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Abstract Social connections among individuals are essential components of social‐ecological systems (SESs), enabling people to take actions to more effectively adapt or transform in response to widespread social‐ecological change. Although scholars have associated social connections and cognitions with adaptive capacity, measuring actors' social networks may further clarify pathways for bolstering resilience‐enhancing actions.We asked how social networks and socio‐cognitions, as components of adaptive capacity, and SES regime shift severity affect individual landscape management behaviours using a quantitative analysis of ego network survey data from livestock producers and landcover data on regime shift severity (i.e. juniper encroachment) in the North American Great Plains.Producers who experienced severe regime shifts or perceived high risks from such shifts were not more likely to engage in transformative behaviour like prescribed burning. Instead, we found that social network characteristics explained significant variance in transformative behaviours.Policy implications: Our results indicate that social networks enable behaviours that have the potential to transform SESs, suggesting possible leverage points for enabling capacity and coordination toward sustainability. Particularly where private lands dominate and cultural practices condition regime shifts, clarifying how social connections promote resilience may provide much needed insight to bolster adaptive capacities in the face of global change. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.
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Coerced resilience in fire management.
Mechanisms underlying the loss of ecological resilience and a shift to an alternate regime with lower ecosystem service provisioning continues to be a leading debate in ecology, particularly in cases where evidence points to human actions and decision-making as the primary drivers of resilience loss and regime change. In this paper, we introduce the concept of coerced resilience as a way to explore the interplay among social power, ecological resilience, and fire management, and to better understand the unintended and undesired regime changes that often surprise ecosystem managers and governing officials. Philosophically, coercion is the opposite of freedom, and uses influence or force to gain compliance among local actors. The coercive force imposed by societal laws and policies can either enhance or reduce the potential to manage for essential structures and functions of ecological systems and, therefore, can greatly alter resilience. Using a classical fire-dependent regime shift from North America (tallgrass prairie to juniper woodland), and given that coercion is widespread in fire management today, we quantify relative differences in resilience that emerge in a policy-coerced fire system compared to a theoretical, policy-free fire system. Social coercion caused large departures in the fire conditions associated with alternative grassland and juniper woodland states, and the potential for a grassland state to emerge to dominance became increasingly untenable with fire as juniper cover increased. In contrast, both a treeless, grassland regime and a co-dominated grass-tree regime emerged across a wide range of fire conditions in the absence of policy controls. The severe coercive forcing present in fire management in the Great Plains, and corresponding erosion of grassland resilience, points to the need for transformative environmental governance and the rethinking of social power structures in modern fire policies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735362
- PAR ID:
- 10111770
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of environmental management
- Volume:
- 240
- ISSN:
- 1095-8630
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 368-373
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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{"Abstract":["This dataset contains pinon-juniper woodland biomass data and is\n part of a long-term study at the Sevilleta LTER measuring net\n primary production (NPP) across four distinct ecosystems:\n creosote-dominant shrubland (Site C, est. winter 1999), black\n grama-dominant grassland (Site G, est. winter 1999), blue\n grama-dominant grassland (Site B, est. winter 2002), and\n pinon-juniper woodland (Site P, est. winter 2003). Net primary\n production is a fundamental ecological variable that quantifies\n rates of carbon consumption and fixation. Estimates of NPP are\n important in understanding energy flow at a community level as well\n as spatial and temporal responses to a range of ecological\n processes. Above-ground net primary production is the change in\n plant biomass, represented by stems, flowers, fruit and and foliage,\n over time and incoporates growth as well as loss to death and\n decomposition. To measure this change the vegetation variables in\n this dataset, including species composition and the cover and height\n of individuals, are sampled twice yearly (spring and fall) at\n permanent 1m x 1m plots within each site. A third sampling at Site C\n is performed in the winter. Volumetric measurements are made using\n vegetation data from permanent plots (SEV278, "Pinon-Juniper\n (Core Site) Quadrat Data for the Net Primary Production Study")\n and regressions correlating species biomass and volume constructed\n using seasonal harvest weights from SEV157, "Net Primary\n Productivity (NPP) Weight Data.""]}more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.02
