Browsing by Author "Alessa, Lilian"

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Monitoring Land Use: Capturing Change through an Information Fusion Approach
(2010) Altaweel, Mark R.; Alessa, Lilian; Kliskey, Andrew D.; Bone, Christopher E.
"Social and environmental factors affecting land use change are among the most significant drivers transforming the planet. Such change has been and continues to be monitored through the use of satellite imagery, aerial photography, and technical reports. While these monitoring tools are useful in observing the empirical results of land use change and issues of sustainability, the data they provide are often not useful in capturing the fundamental policies, social drivers, and unseen factors that shape how landscapes are transformed. In addition, some monitoring approaches can be prohibitively expensive and too slow in providing useful data at a timescale in which data are needed. This paper argues that techniques using information fusion and conducting assessments of continuous data feeds can be beneficial for monitoring primary social and ecological mechanisms affecting how geographic settings are changed over different time scales. We present a computational approach that couples open source tools in order to conduct an analysis of text data, helping to determine relevant events and trends. To demonstrate the approach, we discuss a case study that integrates varied newspapers from two Midwest states in the United States, Iowa and Nebraska, showing how potentially significant issues and event scan be captured. Although the approach we present is useful for monitoring current web-based data streams, we argue that such a method should ultimately be integrated closely with less managed systems and modeling techniques to enhance not only land use monitoring but also to better forecast and understand landscape change."
The Relationship between Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Evolving Cultures, and Wilderness Protection in the Circumpolar North
(2003) Watson, Alan; Alessa, Lilian; Glaspell, Brian
"There are many unique issues associated with natural resource management in the far north as a result of legislative direction, historic settlement and occupation patterns, northern cultural traditions, ecotourism, economic depression, pressures for energy development, and globalization and modernization effects. Wilderness designation in Canada, the USA, and Finland is aimed at preserving and restoring many human and ecological values, as are the long-established, strictly enforced, nature reserves in Russia. In Alaska and Finland, and in some provinces of Canada, there is a variety of values associated with protecting relatively intact relationships between indigenous people and relatively pristine, vast ecosystems. These values are often described as 'traditional means of livelihood,' 'traditional means of access,' 'traditional relationships with nature,' or 'traditional lifestyles.' Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) forms part of these relationships and has been acknowledged as a contributor to understanding the effects of management decisions and human-use impacts on long-term ecological composition, structure, and function. Wilderness protection can help maintain opportunities to continue traditional relationships with nature. As cultures continue to evolve in customs, attitudes, knowledge, and technological uses, values associated with both TEK and relationships with relatively pristine ecosystems will also evolve. Understanding these relationships and how to consider them in wilderness protection and restoration decision making is potentially one of the most contentious, widespread natural resource management issues in the circumpolar north."
Timescapes of Community Resilience and Vulnerability in the Circumpolar North
(2004) Robards, Martin; Alessa, Lilian
"Historical relationships between people and a changing Arctic environment (which constitute a social-ecological system, or SES) can offer insights for management that promote both social and ecological resilience. The continued existence of healthy renewable resources around communities is particularly important, as subsistence and commercial use of local resources are often the only practical avenues to healthy, long-term security for those communities. Our research draws on the position that SESs exist in an environment that is explicitly temporal: frequently cyclic, changing, contextual, and contingent. Therefore, the causes and effect of disturbances to SESs are rarely temporally linear; instead, they are characterized by a complex array of hysteretic effects and alternate (possibly repeating) states. The term timescapes describes the time-space context element and its fundamental importance to sustainable practices. We investigate social-ecological timescapes of the circumpolar North in relation to four primary provisioning practices (hunting/gathering, pastoralism, agriculture, and market-based economy). Broadly, we identify distinct social-ecological states, interspersed with periods of change. For specific communities that have maintained their existence through a series of periods of profound change, we propose that elements of social and ecological resilience have been neither incrementally lost nor gained through time; rather, they have waxed and waned in accordance with specific, and sometimes repeating, conditions. To maintain their existence, we believe, communities have had to maintain their ability to recognize gradual or rapid changes in social, ecological, or economic conditions and reorganize themselves to adapt to those changes, rather than to any specific outcomes of a change. That is, they have adapted to a dynamic environment, not a preferred state. However, centralized Western management, despite fundamental flaws in accounting for local linkages between culture, economics, and the environment, is increasingly circumscribing local practices. We believe that the significant challenge of maintaining equity and resilience of remote communities, within and outside the Arctic, will necessitate incorporating localized cultural values and decision-making processes that fostered prior community existence with (data from) Western interdisciplinary research."