Grazing Usage Over Time and Space in the Thunder Basin Ecoregion

National grasslands are public lands that have diverse and critical uses. They serve as wildlife habitat, contain mineral resources, and are used recreationally. The Thunder Basin National Grassland, located in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, spans more than 500,000 acres and local ranchers rely on that acreage to feed their cattle. Effective management of these grazing lands is challenging because agency managers must balance multiple private and public objectives. Advancing rangeland policy requires an accurate understanding of previous grazing history. Even so, few long-term, quantitative records of grazing intensity on this land exist. To address this gap, we digitized physical records of four decades of grazing usage. We analyzed this data to examine variation in grazing intensity over time and space. We found that there was a steady increase in grazing intensity over time, but it fell dramatically in the early 2000s. This is an important observation that can help government agencies understand how various social and environmental factors impact grazing intensity. Application of this understanding can help create sustainable grassland policies

Social Networks Impact Flood Risk Mitigation Behavior: A Case Study of Lidar Adoption in the Pacific Northwest, US

Flood risk and damage are expected to increase in the Pacific Northwest due to climate change. Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) is a remote sensing technology that generates high-resolution topographic data and can therefore produce higher accuracy floodplain maps, an important tool that communities use to assess their flood risk. Despite the promise of lidar for flood risk mitigation, both the availability of lidar data and the use of that data when available varies across the U.S. What factors drive the adoption of technology, such as lidar, for flood risk management? How can we better promote the use of technologies when available? Previous research has identified the importance of various factors in flood risk management, such as risk perception, direct experience, and knowledge of future risk. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how peer influence impacts an individual’s choices about how to manage risk. In this study, we examine the adoption of lidar by flood risk managers for risk mitigation, as a function of several factors including risk perception, direct experience, and social networks. We conducted semi-structured interviews with flood risk managers in Idaho to inform the development of an online survey for flood risk managers in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Using this survey, we found that flood risk managers who share information with others using lidar are also more likely to use lidar themselves. Furthermore, the more frequently these flood managers communicate, the stronger this peer influence is. This research demonstrates the potential for harnessing social networks to help communities more effectively adapt to changing flood risk hazards

Adoption as a Social Marker: Innovation Diffusion with Outgroup Aversion

Social identities are among the key factors driving behavior in complex societies. Signals of social identity are known to influence individual behaviors in the adoption of innovations. Yet the population-level consequences of identity signaling on the diffusion of innovations are largely unknown. Here we use both analytical and agent-based modeling to consider the spread of a beneficial innovation in a structured population in which there exist two groups who are averse to being mistaken for each other. We investigate the dynamics of adoption and consider the role of structural factors such as demographic skew and communication scale on population-level outcomes. We find that outgroup aversion can lead to adoption being delayed or suppressed in one group, and that population-wide underadoption is common. Comparing the two models, we find that differential adoption can arise due to structural constraints on information flow even in the absence of intrinsic between-group differences in adoption rates. Further, we find that patterns of polarization in adoption at both local and global scales depend on the details of demographic organization and the scale of communication. This research has particular relevance to widely beneficial but identity-relevant products and behaviors, such as green technologies, where overall levels of adoption determine the positive benefits that accrue to society at large.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure

Sustainability Partnerships and Viticulture Management in California

Agricultural regions in the United States are experimenting with sustainability partnerships that, among other goals, seek to improve growers\u27 ability to manage their vineyards sustainably. In this paper, we analyze the association between winegrape grower participation in sustainability partnership activities and practice adoption in three winegrowing regions of California. Using data gathered from a survey of 822 winegrape growers, we find a positive association between participation and adoption of sustainable practices, which holds most strongly for practices in which the perceived private benefits outweigh the costs, and for growers with relatively dense social networks. We highlight the mechanisms by which partnerships may catalyze sustainable farm management, and discuss the implications of these findings for improving sustainability partnerships. Taken together, we provide one of the most comprehensive quantitative analyses to date regarding the effectiveness of agricultural sustainability partnerships for improving farm management

Unlikely Alliances and Their Implications for Resource Management in the American West

Collaborative, or participatory governance is an increasingly common means of addressing natural resource issues, especially in the American West where patchworks of public, private, and tribal interests characterize the region’s resources. In this context, unlikely alliances, or partnerships among diverse actors who have historically been at odds, have a growing potential to shape social and ecological outcomes, for better or worse. While these unlikely alliances have received greater attention in recent years, relatively little research has worked to synthesize the concept across diverse contexts and disciplines. Based on a review of the literature on unlikely alliances in natural resource governance, we develop a framework that synthesizes the individual motivations and contextual factors that influence their formation, as well as the social and ecological outcomes that they create. We use this framework to analyze six illustrative cases of unlikely alliances. Our analysis of these cases suggests that unlikely alliances in the American West are likely to arise in the presence of a crisis, when appropriate leadership is present, when some of the actors have interacted effectively in the past, and when actors need to pool resources. The cases also illustrate some common outcomes, including environmental improvement, transformation of social networks, policy change, and shifts in power relationships. We discuss the implications of unlikely alliances for the social-ecological future of the American West. Our paper highlights the role of unlikely alliances in shaping patterns of natural resource governance, and provides a focus for further research in this realm

Bringing Forecasting Into the Future: Using Google to Predict Visitation in U.S. National Parks

In recent years, visitation to U.S. National Parks has been increasing, with the majority of this increase occurring in a subset of parks. As a result, managers in these parks must respond quickly to increasing visitor-related challenges. Improved visitation forecasting would allow managers to more proactively plan for such increases. In this study, we leverage internet search data that is freely available through Google Trends to create a forecasting model. We compare this Google Trends model to a traditional autoregressive forecasting model. Overall, our Google Trends model accurately predicted 97% of the total visitation variation to all parks one year in advance from 2013 to 2017 and outperformed the autoregressive model by all metrics. While our Google Trends model performs better overall, this was not the case for each park unit individually; the accuracy of this model varied significantly from park to park. We hypothesized that park attributes related to trip planning would correlate with the accuracy of our Google Trends model, but none of the variables tested produced overly compelling results. Future research can continue exploring the utility of Google Trends to forecast visitor use in protected areas, or use methods demonstrated in this paper to explore alternative data sources to improve visitation forecasting in U.S. National Parks

Adaptive Groundwater Governance and the Challenges of Policy Implementation in Idaho’s Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer Region

Globally, groundwater overdraft poses significant challenges to agricultural production. As a result, it is likely that new water management policies and governance arrangements will be needed to stop groundwater depletion and maintain agricultural viability. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state water managers and other water actors, this paper provides a study of a recent resource management agreement between surface water and groundwater irrigators in the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer region of Idaho. Using adaptive governance as our descriptive framework, we examine how groundwater governance arrangements emerge and are applied to mitigate the impacts of groundwater overdraft. Our findings suggest that adaptive governance, while not a stated goal of the agreement, may enable flexible and sustainable social and ecological outcomes. Our findings also indicate that this new governance arrangement creates a vacuum in enforcement authority that may prove challenging as the management agreement is implemented. These findings extend our understanding of the conditions necessary for effective adaptive governance of groundwater resources, and highlight the challenge of creating capacity for local resource managers as governance shifts from more bureaucratic to adaptive and decentralised arrangements

Socio-Hydrology: An Interplay of Design and Self-Organization in a Multilevel World

The emerging field of socio-hydrology is a special case of social-ecological systems research that focuses on coupled human-water systems, exploring how the hydrologic cycle and human cultural traits coevolve and how such coevolutions lead to phenomena of relevance to water security and sustainability. As such, most problems tackled by socio-hydrology involve some aspects of engineering design, such as large-scale water infrastructure, and self-organization in a broad context, such as cultural change at the population level and the hydrologic shift at the river basin or aquifer level. However, within the field of socio-hydrology, it has been difficult to find general theories that assist our understanding of the dynamics emerging from the interplay between design and selforganization, hindering generalization of phenomena between cases. We address this gap by developing insights on how the theoretical frameworks of robustness-fragility trade-off and cultural multilevel selection can inform our understanding in this regard. We apply the two theories to two cases in the Ganges Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh and the Kissimmee River Basin in Florida, illustrating how the two theories may provide general insights into causal mechanisms shaping the socio-hydrological phenomena observed in the two cases. Specifically, we use the two theories to address (1) the transference of system fragility across different domains due to design choices and (2) the multilevel social processes in the nested organizational hierarchy that lead to the formation or collapse of shared cultural traits. We show that these two theories, separately or taken together, can provide richer theoretical grounding for understanding socio-hydrological phenomena

Private Land Conservation Decision-Making: An Integrative Social Science Model

Owners and managers of private lands make decisions that have implications well beyond the boundaries of their land, influencing species conservation, water quality, wildfire risk, and other environmental outcomes with important societal and ecological consequences. Understanding how these decisions are made is key for informing interventions to support better outcomes. However, explanations of the drivers of decision making are often siloed in social science disciplines that differ in focus, theory, methodology, and terminology, hindering holistic understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptual model of private land conservation decision-making that integrates theoretical perspectives from three dominant disciplines: economics, sociology, and psychology. The model highlights how heterogeneity in behavior across decision-makers is driven by interactions between the decision context, attributes of potential conservation behaviors, and attributes of the decision-maker. These differences in both individual attributes and context shape decision-makers’ constraints and the potential and perceived consequences of a behavior. The model also captures how perceived consequences are evaluated and weighted through a decision-making process that may range from systematic to heuristic, ultimately resulting in selection of a behavior. Outcomes of private land behaviors across the landscape feed back to alter the socio-environmental conditions that shape future decisions. The conceptual model is designed to facilitate better communication, collaboration, and integration across disciplines and points to methodological innovations that can expand understanding of private land decision-making. The model also can be used to illuminate how behavior change interventions (e.g., policies, regulations, technical assistance) could be designed to target different drivers to encourage environmentally and socially beneficial behaviors on private lands

Social networks impact flood risk mitigation behavior: A case study of lidar adoption in the Pacific Northwest, US

Flood risk and damage are expected to increase in the Pacific Northwest due to climate change. Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) is a remote sensing technology that generates high-resolution topographic data and can therefore produce higher accuracy floodplain maps, an important tool that communities use to assess their flood risk. Despite the promise of lidar for flood risk mitigation, both the availability of lidar data and the use of that data when available varies across the U.S. What factors drive the adoption of technology, such as lidar, for flood risk management? How can we better promote the use of technologies when available? Previous research has identified the importance of various factors in flood risk management, such as risk perception, direct experience, and knowledge of future risk. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how peer influence impacts an individual’s choices about how to manage risk. In this study, we examine the adoption of lidar by flood risk managers for risk mitigation, as a function of several factors including risk perception, direct experience, and social networks. We conducted semi-structured interviews with flood risk managers in Idaho to inform the development of an online survey for flood risk managers in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Using this survey, we found that flood risk managers who share information with others using lidar are also more likely to use lidar themselves. Furthermore, the more frequently these flood managers communicate, the stronger this peer influence is. This research demonstrates the potential for harnessing social networks to help communities more effectively adapt to changing flood risk hazards