A Landscape Perspective on Climate-Driven Risks to Food Security: Exploring the Relationship between Climate and Social Transformation in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest

Spatially and temporally unpredictable rainfall patterns presented food production challenges to small-scale agricultural communities, requiring multiple risk-mitigating strategies to increase food security. Although site-based investigations of the relationship between climate and agricultural production offer insights into how individual communities may have created long-term adaptations to manage risk, the inherent spatial variability of climate-driven risk makes a landscape-scale perspective valuable. In this article, we model risk by evaluating how the spatial structure of ancient climate conditions may have affected the reliability of three major strategies used to reduce risk: drawing upon social networks in time of need, hunting and gathering of wild resources, and storing surplus food. We then explore how climate-driven changes to this reliability may relate to archaeologically observed social transformations. We demonstrate the utility of this methodology by comparing the Salinas and Cibola regions in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest to understand the complex relationship among climate-driven threats to food security, risk-mitigation strategies, and social transformations. Our results suggest key differences in how communities buffered against risk in the Cibola and Salinas study regions, with the structure of precipitation influencing the range of strategies to which communities had access through time

A Lockpick's Guide to dataARC: Designing Infrastructures and Building Communities to Enable Transdisciplinary Research

The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) community initiated dataARC to develop digital research infrastructures to support their work on long-term human-ecodynamics in the North Atlantic. These infrastructures were designed to address the challenges of sharing research data, the connections between those data and high-level interpretations, and the interpretations themselves. In parallel, they were also designed to support the reuse of diverse data that underpin transdisciplinary synthesis research and to contextualise materials disseminated widely to the public more firmly in their evidence base. This article outlines the research infrastructure produced by the project and reflects on its design and development. We outline the core motivations for dataARC's work and introduce the tools, platforms and (meta)data products developed. We then undertake a critical review of the project's workflow. This review focuses on our understanding of the needs of stakeholder groups, the principles that guided the design of the infrastructure, and the extent to which these principles are successfully promoted in the current implementation. Drawing on this assessment, we consider how the infrastructure, in whole or in part, might be reused by other transdisciplinary research communities. Finally, we highlight key socio-technical gaps that may emerge as structural barriers to transdisciplinary, engaged, and open research if left unaddressed

Climate challenges, vulnerabilities, and food security

This paper identifies rare climate challenges in the long-term history of seven areas, three in the subpolar North Atlantic Islands and four in the arid-to-semiarid deserts of the US Southwest. For each case, the vulnerability to food shortage before the climate challenge is quantified based on eight variables encompassing both environmental and social domains. These data are used to evaluate the relationship between the “weight” of vulnerability before a climate challenge and the nature of social change and food security following a challenge. The outcome of this work is directly applicable to debates about disaster management policy

Shaping Arctic’s Tomorrow through Indigenous Knowledge Engagement and Knowledge Co-Production

This perspective presents a statement of the 10th International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences Indigenous Knowledge and knowledge co-production panel and discussion group, 20 July 2021. The statement is designed to serve as a characterization of the state-of-the-art and guidance for further advancement of Indigenous Knowledge and knowledge co-production in the Arctic. It identifies existing challenges and provides specific recommendations for researchers, Indigenous communities, and funding agencies on meaningful recognition and engagement of Indigenous Knowledge systems

Qualitative data sharing and re-use for socio-environmental systems research: A synthesis of opportunities, challenges, resources and approaches

Researchers in many disciplines, both social and natural sciences, have a long history of collecting and analyzing qualitative data to answer questions that have many dimensions, to interpret other research findings, and to characterize processes that are not easily quantified. Qualitative data is increasingly being used in socio-environmental systems research and related interdisciplinary efforts to address complex sustainability challenges. There are many scientific, descriptive and material benefits to be gained from sharing and re-using qualitative data, some of which reflect the broader push toward open science, and some of which are unique to qualitative research traditions. However, although open data availability is increasingly becoming an expectation in many fields and methodological approaches that work on socio-environmental topics, there remain many challenges associated the sharing and re-use of qualitative data in particular. This white paper discusses opportunities, challenges, resources and approaches for qualitative data sharing and re-use for socio-environmental research. The content and findings of the paper are a synthesis and extension of discussions that began during a workshop funded by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) and held at the Center Feb. 28-March 2, 2017. The structure of the paper reflects the starting point for the workshop, which focused on opportunities, challenges and resources for qualitative data sharing, and presents as well the workshop outputs focused on developing a novel approach to qualitative data sharing considerations and creating recommendations for how a variety of actors can further support and facilitate qualitative data sharing and re-use. The white paper is organized into five sections to address the following objectives: (1) Define qualitative data and discuss the benefits of sharing it along with its role in socio-environmental synthesis; (2) Review the practical, epistemological, and ethical challenges regarding sharing such data; (3) Identify the landscape of resources available for sharing qualitative data including repositories and communities of practice (4) Develop a novel framework for identifying levels of processing and access to qualitative data; and (5) Suggest roles and responsibilities for key actors in the research ecosystem that can improve the longevity and use of qualitative data in the future.This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1052875

Shaping Arctic’s Tomorrow through Indigenous Knowledge Engagement and Knowledge Co-Production

This perspective presents a statement of the 10th International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences Indigenous Knowledge and knowledge co-production panel and discussion group, 20 July 2021. The statement is designed to serve as a characterization of the state-of-the-art and guidance for further advancement of Indigenous Knowledge and knowledge co-production in the Arctic. It identifies existing challenges and provides specific recommendations for researchers, Indigenous communities, and funding agencies on meaningful recognition and engagement of Indigenous Knowledge systems