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Even as new elements of a research infrastructure are added, older parts continue to exert persistent and consequential influence. We introduce the concept of sedimentary legacy to describe the relationship between infrastructure and research objects. Contrary to common accounts of legacy infrastructure that underscore lock-in, static, or constraining outcomes, sedimentary legacy emphasizes how researchers adapt infrastructure to support the investigation of new research objects, even while operating under constraining legacies. To illustrate the implications of sedimentary legacy, we track shifting objects of investigation across the history of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, focusing especially on recurrent ecological investigations of ‘human disturbance’ as researchers shift to study socioecological objects. We examine the relationship between scientific objects and the resources collected and preserved to render such objects tractable to scientific investigations, and show how the resources of a long-term research infrastructure support the assembly of certain objects of investigation, even while foreclosing others.

 

We focus on how the concept of knowledge infrastructure can help interrogate both the novelties and continuities in energy transitions. In particular, we turn attention to research, innovation, and knowledge production ca- pacities in renewable energy transitions. We outline the subfield of knowledge infrastructures and introduce concepts relevant to energy research. We especially illustrate the ways that knowledge infrastructures may support or adapt to change, and also the ways that they display ‘legacy’ properties that inhibit, slow or outright prevent transitions. To ground our investigation, we briefly examine research in Scotland’s marine energy sector as the nation pursues a transition from an energy sector heavily reliant on oil and gas, to one based on renewable energy innovation and implementation. Via this case, we illustrate that a great deal of the ‘old’ knowledge in- frastructures for energy research, rather than being wholly swept away, instead persist across energy transitions. The concept of knowledge infrastructures provides a powerful addition to energy social science because they are fundamental to our ability to research and develop renewable energy technologies, and so play an important role in defining possible energy futures. 

Ecological restorationists working to restore species and habitats must make decisions about how to monitor the effectiveness of their actions. In order to do this, they must determine historical baselines for populations by measuring and monitoring reference habitat sites: analog ecological systems that act as controls for comparison. Yet as climate change alters what is possible in terms of habitat restoration, drawing baselines for recovery has become fraught with difficulty. This article examines the epistemic and legal practices of baseline-setting in the case of the Columbia River Basin as well as the ways that ecological restorationists are dealing with the shifting baselines of a climate-changed river. Restorationists do this by altering their epistemic practices, using trained judgment and establishing alternative, anticipatory baselines. While the field of restoration was born out of the idea that environmental repair was about looking to the past, the discipline has transformed to look forward and even to anticipate the future. One way that this is occurring is through re-thinking baselines to reflect emerging environmental and sociotechnical imaginaries, which are enacted through epistemic practice. Anticipatory practices such as baseline-setting help sensitize the field of restoration ecology to the future, while at the same time facilitating the emergence of ideas that will enable scientifically based decision-making to continue to occur within a high level of uncertainty. 

This article explores how scientists adapt to a changing climate. To do this, we bring examples from a case study of salmon habitat restorationists in the Columbia River Basin into conversation with concepts from previous work on change and stability in knowledge infrastructures and scientific practice. In order to adapt, ecological restorationists are increasingly relying on predictive modeling tools, as well as initiating broader changes in the interdisciplinary nature of the field of ecological restoration itself. We explore how the field of ecological restoration is shifting its conceptual gaze from restoring to past, historic baselines to anticipating a no-analog future and consider what this means in terms of understanding the adaptive capacity of knowledge infrastructures and epistemic communities more broadly. We argue that identifying how scientists themselves conceptualize drivers of change and respond to these changes is an important step in understanding what adaptive capacity in science might entail. We offer these examples as a provocation for thinking about “adaptive epistemologies” and how adaptation by scientists themselves can facilitate or hinder particular environmental or sociotechnical futures.