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1. Dynamic Habitat Disturbance and Ecological Resilience (DyHDER): modeling population responses to habitat condition

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3023  

   Murphy, Brendan P. ; Walsworth, Timothy E. ; Belmont, Patrick ; Conner, Mary M. ; Budy, Phaedra ( February 2020 , Ecosphere)

   Understanding how populations respond to spatially heterogeneous habitat disturbance is as critical to conservation as it is challenging. Here, we present a new, free, and open‐source metapopulation model: Dynamic Habitat Disturbance and Ecological Resilience (DyHDER), which incorporates subpopulation habitat condition and connectivity into a population viability analysis framework. Modeling temporally dynamic and spatially explicit habitat disturbance of varying magnitude and duration is accomplished through the use of habitat time‐series data and a mechanistic approach to adjusting subpopulation vital rates. Additionally, DyHDERuses a probabilistic dispersal model driven by site‐specific habitat suitability, density dependence, and directionally dependent connectivity. In the first application of DyHDER, we explore how fragmentation and projected climate change are predicted to impact a well‐studied Bonneville cutthroat trout metapopulation in the Logan River (Utah,USA). The DyHDERmodel predicts which subpopulations are most susceptible to disturbance, as well as the potential interactions between stressors. Further, the model predicts how populations may be expected to redistribute following disturbance. This information is valuable to conservationists and managers faced with protecting populations of conservation concern across landscapes undergoing changing disturbance regimes. The DyHDERmodel provides a valuable and generalizable new tool to explore metapopulation resilience to spatially and temporally dynamic stressors for a diverse range of taxa and ecosystems.

    

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2. Ecological stakeholder analogs as intermediaries between freshwater biodiversity conservation and sustainable water management

   https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1856  

   van Rees, Charles B. ; Cañizares, Jessica Rozek ; Garcia, Gabriela Marie ; Reed, J. Michael ( June 2019 , Environmental Policy and Governance)

   Water security is essential for human well‐being and is among the biggest challenges in environmental governance. Governments and nonprofit organizations alike are gaining increased appreciation for the contributions of intact ecosystems to water security, whereas conservation scientists call for decisive action to address the dire condition of earth's freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. Stakeholder‐based, Habermasian decision‐making frameworks such as integrated water resources management (IWRM) are widely used to equitably manage complex water systems, and ecologists have developed increasingly sophisticated frameworks (e.g., environmental flows) to quantify and anticipate the ecological outcomes of water management decisions. IWRM implementation is criticized for being excessively top‐down whereas ecological frameworks in water decision‐making can fail to account for the cultural and societal values of ecosystems, and it remains unclear how best to connect the desired bottom‐up implementation of IWRM with the expert‐based, top‐down structure of hydro‐ecological research. We revisit and elaborate upon the ecological stakeholder analog (ESA) concept, which treats ecological phenomena (e.g., species and processes) as stakeholders and ecological information as interests and positions with respect to water management. We then illustrate how ESAs can address the many calls to improve environmental flows and IWRM strategies by improving their integration, and how established conceptual frameworks from stakeholder theory applies readily to ecological stakeholders.

    

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3. Making It Spatial Makes It Personal: Engaging Stakeholders with Geospatial Participatory Modeling

   https://doi.org/10.3390/land8020038  

   Vukomanovic, Jelena ; Skrip, Megan ; Meentemeyer, Ross ( February 2019 , Land)

   Participatory research methods are increasingly used to collectively understand complex social-environmental problems and to design solutions through diverse and inclusive stakeholder engagement. But participatory research rarely engages stakeholders to co-develop and co-interpret models that conceptualize and quantify system dynamics for comparing scenarios of alternate action. Even fewer participatory projects have engaged people using geospatial simulations of dynamic landscape processes and spatially explicit planning scenarios. We contend that geospatial participatory modeling (GPM) can confer multiple benefits over non-spatial approaches for participatory research processes, by (a) personalizing connections to problems and their solutions through visualizations of place, (b) resolving abstract notions of landscape connectivity, and (c) clarifying the spatial scales of drivers, data, and decision-making authority. We illustrate through a case study how GPM is bringing stakeholders together to balance population growth and conservation in a coastal region facing dramatic landscape change due to urbanization and sea level rise. We find that an adaptive, iterative process of model development, sharing, and revision drive innovation of methods and ultimately improve the realism of land change models. This co-production of knowledge enables all participants to fully understand problems, evaluate the acceptability of trade-offs, and build buy-in for management actions in the places where they live and work. 

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4. A novel quantitative framework for riverscape genetics

   https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2147  

   White, Shannon L. ; Hanks, Ephraim M. ; Wagner, Tyler ( June 2020 , Ecological Applications)

   Riverscape genetics, which applies concepts in landscape genetics to riverine ecosystems, lack appropriate quantitative methods that address the spatial autocorrelation structure of linear stream networks and account for bidirectional geneflow. To address these challenges, we present a general framework for the design and analysis of riverscape genetic studies. Our framework starts with the estimation of pairwise genetic distance at sample sites and the development of a spatially structured ecological network (SSEN) on which riverscape covariates are measured. We then introduce the novel bidirectional geneflow in riverscapes (BGR) model that uses principles of isolation‐by‐resistance to quantify the effects of environmental covariates on genetic connectivity, with spatial covariance defined using simultaneous autoregressive models on the SSEN and the generalized Wishart distribution to model pairwise distance matrices arising through a random walk model of geneflow. We highlight the utility of this framework in an analysis of riverscape genetics for brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) in north central Pennsylvania, USA. Using the fixation index (F_ST) as the measure of genetic distance, we estimated the effects of 12 riverscape covariates on geneflow by evaluating the relative support of eight competing BGR models. We then compared the performance of the top‐ranked BGR model to results obtained from comparable analyses using multiple regression on distance matrices (MRM) and the program STRUCTURE. We found that the BGR model had more power to detect covariate effects, particularly for variables that were only partial barriers to geneflow and/or uncommon in the riverscape, making it more informative for assessing patterns of population connectivity and identifying threats to species conservation. This case study highlights the utility of our modeling framework over other quantitative methods in riverscape genetics, particularly the ability to rigorously test hypotheses about factors that influence geneflow and probabilistically estimate the effect of riverscape covariates, including stream flow direction. This framework is flexible across taxa and riverine networks, is easily executable, and provides intuitive results that can be used to investigate the likely outcomes of current and future management scenarios.

    

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5. Governing trade‐offs in ecosystem services and disservices to achieve human–wildlife coexistence

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13241  

   Ceauşu, Silvia ; Graves, Rose A. ; Killion, Alexander K. ; Svenning, Jens‐Christian ; Carter, Neil H. ( January 2019 , Conservation Biology)

   Sustaining wildlife populations, which provide both ecosystem services and disservices, represents a worldwide conservation challenge. The ecosystem services and Ostrom's social–ecological systems frameworks have been adopted across natural and social sciences to characterize benefits from nature. Despite their generalizability, individually they do not include explicit tools for addressing the sustainable management of many wildlife populations. For instance, Ostrom's framework does not specifically address competing perspectives on wildlife, whereas the ecosystem services framework provides a limited representation of the social and governance context wherein such competing perspectives are embedded. We developed a unified social–ecological framework of ecosystem disservices and services (SEEDS) that advances both frameworks by explicitly acknowledging the importance of competing wildlife perspectives embedded in the social and governance contexts. The SEEDS framework emulates the hierarchical structure of Ostrom's social–ecological systems, but adds subsystems reflecting heterogeneous stakeholder views and experiences of wildlife‐based services and disservices. To facilitate operationalizing SEEDS and further broader analyses across human–wildlife systems, we devised a list of variables to describe SEEDS subsystems, such as types and level of services and disservices, cost and benefit sharing, and social participation of stakeholders. Steps to implement SEEDS involve engaging local communities and stakeholders to define the subsystems, analyze interactions and outcomes, and identify leverage points and actions to remedy unwanted outcomes. These steps connect SEEDS with other existing approaches in social–ecological research and can guide analyses across systems or within individual systems to provide new insights and management options for sustainable human–wildlife coexistence.

    

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