Translating the 10 golden rules of reforestation for coral reef restoration

Efforts are accelerating to protect and restore ecosystems globally. With trillions of dollars in ecosystem services at stake, no clear framework exists for developing or prioritizing approaches to restore coral reefs even as efforts and investment opportunities to do so grow worldwide. Restoration may buy time for climate change mitigation, but it lacks rigorous guidance to meet objectives of scalability and effectiveness. Lessons from restoration of terrestrial ecosystems can and should be rapidly adopted for coral reef restoration. We propose how the 10 golden rules of effective forest restoration can be translated to accelerate efforts to restore coral reefs based on established principles of resilience, management, and local stewardship. We summarize steps to undertake reef restoration as a management strategy in the context of the diverse ecosystem service values that coral reefs provide. Outlining a clear blueprint is timely as more stakeholders seek to undertake restoration as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration begins.     

Common Values and Themes for Grazed Open Spaces: “Plant Diversity” and “Watershed” as Communication Intersections for Agriculture and Conservation Groups?

ABSTRACT

Communicating about the use and management of open spaces occurs within a complex social environment replete with diverse stakeholder opinions and meta-narratives. For western US rangelands, production-based enterprises have been the traditional use but increasingly they are valued for ecosystem services such as water, recreation, biodiversity, and aesthetics which have led to additional conflict. We surveyed Wyoming-based members of six agricultural (Ag) and four environmental/conservation (Env/Con) groups to determine grazing-centric mutual exclusivity of special interests, common values, and emergent themes. We assessed 197 survey participants; 150 from Ag groups and 47 from Env/Con groups. Of 10 values assessed, “watershed” and “plant diversity” were similarly valued by both group types. These naturally dichotomous groups also agreed that communication and reliance on science are needed. Communication and conflict resolution about the use of open spaces can benefit from addressing social presuppositions and meta-narratives of broader audiences to facilitate effective dialogue and solutions.     

Moral emotions: A review and research agenda for management scholarship

By discussing “families” of moral emotions, we synthesize and review the moral emotions literature in an effort to advance organizational scholarship. First, we broadly discuss “what constitutes a moral emotion?” Second, we critically examine each family of moral emotions. We discuss key controversies and debates, particularly in terms of construct overlap, and provide recommendations. Third, we review scholarly work on each family of moral emotions in the workplace and offer ideas for future research. Finally, in our general future directions, we discuss a range of theoretical perspectives that can be used to advance the moral emotions literature in the management field.     

Motivated to disengage: The ethical consequences of goal commitment and moral disengagement in goal setting

A growing literature has suggested that high performance goals can have unintended consequences within organizations as employees engage in unethical behavior to achieve outcomes associated with goal attainment. Extending research on the dark side of goal setting, we suggest that high performance goals not only create a desire to achieve a particular outcome but also alter moral reasoning processes related to goal attainment. Integrating goal-setting theory with motivated moral reasoning, we hypothesize an indirect effect of high performance goals on unethical behavior via state moral disengagement. We also examine goal commitment—which tends to amplify the relationship between high goals and performance—as a key boundary condition associated with this indirect effect. We build this conditional indirect effect model across three studies conducted in the field and the laboratory. Our results provide new insight into both when and why high goals can facilitate moral disengagement and unethical behavior within organizations.     

基于成本收益理论的井场作业人员不安全行为决策分析

为有效制定油气田井场作业人员不安全行为的防范措施,降低事故发生可能性,基于成本收益理论建立油气田井场作业人员的行为决策模型,通过仿真计算定量分析了不同影响因素对不安全行为产生的影响程度。结果表明:正向激励和负向激励对不安全行为的降低幅度为21.8%,17.2%,负向激励和监督力度共同作用下不安全行为可降低44.8%。油田企业在保证利润的前提下应优先提升HSE奖励水平,合理控制罚金水平的同时加大管理监督力度,从而有效减少作业人员不安全行为的发生,保障企业的安全生产。     

Ecological principles,biodiversity, and the electric utility industry

The synthetic field of conservation biology uses principles derived from many different disciplines to address biodiversity issues. Many of these principles have come from ecology, and two simple ones that seem to relate to many issues involving the utility industry are: (1) Everything is interconnected (and should usually stay that way), and (2) We can never do merely one thing. The first principle can be applied to both the biotic and physical environments that are impacted by industrial activities. Habitat fragmentation and the loss of physical and biotic connectedness that results are frequently associated with transmission rights-of-way. These problems can be reduced—or even turned into conservation benefits—by careful planning and creative management. The second principle applies to the utility industry's programs to deal with carbon released by burning fossil fuels. Ecological knowledge can allow these programs to contribute to the preservation of biodiversity in addition to addressing a pollution problem. Without careful ecological analyses, industry could easily create new problems while implementing solutions to old ones.     

The Effect of Fragment Shape and Species' Sensitivity to Habitat Edges on Animal Population Size

Abstract:  Habitat fragmentation causes extinction of local animal populations by decreasing the amount of viable "core" habitat area and increasing edge effects. It is widely accepted that larger fragments make better nature reserves because core-dwelling species have a larger amount of suitable habitat. Nevertheless, fragments in real landscapes have complex, irregular shapes. We modeled the population sizes of species that have a representative range of preferences for or aversions to habitat edges at five spatial scales (within 10, 32, 100, 320, and 1000 m of an edge) in a nation-wide analysis of forest remnants in New Zealand. We hypothesized that the irregular shapes of fragments in real landscapes should generate statistically significant correlations between population density and fragment area, purely as a "geometric" effect of varying species responses to the distribution of edge habitat. Irregularly shaped fragments consistently reduced the population size of core-dwelling species by 10–100%, depending on the scale over which species responded to habitat edges. Moreover, core populations within individual fragments were spatially discontinuous, containing multiple, disjunct populations that inhabited small spatial areas and had reduced population size. The geometric effect was highly nonlinear and depended on the range of fragment sizes sampled and the scale at which species responded to habitat edges. Fragment shape played a strong role in determining population size in fragmented landscapes; thus, habitat restoration efforts may be more effective if they focus on connecting disjunct cores rather than isolated fragments.     

Disturbance-Mediated Mammal Persistence and Abundance-Area Relationships in Amazonian Forest Fragments

Abstract:  Few researchers have investigated the synergistic effects of tropical forest fragmentation and disturbance on species persistence and abundance. We examined effects of both forest-patch metrics and forest disturbance in determining richness and abundance of midsized to large-bodied mammal species in a highly fragmented Amazonian forest landscape. Twenty-one forest fragments, ranging from 2 to 14,480 ha, and two continuous forest sites were sampled based on sightings, tracks, line-transect censuses, armadillo burrow censuses, and camera trapping. Patch occupancy of 37 species recorded ranged from 4% to all forest sites surveyed. Forest fragment size was the strongest predictor of species persistence, explaining 90% of the variation in species richness. Information-theoretic analysis confirmed that fragment area was the most important explanatory variable for the overall species richness and abundance of mammal species, followed by surface fires, which affected the abundance of seven species. Large mammal species were typically absent from fragments <100 ha, whereas some ubiquitous species were favored by fragmentation, exhibiting hyperabundance in small patches. Our findings highlight the importance of large (>10,000 ha), relatively undisturbed forest patches to maximize persistence and maintain baseline abundances of Neotropical forest mammal species.     

Development of a Grassland Integrity Index Based on Breeding Bird Assemblages

We utilized landscape and breeding bird assemblage data from three Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) routes sampled from 1965–1995 to develop and test a grassland integrity index (GII) in a mixed-grass prairie area of Oklahoma. The overall study region is extensively fragmented from long-term agricultural activity, and native habitat remnants have been degraded by recent encroachment of woody vegetation, namely eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana L.). The 50 individual bird survey points along the BBS routes, known as stops, were used as sample sites. Our process first focused on developing a grassland disturbance index (GDI) as a measure of cumulative landscape disturbances for these sites. The GDI was based on five key landscape variables identified in an earlier species-level study of long-term avian community dynamics: total tree, shrub, and herbaceous vegetation cover indices, overall mean landscape patch size, and grassland patch core size. The GII was then developed based on breeding bird assemblage data. Assemblages were based on commonly used response guilds reflective of five avian life history parameters: foraging mode/location, nesting location, habitat specificity, migratory pattern, and dietary guild. We tested the response of 78 candidate assemblage metrics to the GDI, and eliminated those with no or poor response or with high correlations (redundant), resulting in 13 metrics for use in the final index. Individual metric scores were scaled to fall between 0 and 10, and the cumulative index to range from 0 to 100. Although broader application and refinement are possible, the avian-based GII has an advantage over labor-intensive, habitat-based monitoring in that the GII is derived from readily available long-term BBS data. Therefore, the GII shows promise as an inexpensive tool that could easily be applied over other areas to monitor changes in regional grassland conditions.