Commissioning ShARCS: the Shane Adaptive optics infraRed Camera-Spectrograph for the Lick Observatory 3-m telescope

We describe the design and first-light early science performance of the Shane Adaptive optics infraRed Camera-Spectrograph (ShARCS) on Lick Observatory's 3-m Shane telescope. Designed to work with the new ShaneAO adaptive optics system, ShARCS is capable of high-efficiency, diffraction-limited imaging and low-dispersion grism spectroscopy in J, H, and K-bands. ShARCS uses a HAWAII-2RG infrared detector, giving high quantum efficiency (>80%) and Nyquist sampling the diffraction limit in all three wavelength bands. The ShARCS instrument is also equipped for linear polarimetry and is sensitive down to 650 nm to support future visible-light adaptive optics capability. We report on the early science data taken during commissioning.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference, paper 9148-11

A review of social dilemmas and social-ecological traps in conservation and natural resource management

Successful conservation depends as much on people working together as it does on sound science and good governance. Research on cooperation in businesses, economics, psychology, and natural resource management has identified shared social and social-ecological dynamics, reviewed and categorized in this article that can create unwanted surprises and problems for conservation efforts. Cooperation may fail when: (1) individual and group benefits are in conflict (social dilemmas) or (2) social-ecological systems become caught in problem-causing and problem-enhancing feedbacks (SES traps). Knowing about and recognizing these dynamics can help decision makers to understand and change key elements of problems and learn from the experiences of others. Social dilemmas have winners and losers, and involve give-some or take-some choices; SES traps are lose-lose situations. Solutions to problems of cooperation in conservation contexts involve identifying the conservation objective and context, diagnosing systemic social dilemmas and SES traps, and developing practical solutions that work with group processes and individuals toward shared and positively reinforcing goals, goal structures, and expectations. Research on cooperation in conservation has largely ignored problems of scale, scaling, and group heterogeneity. The field would benefit from a shift from a probabilistic, empirical approach to a stronger theory-driven, mechanistic, and more diagnostic approach

Adapting agricultural water use to climate change in a post-Soviet context: challenges and opportunities in southeast Kazakhstan

The convergence of climate change and post-Soviet socio-economic and institutional transformations has been underexplored so far, as have the consequences of such convergence on crop agriculture in Central Asia. This paper provides a place-based analysis of constraints and opportunities for adaptation to climate change, with a specific focus on water use, in two districts in southeast Kazakhstan. Data were collected by 2 multi-stakeholder participatory workshops, 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews, and secondary statistical data. The present-day agricultural system is characterised by enduring Soviet-era management structures, but without state inputs that previously sustained agricultural productivity. Low margins of profitability on many privatised farms mean that attempts to implement integrated water management have produced water users associations unable to maintain and upgrade a deteriorating irrigation infrastructure. Although actors engage in tactical adaptation measures, necessary structural adaptation of the irrigation system remains difficult without significant public or private investments. Market-based water management models have been translated ambiguously to this region, which fails to encourage efficient water use and hinders adaptation to water stress. In addition, a mutual interdependence of informal networks and formal institutions characterises both state governance and everyday life in Kazakhstan. Such interdependence simultaneously facilitates operational and tactical adaptation, but hinders structural adaptation, as informal networks exist as a parallel system that achieves substantive outcomes while perpetuating the inertia and incapacity of the state bureaucracy. This article has relevance for critical understanding of integrated water management in practice and adaptation to climate change in post-Soviet institutional settings more broadly