A Long-Term Vision for an Ecologically Sound Platte River

The Platte River extends about 310 mi (499 km) from North Platte, Nebraska, to its terminus at the Missouri River confluence near Plattsmouth, Nebraska. The Platte River Valley is a continentally significant ecosystem that serves as a major stopover for migratory waterbirds in the Central Flyway including the endangered Whooping Crane (Grus americana) and \u3e1 million Sandhill Cranes (Antigone canadensis) at the peak of spring migration. However, the Platte River Valley also supports a great diversity of avifauna including grassland breeding birds, native stream fish, vascular plants, herpetofauna, mammals, pollinators, and aquatic macroinvertebrates. Despite ongoing conservation efforts since the mid-1970s the ecosystem remains largely conservation dependent and an increasing number of species across taxa are being considered at risk of regional extirpation or outright extinction. However, given the attention provided to conservation in the Platte River Valley and the need to maintain ecologically functional stopover sites in the Central Flyway, there is a great opportunity to create a resilient refugium for biodiversity conservation in the central Great Plains. To that end we convened a working group of \u3e18 individuals representing \u3e9 organizations including representatives from non-profit conservation organizations, universities, and state and federal natural resource agencies to develop a long-term vision for an ecologically sound Platte River Valley (PRV). We met in groups of varying size for \u3e170 hours throughout a more than 3-year period and developed conservation priorities and objectives using a landscape design process. Landscape design is an interdisciplinary conservation planning process that incorporates components of landscape ecology and social dimensions of natural resources with the explicit intention of improving conservation implementation.https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1128/thumbnail.jp

Who participates in the climate change online discourse? A typology of Germans’ online engagement

This paper argues the relevance of the internet for scientific communication. It is not only an immense source of information, it also empowers laypeople to interact by commenting, rating, and sharing online content. Previous studies have found that users’ contributions to online content affect the reception processes. However, research on who actually uses these participatory possibilities is scarce. This paper characterizes engaged (and non-engaged) online users by analyzing online engagement (using search engines and different participatory forms) with a representative German online survey (n = 1,463). Different groups of climate change perceptions (such as uncertainty of scientific evidence), attitudes, knowledge, and online engagement are identified with hierarchical cluster analyses. Interest and knowledge are main drivers of online engagement, although a group of uninterested, unknowing and doubtful users participates in SNSs. The most active group, participating experts, knows most about scientific processes in climate sciences. No distinct group of skeptical participants was identified

Discussing climate change online. Topics and perceptions in online climate change communication in different online public arenas

How users discuss climate change online is one of the crucial questions (science) communication scholars address nowadays. This study contributes by approaching the issue through the theoretical concept of online public arenas. The diversity of topics and perceptions in the climate change discourse is explored by comparing different arenas. German journalistic articles and their reader comments as well as scientific expert blogs are analyzed by quantitative manual and automated content analysis (n = 5, 301). Findings demonstrate a larger diversity of topics and interpretations in arenas with low barriers to communication. Overall, climate change skepticism is rare, but mostly present in lay publics

Wissen, Nichtwissen, Unwissen, Unsicherheit: Zur Operationalisierung und Auswertung von Wissensitems am Beispiel des Klimawissens

Abstract: Science is present in all dimensions of laypeople’s everyday lives and serves as a basis for decisions. However, scientific topics such as climate change are very complex, abstract and uncertain – thus for laypeople difficult to understand. Mass media act as significant mediators between science and lay audiences. Much empirical research exists about the relations between media use and knowledge as well as attitudes towards science. Nonetheless, statistical proof for these correlations is often missing. A main reason for that can be seen in insufficient theoretical examinations of ‚knowledge‘ and measurement problems. This article tries to address these issues by focusing on how knowledge can be conceptualised and operationalised in empirical studies. Five different dimensions of knowledge about climate change are discussed: knowledge about (1) causes, (2) basics and (3) effects of climate change as well as (4) climate-friendly behavior and (5) the procedures of the climate sciences. Different theoretical concepts of knowledge, ignorance and misinformation in combination with the dimension of (un)certainty/confidence are introduced. Using empirical data from an online survey about climate change, the consequences of different response formats and scales are illustrated and discussed