiversity.     

Anguilliform larvae collected off North Carolina

The distinctive larval stage of eels (leptocephalus) facilitates dispersal through prolonged life in the open ocean. Leptocephali are abundant and diverse off North Carolina, yet data on distributions and biology are lacking. The water column (from surface to 1,293 m) was sampled in or near the Gulf Stream off Cape Hatteras, Cape Lookout, and Cape Fear, North Carolina during summer through fall of 1999–2005, and leptocephali were collected by neuston net, plankton net, Tucker trawl, and dip net. Additional samples were collected nearly monthly from a transect across southern Onslow Bay, North Carolina (from surface to 91 m) from April 2000 to December 2001 by bongo and neuston nets, Methot frame trawl, and Tucker trawl. Overall, 584 tows were completed, and 224 of these yielded larval eels. The 1,295 eel leptocephali collected (combining all methods and areas) represented at least 63 species (nine families). Thirteen species were not known previously from the area. Dominant families for all areas were Congridae (44% of individuals, 11 species), Ophichthidae (30% of individuals, 27 species), and Muraenidae (22% of individuals, ten species). Nine taxa accounted for 70% of the overall leptocephalus catches (in order of decreasing abundance): Paraconger caudilimbatus (Poey), Gymnothorax ocellatus Agassiz complex, Ariosoma balearicum (Delaroche), Ophichthus gomesii (Castelnau), Callechelys muraena Jordan and Evermann, Letharchus aliculatus McCosker, Rhynchoconger flavus (Goode and Bean), Ophichthus cruentifer (Goode and Bean), Rhynchoconger gracilior (Ginsburg). The top three species represented 52% of the total eel larvae collected. Most leptocephali were collected at night (79%) and at depths > 45 m. Eighty percent of the eels collected in discrete depth Tucker trawls at night ranged from mean depths of 59–353 m. A substantial number (38% of discrete depth sample total) of larval eels were also collected at the surface (neuston net) at night. Daytime leptocephalus distributions were less clear partly due to low catches and lower Tucker trawl sampling effort. While net avoidance may account for some of the low daytime catches, an alternative explanation is that many species of larval eels occur during the day at depths > 350 m. Larvae of 21 taxa of typically shallow water eels were collected at depths > 350 m, but additional discrete depth diel sampling is needed to resolve leptocephalus vertical distributions. The North Carolina adult eel fauna (estuary to at least 2,000 m) consists of 51 species, 41% of which were represented in these collections. Many species of leptocephali collected are not yet known to have juveniles or adults established in the South Atlantic Bight or north of Cape Hatteras. Despite Gulf Stream transport and a prolonged larval stage, many of these eel leptocephali may not contribute to their respective populations.     

Exploring fisheries strategies for the western English Channel using an ecosystem model

An ecosystem model of the western English Channel ecosystem in 1994 was used to explore the effects of the use of a fishing policy optimization routine on profits, number of jobs and ecosystem structure. The optimization for single objective led to the specialization of the fishing fleet, with some fleet types being almost excluded. The profits and mainly the job optimizations led to big changes in the ecosystem structure, with loss of diversity, but the overall biomass of all vertebrate groups represented in the model increased considerably. For the objective focusing on ecosystem structure, there was an increase in biodiversity, with many long-lived groups predicted to increase, although the overall vertebrate biomass suffered just a small increase. An “ideal” mixed policy configuration was found when slightly greater weight was given to ecosystem structure than was given to profits and jobs. This scenario led to an overall reduction in effort but also to increased profits and biodiversity, while keeping the number of jobs at the same level as the baseline estimates. The results of the optimizations showed that the average trophic level of the catches is quite resistant to changes in the underlying system structure. On the other hand, despite the high level of aggregation of the model structure, a biodiversity index estimated by the model presented large changes as a function of the weights placed on the single policy functions, reflecting the changes in the system structure. The output of the application of the fishing optimization presented here should be considered in qualitative rather than in quantitative terms as an aid and part contribution to the complicated discussions on future long term management actions. Nonetheless it points to an overall reduction in fishing capacity, an objective widely accepted within the scientific community, while keeping the fishery in a profitable state.     

The ecological niche of Daphnia magna characterized using population growth rate

The concept of an organism's niche is central to ecological theory, but an operational definition is needed that allows both its experimental delineation and interpretation of field distributions of the species. Here we use population growth rate (hereafter, pgr) to define the niche as the set of points in niche space where pgr > 0. If there are just two axes to the niche space, their relationship to pgr can be pictured as a contour map in which pgr varies along the axes in the same way that the height of land above sea level varies with latitude and longitude. In laboratory experiments we measured the pgr of Daphnia magna over a grid of values of pH and Ca2+, and so defined its "laboratory niche" in pH-Ca2+ space. The position of the laboratory niche boundary suggests that population persistence is only possible above 0.5 mg Ca2+/L and between pH 5.75 and pH 9, though more Ca2+ is needed at lower pH values. To see how well the measured niche predicts the field distribution of D. magna, we examined relevant field data from 422 sites in England and Wales. Of the 58 colonized water bodies, 56 lay within the laboratory niche. Very few of the sites near the niche boundary were colonized, probably because pgr there is so low that populations are vulnerable to extinction by other factors. Our study shows how the niche can be quantified and used to predict field distributions successfully.     

Modeled historical land use and land cover for the conterminous United States

The landscape of the conterminous United States has changed dramatically over the last 200 years, with agricultural land use, urban expansion, forestry, and other anthropogenic activities altering land cover across vast swaths of the country. While land use and land cover (LULC) models have been developed to model potential future LULC change, few efforts have focused on recreating historical landscapes. Researchers at the US Geological Survey have used a wide range of historical data sources and a spatially explicit modeling framework to model spatially explicit historical LULC change in the conterminous United States from 1992 back to 1938. Annual LULC maps were produced at 250-m resolution, with 14 LULC classes. Assessment of model results showed good agreement with trends and spatial patterns in historical data sources such as the Census of Agriculture and historical housing density data, although comparison with historical data is complicated by definitional and methodological differences. The completion of this dataset allows researchers to assess historical LULC impacts on a range of ecological processes.     

Historical processes constrain patterns in global diatom diversity

There is a long-standing belief that microbial organisms have unlimited dispersal capabilities, are therefore ubiquitous, and show weak or absent latitudinal diversity gradients. In contrast, using a global freshwater diatom data set, we show that latitudinal gradients in local and regional genus richness are present and highly asymmetric between both hemispheres. Patterns in regional richness are explained by the degree of isolation of lake districts, while the number of locally coexisting diatom genera is highly constrained by the size of the regional diatom pool, habitat availability, and the connectivity between habitats within lake districts. At regional to global scales, historical factors explain significantly more of the observed geographic patterns in genus richness than do contemporary environmental conditions. Together, these results stress the importance of dispersal and migration in structuring diatom communities at regional to global scales. Our results are consistent with predictions from the theory of island biogeography and metacommunity concepts and likely underlie the strong provinciality and endemism observed in the relatively isolated diatom floras in the Southern Hemisphere.     

Groundwater flow, multicomponent transport and biogeochemistry: development and application of a coupled process model

A research tool for modeling the reactive flow and transport of groundwater contaminants in multiple dimensions is presented. Arbitrarily complex coupled kinetic–equilibrium heterogeneous reaction networks, automatic code generation, transfer-function based solutions, parameter estimation, high-resolution methods for advection, and robust solvers for the mixed kinetic–equilibrium chemistry are some of the features of reactive flow and transport (RAFT) that make it a versatile research tool in the modeling of a wide variety of laboratory and field experiments. The treatment of reactions is quite general so that RAFT can be used to model biological, adsorption/desorption, complexation, and mineral dissolution/precipitation reactions among others. The integrated framework involving automated code generation and parameter estimation allows for the development, characterization, and evaluation of mechanistic process models. The model is described and used to solve a problem in competitive adsorption that illustrates some of these features. The model is also used to study the development of an in situ Fe(II)-zone by encouraging the growth of an iron-reducing bacterium with lactate as the electron donor. Such redox barriers are effective in sequestering groundwater contaminants such as chromate and TCE.