Correction to: He ʻike ʻana ia i ka pono (it is a recognizing of the right thing): how one indigenous worldview informs relational values and social values (Sustainability Science, (2019), 14, 5, (1213-1232), 10.1007/s11625-019-00721-9)

In the original publication of the article, under the section “Indigenous and local knowledge”, on the 4th page, the following sentence “… Megan Bang, a scholar of Native American (Menominee) descent, and her team…” was published incorrectly. The correct sentence should read as “… Megan Bang, a scholar of Native American (Ojibwe) and Italian descent, and her team…”

Farmers\u27 relationship with nature: how and why it matters

Understanding why producers adopt best management practices (BMPs) is vital to protecting waterbodies such as the Salish Sea. While the economic bottom line is important to agricultural producers, they also make decisions through a socio-cultural lens influenced by their world-views and psychological biases. This presentation provides insights into economic, and non-economic motivations underling farming practices in British Columbia. We conducted 166 surveys and 30 on-farm interviews with agricultural producers across British Columbia (BC) as part of an assessment of BC’s Environmental Farm Plan program. The survey results find diverse motivations for farming. Non-economic motivations including lifestyle, reputation, and stewardship of the land, can be more important to producers than economic motivations. Given our interest in BMPs and stewardship, we sought to understand producers’ relationships with nature. We used a newly developed set of questions, known as the ‘relational values scale’, to measure dimensions of producers’ relationship with nature, including their responsibility to the land and their kinship with plants and animals. We find that relational values and motivations explain the variance in past adoption and future willingness to adopt BMPs. Also, producers’ motivations and values influence their participation and beliefs regarding incentive programs. By accounting for the diversity of ways producers are motivated by and value nature, incentive programs can better enable the widespread adoption of BMPs

Modeling multiple ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, commodity production, and tradeoffs at landscape scales

Nature provides a wide range of benefits to people. There is increasing consensus about the importance of incorporating these ecosystem services into resource management decisions, but quantifying the levels and values of these services has proven difficult. We use a spatially explicit modeling tool, Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to predict changes in ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and commodity production levels. We apply InVEST to stakeholder-defined scenarios of land-use/land-cover change in the Willamette Basin, Oregon. We found that scenarios that received high scores for a variety of ecosystem services also had high scores for biodiversity, suggesting there is little tradeoff between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Scenarios involving more development had higher commodity production values, but lower levels of biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. However, including payments for carbon sequestration alleviates this tradeoff. Quantifying ecosystem services in a spatially explicit manner, and analyzing tradeoffs between them, can help to make natural resource decisions more effective, efficient, and defensible. © The Ecological Society of America

An environmental justice perspective on ecosystem services

Mainstreaming of ecosystem service approaches has been proposed as one path toward sustainable development. Meanwhile, critics of ecosystem services question if the approach can account for the multiple values of ecosystems to diverse groups of people, or for aspects of inter- and intra-generational justice. In particular, an ecosystem service approach often overlooks power dimensions and capabilities that are core to environmental justice. This article addresses the need for greater guidance on incorporating justice into ecosystem services research and practice. We point to the importance of deep engagement with stakeholders and rights holders to disentangle contextual factors that moderate justice outcomes on ecosystem service attribution and appropriation in socio-political interventions. Such a holistic perspective enables the integration of values and knowledge plurality for enhancing justice in ecosystem services research. This broadened perspective paves a way for transformative ecosystem service assessments, management, and research, which can help inform and design governance structures that nourish human agency to sustainably identify, manage, and enjoy ecosystem services for human wellbeing

Genome-Wide Association Study in BRCA1 Mutation Carriers Identifies Novel Loci Associated with Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk

BRCA1-associated breast and ovarian cancer risks can be modified by common genetic variants. To identify further cancer risk-modifying loci, we performed a multi-stage GWAS of 11,705 BRCA1 carriers (of whom 5,920 were diagnosed with breast and 1,839 were diagnosed with ovarian cancer), with a further replication in an additional sample of 2,646 BRCA1 carriers. We identified a novel breast cancer risk modifier locus at 1q32 for BRCA1 carriers (rs2290854, P = 2.7×10-8, HR = 1.14, 95% CI: 1.09-1.20). In addition, we identified two novel ovarian cancer risk modifier loci: 17q21.31 (rs17631303, P = 1.4×10-8, HR = 1.27, 95% CI: 1.17-1.38) and 4q32.3 (rs4691139, P = 3.4×10-8, HR = 1.20, 95% CI: 1.17-1.38). The 4q32.3 locus was not associated with ovarian cancer risk in the general population or BRCA2 carriers, suggesting a BRCA1-specific associat

Expert views on strategies to increase water resilience: evidence from a global survey

Scholars and policy-makers are advocating for increasing the resilience of water systems, both social and biophysical, to climate change impacts, and global environmental change more broadly. But what is "water resilience," and what does it imply for water resources management and water governance? Generally, water resilience may include ecological aspects of water quality or flood mitigation, engineered infrastructure to ensure safe and reliable water supply and to mitigate floods, and the socially inclusive and equitable governance of these systems. Following this, our goal was twofold: (1) explore and draw out a comprehensive set of water resource management strategies across sectors that are likely to contribute to increased resilience, and (2) investigate whether disciplinary divides are indeed a barrier toward convergence around key water resilience actions. To address these two gaps, we drew on a survey of experts in resilience and various aspects of water management and governance (n = 420), and aimed to synthesize their views on the specific strategies that can help enhance water resilience. Specifically, we surveyed experts across various water domains from ecosystem management to drought and flood management. Overall, we found that while debates about how to theorize or operationalize resilience in relation to different systems - social or biophysical - may be unresolved, there is considerable convergence among various experts about which actions are likely to make water systems more resilient to increasing risks and uncertainties. The most widely agreed upon strategies for building water resilience revolve around improved ecosystem health, integration across scales, and adaptation to change

Data from: Do correlated responses to multiple environmental changes exacerbate or mitigate species loss?

Biological communities face multiple global changes simultaneously, and predicting how they will respond remains a key challenge. Co-tolerance theory offers a framework for understanding how species-level responses to multiple stressors affect community properties. Co-tolerance theory predicts that positive correlations in species responses (i.e., species that are susceptible to one stressor are more likely to be highly susceptible to a second) lessen total species loss, essentially because species cannot be eliminated from a community twice. However, it is unclear whether several of the tenets of co-tolerance theory describe real-world communities, and what consequences result from such deviations. Here, we use an empirical dataset of bird community response to land-use change over a climate gradient to examine co-tolerance theory’s tenet that environmental changes only harm species (not benefit them). We show that this tenet is not met, and then use simulations to examine how predictions of total species richness and community intactness vary when multiple environmental changes both harm and benefit particular species in the community. Finally, we conduct a sensitivity analysis, examining how the average species response to environmental change, as well as the variance among species, can further alter predictions. Overall, we find that predictions of co-tolerance theory can break down when communities contain species that benefit from some environmental changes. As a result, the presence of multiple environmental changes can either compound or mitigate species loss when species’ responses are positively correlated, preventing a one-size-fits-all statement regarding the effects of correlated responses. This finding highlights the need to carefully consider the underlying mechanisms of community change when making policy assessments regarding the consequences of correlations of species responses to environmental impacts

Integrating conservation planning with human communities, ecosystem services, and economics

[Extract] People are the cause of conservation problems and are fundamental to every conservation solution. Social, economic, and political considerations (hereafter simply "social considerations") are therefore crucial to the success of conservation initiatives (Polasky 2008; Claus et al. 2010). People are also independently important, for moral reasons (Chan and Satterfield, forthcoming) and because the treatment of people affects perceptions of conservation-both individual projects and the larger enterprise. Despite acknowledgement of the importance of such social considerations, conservation planning theory and practice-like much of conservation generally-has been much more focused on ecological considerations than social ones (Knight et al. 2006). Accordingly, much guidance is available for conservation planners on incorporating ecological considerations into conservation planning (see all other chapters in this book), but little guidance exists for incorporating social considerations

Data from: Why less complexity produces better forecasts: an independent data evaluation of kelp habitat models

Understanding how species are distributed in the environment is increasingly important for natural resource management, particularly for keystone and habitat forming species, and those of conservation concern. Habitat suitability models are fundamental to developing this understanding; however their use in management continues to be limited due to often-vague model objectives and inadequate evaluation methods. Along the Northeast Pacific coast, canopy kelps (Macrocystis pyrifera and Nereocystis luetkeana) provide biogenic habitat and considerable primary production to nearshore ecosystems. We investigated the distribution of these species by examining a series of increasingly complex habitat suitability models ranging from process-based models based on species' ecology to complex Generalised Additive Models applied to purpose-collected survey data. Seeking limits on model complexity, we explored the relationship between model complexity and forecast skill, measured using both cross-validation and independent data evaluation. Our analysis confirmed the importance of predictors used in models of coastal kelp distributions developed elsewhere (i.e., depth, bottom type, bottom slope, and exposure); it also identified additional important factors including salinity, and interactions between exposure and salinity, and slope and tidal energy. Comparative results showed that cross-validation can lead to over-fitting, while independent data evaluation clearly identified the appropriate model complexity for generating habitat forecasts. Our results also illustrate that, depending on the evaluation data, predictions from simpler models can out-perform those from more complex models. Collectively, the insights from evaluating multiple models with multiple data sets contribute to the holistic assessment of model forecast skill. The continued development of methods and metrics for evaluating model forecasts with independent data, and the explicit consideration of model objectives and assumptions, promise to increase the utility of model forecasts to decision makers

Gone fishing? Intergenerational cultural shifts can undermine common property co-managed fisheries

Conventional common property thinking assumes that a central goal of management is to maintain social-ecological systems in a healthy and resilient state, including maintaining the ability of communities to harvest across time and generations. Little research has been done, however, on how common property systems are affected by demographic shifts, the social status of emerging livelihoods, and the employment aspirations of users for their offspring. An empirical case study from Chile (well known for its common property fisheries) suggests that major socio-cultural shifts are now occurring, with a lack of entry by new fishers and an aging population of existing ones. These types of social and cultural changes are increasingly common through globalization and worldwide economic development, and pose significant policy challenges across broad classes of common property systems. The Chilean case reveals that community adaptive capacity can come at the expense of social-ecological common property systems, and highlights the need to consider the broader context of ‘slow’ social variables