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Now showing 1 - 10 of 3745
  • Journal Article
    Global-Scale Patterns of Forest Fragmentation
    (2000) Riitters, Kurt; Wickham, James; O'Neill, Robert; Jones, Bruce; Smith, Elizabeth
    "We report an analysis of forest fragmentation based on 1-km resolution land-cover maps for the globe. Measurements in analysis windows from 81 km 2 (9 x 9 pixels, 'small' scale) to 59,049 km 2 (243 x 243 pixels, 'large' scale) were used to characterize the fragmentation around each forested pixel. We identified six categories of fragmentation (interior, perforated, edge, transitional, patch, and undetermined) from the amount of forest and its occurrence as adjacent forest pixels. Interior forest exists only at relatively small scales; at larger scales, forests are dominated by edge and patch conditions. At the smallest scale, there were significant differences in fragmentation among continents; within continents, there were significant differences among individual forest types. Tropical rain forest fragmentation was most severe in North America and least severe in Europe-Asia. Forest types with a high percentage of perforated conditions were mainly in North America (five types) and Europe-Asia (four types), in both temperate and subtropical regions. Transitional and patch conditions were most common in 11 forest types, of which only a few would be considered as 'naturally patchy' (e.g., dry woodland). The five forest types with the highest percentage of interior conditions were in North America; in decreasing order, they were cool rain forest, coniferous, conifer boreal, cool mixed, and cool broadleaf."
  • Journal Article
    Emery Roe on Complexity: Avoiding Triangulation-Strangulation
    (2000) Bessey, K. Michael
    "Emery Roe (1998) makes a smooth segue in this collection of revised journal articles (from Transition, Ecological Economics, International Journal of Sustainable Development, World Ecology, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Economic and Political Weekly, and Environmental Management) to examine the pitfalls of one-dimensional policy analysis in a multidimensional world, and to propose triangulation as a useful alternative."
  • Journal Article
    Water Rights Arenas in the Andes: Networks to Strengthen Local Water Control
    (2008) Boelens, Rutgerd
    "The threats that Andean water user collectives face are ever‐growing in a globalising society. Water is power and engenders social struggle. In the Andean region, water rights struggles involve not only disputes over the access to water, infrastructure and related resources, but also over the contents of water rules and rights, the recognition of legitimate authority, and the discourses that are mobilised to sustain water governance structures and rights orders. While open and large‐scale water battles such as Bolivia’s 'Water Wars' or nationwide mobilisations in Ecuador get the most public attention, low‐profile and more localised water rights encounters, ingrained in local territories, are far more widespread and have an enormous impact on the Andean waterscapes. This paper highlights both water arenas and the ways they operate between the legal and the extralegal. It shows how local collectives build on their own water rights foundations to manage internal water affairs but which simultaneously offer an important home‐base for strategising wider water defence manoeuvres. Hand‐in‐hand with inwardly reinforcing their rights bases, water user groups aim for horizontal and vertical linkages thereby creating strategic alliances. Sheltering an internal school for rights and identity development, reflection and organisation, these local community foundations, through open and subsurface linkages and fluxes, provide the groundwork for upscaling their water rights defence networks to national and transnational arenas."
  • Journal Article
    Citizen Science as a Tool for Conservation in Residential Ecosystems
    (2007) Cooper, Caren B.; Dickinson, Janis; Phillips, Tina; Bonney, Rick
    "Human activities, such as mining, forestry, and agriculture, strongly influence processes in natural systems. Because conservation has focused on managing and protecting wildlands, research has focused on understanding the indirect influence of these human activities on wildlands. Although a conservation focus on wildlands is critically important, the concept of residential area as an ecosystem is relatively new, and little is known about the potential of such areas to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity. As urban sprawl increases, it becomes urgent to construct a method to research and improve the impacts of management strategies for residential landscapes. If the cumulative activities of individual property owners could help conserve biodiversity, then residential matrix management could become a critical piece of the conservation puzzle. Citizen science is a method of integrating public outreach and scientific data collection locally, regionally, and across large geographic scales. By involving citizen participants directly in monitoring and active management of residential lands, citizen science can generate powerful matrix management efforts, defying the tyranny of small decisions and leading to positive, cumulative, and measurable impacts on biodiversity."
  • Journal Article
    Modeling Regional Dynamics of Human-Rangifer Systems: A Framework for Comparative Analysis
    (2013) Berman, Matthew
    "Theoretical models of interaction between wild and domestic reindeer (Rangifer tarandus; caribou in North America) can help explain observed social-ecological dynamics of arctic hunting and husbandry systems. Different modes of hunting and husbandry incorporate strategies to mitigate effects of differing patterns of environmental uncertainty. Simulations of simple models of harvested wild and domestic herds with density-dependent recruitment show that random environmental variation produces cycles and crashes in populations that would quickly stabilize at a steady state with nonrandom parameters. Different husbandry goals lead to radically different long-term domestic herd sizes. Wild and domestic herds are typically ecological competitors but social complements. Hypothesized differences in ecological competition and diverse human livelihoods are explored in dynamic social-ecological models in which domestic herds competitively interact with wild herds. These models generate a framework for considering issues in the evolution of Human-Rangifer Systems, such as state-subsidized herding and the use of domestic herds for transportation support in hunting systems. Issues considered include the role of geographic factors, markets for Rangifer products, state-subsidized herding, effects of changes in husbandry goals on fate of wild herds, and how environmental shocks, herd population cycles, and policy shifts might lead to system state changes. The models also suggest speculation on the role of geographic factors in the failure of reindeer husbandry to take hold in the North American Arctic. The analysis concludes with suggested empirical strategies for estimating parameters of the model for use in comparative studies across regions of the Arctic."
  • Journal Article
    Impact of Cropping Methods on Biodiversity in Coffee Agroecosystems in Sumatra, Indonesia
    (2004) Gillison, Andrew N.; Liswanti, Nining; Budidarsono, Suseno; van Noordwijk, Meine; Tomich, Thomas V.
    "The sustainable management of biodiversity and productivity in forested lands requires an understanding of key interactions between socioeconomic and biophysical factors and their response to environmental change. Appropriate baseline data are rarely available. As part of a broader study on biodiversity and profitability, we examined the impact of different cropping methods on biodiversity (plant species richness) along a subjectively determined land-use intensity gradient in southern Sumatra, ranging from primary and secondary forest to coffee-farming systems (simple, complex, with and without shade crops) and smallholder coffee plantings, at increasing levels of intensity. We used 24 (40 x 5 m) plots to record site physical data, including soil nutrients and soil texture together with vegetation structure, all vascular plant species, and plant functional types (PFT's readily observable, adaptive, morphological features). Biodiversity was lowest under simple, intensive, non-shaded farming systems and increased progressively through shaded and more complex agroforests to late secondary and closed-canopy forests. The most efficient single indicators of biodiversity and soil nutrient status were PFT richness and a derived measure of plant functional complexity. Vegetation structure, tree dry weight, and duration of the land-use type, to a lesser degree, were also highly correlated with biodiversity. Together with a vegetation, or V index, the close correspondence between these variables and soil nutrients suggests they are potentially useful indicators of coffee production and profitability across different farming systems. These findings provide a unique quantitative basis for a subsequent study of the nexus between biodiversity and profitability."
  • Journal Article
    'Sustainability Learning': An Introduction to the Concept and Its Motivational Aspects
    (2010) Hansmann, Ralf
    "This theoretical paper clarifies the concept of sustainability learning and specifically analyzes motivational aspects. Mastering the challenges of sustainability requires individual learning as well as learning processes on different levels of human systems ranging from groups and organizations to human societies, and mankind as a whole. Learning processes of individuals play a fundamental role, since individuals constitute and shape the larger social aggregates. Learning processes on the level of social aggregates are important since social systems embed and influence individuals. Therefore, sustainability learning needs to be understood as a multi-level concept, comprising individual learning as well as learning processes of human systems. Transdisciplinarity and mutual learning between science and society are considered fundamental approaches of sustainability learning, and hence increase the capacity of mankind to manage human-environment systems in sustainable ways. Based on systemic considerations, the two-fold role, in which motivations act as determinants and targeted outcomes of sustainability learning processes, is explained together with the outstanding role that cooperation, hence cooperative motivation, plays for sustainable development. Finally, the multifaceted, controversial discourses on what sustainability ultimately means (for the scientific community, for a given cultural or political entity, organization, or individual person) are considered."
  • Journal Article
    Analyzing Resilience with Communicative Systems Theory an Example from European Fisheries
    (2013) Wilson, Douglas C.; Jacobsen, Rikke B.
    "The present paper argues that our understanding of the resilience of social-ecological systems can be improved by considering 'communicative resilience' based on Communicative Systems Theory, which focuses on communicative action oriented to achieving mutual understandings. It further argues that it is possible to theorise and analyse resilience within complex social-ecological systems from this communicative perspective in a way that is very different from, but complementary to, agent-based approaches focussed on incentives. The paper presents data from multispecies mixed fisheries in Europe to demonstrate that the implications of institutional rules for SES resilience can be understood and improved upon by examining how institutions help or hinder the development of mutual understandings."
  • Journal Article
    State of the Commons
    (2012) Wallaert, Josh
    "One year after that meeting, the Reeve Electric Association became the first farmer-owned cooperative to receive a loan for the purchase and distribution of electric power from the Rural Electrification Administration, a centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. In four years, the number of electrified farms in the United States more than doubled, from 789,000 in 1936 to 1.7 million in 1940. To my knowledge, this is the only online photo of the Reeve Plant that is freely available to publish. It was uploaded to Wikipedia in September by Ann Sullivan-Larson, a graphic designer at a print shop in Iowa, and tagged with a creative commons license that allows others to share and remix the image. Although the plant was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, the National Park Service has yet to digitize its photographs of the building."
  • Journal Article
    An Economics Perspective of Plea Bargaining
    (2019) Banerjee, Anita
    "The present study is an attempt to look at plea bargaining from an economics perspective. At the outset it traces the origin of plea bargaining. The study also provides a brief sketch of the concept as interpreted by various Economists. Alongside it highlights some of the key tools of economics which can provide a better understanding and justification of Plea bargaining as a procedure for efficient and cost effective method of resolving cases. The article concludes by stressing upon the need to resort to plea bargaining, keeping in mind both the costs as well as a tool to act as deterrence."