Incorporating Human Beliefs and Behaviors into Wildlife Ecology

Like much of the global biosphere, wildlife species have experienced rapid declines during the Anthropocene. Wildlife ecologists have responded to these crises by developing a range of technologies, techniques, and large datasets, which together have revolutionized the field, provided novel insights into the movements and behaviors of animals, and identified new risks and impacts to wildlife in a human-dominated world. While these advances have been vitally important, wildlife ecology has been slower to recognize and incorporate humans themselves into its new research domains. The chapters of this dissertation explore methods for better incorporating human behaviors, beliefs, actions, and infrastructure into the theories and approaches in wildlife ecology that have flourished in the last two decades. The research presented here demonstrates the importance of linking human beliefs and behaviors to wildlife ecology both by presenting novel findings and by showing the opportunities missed when narrow approaches are applied to complex socio-ecological problems.In Chapter 1, I provide a general introduction on the theories underlying this research, contextualize the research questions in light of the loss and recovery of large predators, and describe the research site where I collected much of the data for this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I apply the methods of movement ecology to some of the first fine-scale telemetry data collected on rifle hunters. I draw conclusions about their individual, site-level, and regional-level hunting behaviors and discuss the broad implications of these findings for hunting management. In Chapter 3, I examine livestock-predator conflict using approaches from both ecology and the social sciences. I describe a form of selection bias that is likely widespread but unreported due to the omission of social data from ecological models of conflict, and I offer guidelines for combining and translating ecological and social research on conflict. In Chapter 4, I explore the ecological impacts of one of the most globally widespread human constructions, the fence. I show for the first time the potential extent of fencing at large scales and discuss the wide variety of ecological effects of fences for both humans and ecosystems. I further highlight biases and gaps in fence research that have thus far limited a complete understanding of the environmental effects of these features. In Chapter 5, I conclude by making recommendations regarding how research might better incorporate human perceptions, decisions, and actions into ecology

Global Risks 2012, Seventh Edition

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks 2012 report is based on a survey of 469 experts from industry, government, academia and civil society that examines 50 global risks across five categories. The report emphasizes the singular effect of a particular constellation of global risks rather than focusing on a single existential risk. Three distinct constellations of risks that present a very serious threat to our future prosperity and security emerged from a review of this year's set of risks. Includes a special review of the important lessons learned from the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and the subsequent nuclear crisis at Fukushima, Japan. It focuses on therole of leadership, challenges to effective communication in this information age and resilient business models in response to crises of unforeseen magnitude

Climate change, agriculture and Fairtrade: identifying the challenges and opportunities

This paper presents the findings of a study commissioned by the UK's Fairtrade Foundation on the implications of climate change for agricultural producers in Fairtrade value chains

Enhancing Cyber-Resiliency of DER-based SmartGrid: A Survey

The rapid development of information and communications technology has enabled the use of digital-controlled and software-driven distributed energy resources (DERs) to improve the flexibility and efficiency of power supply, and support grid operations. However, this evolution also exposes geographically-dispersed DERs to cyber threats, including hardware and software vulnerabilities, communication issues, and personnel errors, etc. Therefore, enhancing the cyber-resiliency of DER-based smart grid - the ability to survive successful cyber intrusions - is becoming increasingly vital and has garnered significant attention from both industry and academia. In this survey, we aim to provide a systematical and comprehensive review regarding the cyber-resiliency enhancement (CRE) of DER-based smart grid. Firstly, an integrated threat modeling method is tailored for the hierarchical DER-based smart grid with special emphasis on vulnerability identification and impact analysis. Then, the defense-in-depth strategies encompassing prevention, detection, mitigation, and recovery are comprehensively surveyed, systematically classified, and rigorously compared. A CRE framework is subsequently proposed to incorporate the five key resiliency enablers. Finally, challenges and future directions are discussed in details. The overall aim of this survey is to demonstrate the development trend of CRE methods and motivate further efforts to improve the cyber-resiliency of DER-based smart grid.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid for Publication Consideratio

Conservation conflict hotspots : mapping impacts, risk perception and tolerance for sustainable conservation management

LL received a grant of excellence for foreigners from the Secretariat of External Relations of the Mexican Government; SC would like to thank the University of Sherbrooke for a Continuous Education Grant, BS was granted a travel grant from Newton Links (RLTG9-LATAM-358429460) and a fieldwork grant (FID-784) by El Colegio de la Frontera Sur and RW received funding from the Scottish Funding Council (Global Challenges Research Fund 2017-18 and 2018-19).Global processes manifesting as activities in local places have led to an increase in documented conservation conflicts. Conservation conflicts are sometimes labelled human-wildlife conflict, focusing only on the direct negative impact of species (usually wildlife) on humans or vice versa. However, many authors now recognize that conservation conflicts arise between people with diverse views, when one party acts against the interests of another. They are thus human-human conflicts and not merely an impact on or from conservation. Conflict is not always directly correlated with impact because perceptions of risk, levels of tolerance and conservation values influence human responses. This review aims to define the concept of ‘conservation conflict hotspots’ and explore its practical applications in conservation. We propose that the interaction of impact, risk perception, level of tolerance in a context of conservation values can be mapped at a local scale, with spatial visualization assisting the prediction, understanding and management of such hotspots. The term conservation value incorporates measures of indigeneity, endemicity and demography along with emotional or cultural attachment to species or places. The umbrella terms of risk perception and tolerance capture many of the aspects of attitude, values and individual demographics that can influence people’s actions, enabling contextualization of relevant social factors at local scales. Spatially mapped layers enable us to plan and target conservation efforts towards human as well as ecological factors. The concept of ‘conservation conflict hotspot’ emphasizes the need for transdisciplinary research to understand underlying drivers of conflict and for dialogical and peace-building approaches to facilitate trust and cooperation amongst actors. We can thus address conflicts and achieve sustainable outcomes.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Cascading Failures and Contingency Analysis for Smart Grid Security

The modern electric power grid has become highly integrated in order to increase the reliability of power transmission from the generating units to end consumers. In addition, today’s power system are facing a rising appeal for the upgrade to a highly intelligent generation of electricity networks commonly known as Smart Grid. However, the growing integration of power system with communication network also brings increasing challenges to the security of modern power grid from both physical and cyber space. Malicious attackers can take advantage of the increased access to the monitoring and control of the system and exploit some of the inherent structural vulnerability of power grids. Therefore, determining the most vulnerable components (e.g., buses or generators or transmission lines) is critically important for power grid defense. This dissertation introduces three different approaches to enhance the security of the smart grid. Motivated by the security challenges of the smart grid, the first goal of this thesis is to facilitate the understanding of cascading failure and blackouts triggered by multi-component attacks, and to support the decision making in the protection of a reliable and secure smart grid. In this work, a new definition of load is proposed by taking power flow into consideration in comparison with the load definition based on degree or network connectivity. Unsupervised learning techniques (e.g., K-means algorithm and self-organizing map (SOM)) are introduced to find the vulnerable nodes and performance comparison is done with traditional load based attack strategy. Second, an electrical distance approach is introduced to find the vulnerable branches during contingencies. A new network structure different than the original topological structure is formed based on impedance matrix which is referred as electrical structure. This structure is pruned to make it size compatible with the topological structure and the common branches between the two different structures are observed during contingency analysis experiments. Simulation results for single and multiple contingencies have been reported and the violation of line limits during single and multiple outages are observed for vulnerability analysis. Finally, a cyber-physical power system (CPS) testbed is introduced as an accurate cyber-physical environment in order to observe the system behavior during malicious attacks and different disturbance scenarios. The application areas and architecture of proposed CPS testbed have been discussed in details. The testbed’s efficacy is then evaluated by conducting real-time cyber attacks and exploring the impact in a physical system. The possible mitigation strategies are suggested for defense against the attack and protect the system from being unstable