How to find and share community owned solutions

The main aim of this handbook is to promote community owned solutions by proposing approaches that respond to current and future challenges to sustainability, natural resources management and biodiversity conservation. The handbook introduces key concepts and techniques which underpin a participatory and systems approach to community engagement. It helps a community build up practical skills for exploring, recording and disseminating their own community owned solutions

ECOSENSUS: developing collaborative learning systems for stakeholding development in environmental planning

ECOSENSUS *(Electronic/Ecological Collaborative Sensemaking Support System) investigates the socio-technological issues around developing collaboration tools for participatory environmental decision making amongst (a) marginalised natural resource users, (b) professional 'experts' from different countries, and (c) key decision makers associated with managing ecosystems. An integral activity is the production of open content learning resources to support stakeholders in facilitating distributed environmental decision making. This involves the integrated use of three open source software tools: Moodle (online course management), Compendium (dialogue mapping) and uDig (user friendly desktop/internet GIS). In the first ECOSENSUS-1 phase, the pilot collaborative effort has been focused on supporting stakeholders in developing adaptive management plans for the Rupununi Wetlands in southern Guyana, a region rich in flora and fauna but also under intense pressure to expand the exploitation of its natural resources, including timber, gold, and commercially viable fish species. Results of the ECOSENSUS-1 are briefly described along with some preliminary notes on the current ECOSENUS-2 phase of associated research in Guyana supported by an additional grant from DEFRA. The paper prompts questions on how ECOSENSUS can feed into wider open source course development using the LabSpace on the OpenLearn project

Unilateral pulmonary artery agenesis presenting with unilateral usual interstitial pneumonia in adulthood

Unilateral interstitial lung disease secondary to unilateral pulmonary artery agenesis (UPAA) is a rare anomaly due to a malformation of the sixth aortic arch of the affected side during embryogenesis. While most of the patients present in neonatal period with either cardiac anomalies or respiratory symptoms some of them can remain asymptomatic and late diagnosis is possible when suspicious presentation is noted on chest radiography. We report a case of 32-year female with a history of recurrent respiratory tract infection, who presented with cough and expectoration and the diagnosis of unilateral interstitial lung disease secondary to ipsilateral pulmonary interruption was made

The COBRA Project: a community-based approach to public engagement in science.

Scientific research and communications is dominated by a command-and-control approach which lacks the ability to engage the public in managing and adapting to surprises and rapid change. These initiatives emerge from higher-scale structures e.g. national institutions, which are not always compatible with the realities and perspectives of communities. The failure of top-down, 'deficit model' approaches to science communication have encouraged communities to support an alternative, bottom-up, culturally and ecologically sensitive approach to communication for addressing complex socio-ecological problems. This paper explores the development and promotion of a 'community-expertise' model of public engagement through the COBRA Project, a participatory project involving indigenous communities of South America. The project’s aim is to significantly scale up the sharing of indigenous expertise and knowledge through photography, video and online platforms. We will present the results of how this expertise is identified, recorded and shared with national and international scientists and policymakers. We report on the conflict between the principles behind participatory community engagement and the demands of policymakers for scientific, empirically validated data, which clearly require an imposition on the type and process of data collection, analysis and modes of communication. We argue that participatory methods that engage local indigenous communities are empowering for these involved, but it is in the end up to the scientific and policy-making establishment to accept the validity of these ‘non-standard’ forms of science communication

A global behavioural model of human fire use and management: WHAM! v1.0

Fire is an integral ecosystem process and a major natural source of vegetation disturbance globally. Yet at the same time, humans use and manage fire in diverse ways and for a huge range of purposes. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that a central finding of the first Fire Model Intercomparison Project was simplistic representation of humans is a substantial shortcoming in the fire modules of dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). In response to this challenge, we present a novel, global geospatial model that seeks to capture the diversity of human–fire interactions. Empirically grounded with a global database of anthropogenic fire impacts, WHAM! (the Wildfire Human Agency Model) represents the underlying behavioural and land system drivers of human approaches to fire management and their impact on fire regimes. WHAM! is designed to be coupled with DGVMs (JULES-INFERNO in the current instance), such that human and biophysical drivers of fire on Earth, and their interactions, can be captured in process-based models for the first time. Initial outputs from WHAM! presented here are in line with previous evidence suggesting managed anthropogenic fire use is decreasing globally and point to land use intensification as the underlying reason for this phenomenon.</p