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Creators/Authors contains: "Welch‐Devine, Meredith"

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  1. Highly participatory research and the co-production of knowledge are widely recognized as key to advancing sustainability research that produces useful and usable results. There is great variety in how different teams approach collaborative work, but the initial problem-framing stage is a critical moment of engagement. In this article, we describe our efforts to create a collaborative research project on climate and pastoralism in the northern Basque Country (southwestern France), focusing on our process for determining the research focus. We use the various funding proposals submitted along the way to illustrate concretely the ways in which integrating our different ways of knowing and different approaches led to different research questions than would have been the case had the scientists developed the project alone. We also discuss the difficult choices that must sometimes be made. Researchers and pastoralists worked together to produce this analysis and to make recommendations to others interested in following a similar path. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 18, 2025
  2. Using surveys and interviews in the aftermath of Hurricanes Matthew and Irma, we investigated people's reasons for living on the coast of Georgia, their expectations for the future, and their intentions to stay in place or migrate away from the coast. We found that age, income, and ethnicity all play small but significant roles in determining intention to migrate, but that more intangible elements such as changes in quality of life or lifestyle may be more important. Many residents indicated a preference for remaining close if they were to permanently leave their homes, and residents were more likely to indicate a preference for staying in place after Irma than after Matthew. Residents may have many reasons for becoming more reluctant to move – complacency borne out of repeated “near misses”, increased awareness of the likely costs and inconvenience of re-location, or the realization that specific impacts are highly variable—making responses by coastal planners and managers more challenging. 
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  3. Abstract Rapidly growing cities along the Interstate‐85 corridor from Atlanta, GA, to Raleigh, NC, rely on small rivers for water supply and waste assimilation. These rivers share commonalities including water supply stress during droughts, seasonally low flows for wastewater dilution, increasing drought and precipitation extremes, downstream eutrophication issues, and high regional aquatic diversity. Further challenges include rapid growth; sprawl that exacerbates water quality and infrastructure issues; water infrastructure that spans numerous counties and municipalities; and large numbers of septic systems. Holistic multi‐jurisdiction cooperative water resource planning along with policy and infrastructure modifications is necessary to adapt to population growth and climate. We propose six actions to improve water infrastructure resilience: increase water‐use efficiency by municipal, industrial, agricultural, and thermoelectric power sectors; adopt indirect potable reuse or closed loop systems; allow for water sharing during droughts but regulate inter‐basin transfers to protect aquatic ecosystems; increase nutrient recovery and reduce discharges of carbon and nutrients in effluents; employ green infrastructure and better stormwater management to reduce nonpoint pollutant loadings and mitigate urban heat island effects; and apply the CRIDA framework to incorporate climate and hydrologic uncertainty into water planning. 
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