Pastoral Herding Strategies and Governmental Management Objectives: Predation Compensation as a Risk Buffering Strategy in the Saami Reindeer Husbandry

Previously it has been found that an important risk buffering strategy in the Saami reindeer husbandry in Norway is the accumulation of large herds of reindeer as this increases long-term household viability. Nevertheless, few studies have investigated how official policies, such as economic compensation for livestock losses, can influence pastoral strategies. This study investigated the effect of received predation compensation on individual husbandry units’ future herd size. The main finding in this study is that predation compensation had a positive effect on husbandry units’ future herd size. The effect of predation compensation, however, was nonlinear in some years, indicating that predation compensation had a positive effect on future herd size only up to a certain threshold whereby adding additional predation compensation had little effect on future herd size. More importantly, the effect of predation compensation was positive after controlling for reindeer density, indicating that for a given reindeer density husbandry units receiving more predation compensation performed better (measured as the size of future herds) compared to husbandry units receiving less compensation

Operationalizing local ecological knowledge in climate change research : challenges and opportunities of citizen science

Current research on the local impacts of climate change is based on contrasting results from the simulation of historical trends in climatic variables produced with global models against climate data from independent observations. To date, these observations have mostly consisted of weather data from standardized meteorological stations. Given that the spatial distribution of weather stations is patchy, climate scientists have called for the exploration of new data sources. Knowledge developed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities with a long history of interaction with their environment has been proposed as a data source with untapped potential to contribute to our understanding of the local impacts of climate change. In this chapter, we discuss an approach that aims to bring insights from local knowledge systems to climate change research. First, we present a number of theoretical arguments that give support to the idea that local knowledge systems can contribute in original ways to the endeavors of climate change research. Then, we explore the potential of using information and communication technologies to gather and share local knowledge of climate change impacts. We do so through the examination of a citizen science initiative aiming to collect local indicators of climate change impacts: the LICCI project (www.licci.eu). Our findings illustrate that citizen science can inspire new approaches to articulate the inclusion of local knowledge systems in climate change research. However, this requires outlining careful approaches, with high ethical standards, toward knowledge validation and recognizing that there are aspects of local ecological knowledge that are incommensurable with scientific knowledge

Understanding the accuracy of pre-symptomatic diagnosis of sepsis

Research is currently being undertaken to expand the window of efficiency for medical treatment through pre-symptomatic diagnosis. This is achieved through an observational clinical study. Blood is taken from consenting elective surgery patients from pre-surgery to treatment end. Some of these patients go on to develop sepsis (3.8%) and the majority recover without developing sepsis. Blood is taken daily. The diagnosis of sepsis has a level of variation between clinicians and hospitals and consensus is reached via a clinical advisory panel where the level of disagreement is analysed. The bloods are stored and then shipped to a laboratory where the RNA or transcriptomic signature is measured by microarray and quantitative methods. The data is retrieved, pre-processed, normalised and undergoes statistical modelling. This then predicts when a patient is likely to go on to develop sepsis or not. At every point of this process from patient to statistical result there is an associated error or accuracy. There are different data types present and not all of the error points can be considered independent. In order to give the clinician confidence in using this process to assist at point of care, we need to be able to propagate the errors through the complex process to provide an overall uncertainty measurement

Understanding Public Support for European Protected Areas: A Review of the Literature and Proposing a New Approach for Policy Makers

Protected Areas are the most widely applied policy tool for biodiversity conservation. In Europe, protected areas are expected to significantly increase as the new EU Biodiversity strategy sets an ambitious target of 30% of land and 30% of water to be protected by 2030. Despite the popularity of this environmental policy, understanding variations in the level of public support for protected areas remains underexplored. This is an important area of research, considering that, in order for protected areas to be effective, they need to be supported by most users, including local communities and visitors. In this paper, we reviewed theoretical and empirical evidence explaining the level of support for protected areas and proposed a new approach when designing and designating protected areas in Europe. This approach models the process of the introduction of a new protected area as a policy intervention within a socio-ecological system. Specifically, it models how protected area social outcomes or impacts are conditioned and contextualised by numerous intervening factors relating to the social context and governance and management system to influence local actors’ attitude and active support for the protected area. This new approach aims to assist policy makers, conservation practitioners and scientists to plan actions that assist in increasing the level of public support for protected areas in the context of the post 2020 Biodiversity Strategy of the European Union.</jats:p

Cross-border forms of animal use by indigenous peoples

Revised version of the original published article “Cross-Border Forms of Animal Use by Indigenous Peoples” by Stefan Kirchner, American Journal of International Law, Unbound Volume 111, 2017, p. 402–407. The original article was published as an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)The chapter discusses animal use by indigenous peoples that involve crossing state borders, using the example of reindeer herding by indigenous Sámi in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Animals play important cultural, economic, and spiritual roles for indigenous communities. This particular form of interaction between humans and animals is, however, not sufficiently recognized by contemporary laws. The risk of overruling the interests of migratory animals, and of the pastoralist (semi-)nomadic human communities depending on them, is exacerbated when the herds cross boundariesViešosios teisės katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta