The Instagrammable outdoors – Investigating the sharing of nature experiences through visual social media

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors thank all participants in this study for sharing their views and experiences with them, and thank two anonymous reviewers as well as the associated editor who provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. They also thank John-Paul Shirreffs for the artwork in the Graphical Abstract. This work was supported by the University of Aberdeen and the James Hutton Institute.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Communicating nature during lockdown - How conservation and outdoor organisations use social media to facilitate local nature experiences

Social media impact not only our communication and social interactions but also our relationships to the natural environment. Social media can increase understanding of our environment by offering information and sharing calls to action, while at the same time, they might present a glamourised, standardised picture of nature and distract from actual outdoor interactions. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to study the spaces created for interactions between the online and offline natural world, especially in countries where movement and thus outdoor activities were restricted during lockdowns. To understand these interactions, we investigated the social media communication of nature conservation and outdoor organisations by analysing Twitter posts of four prominent NGOs in Scotland. We found that during the first COVID-19-induced UK lockdown in spring 2020, Scottish nature conservation and outdoor organisations made distinctive efforts in supporting followers to connect with nature in the face of restrictions. Organisations showed signs of moving towards community-building through sharing experiences often related to nearby nature, while calls for environmental action, more prominent in the previous year, receded in relative importance. Emphasis was put on sensory engagement with, and finding solace in the rhythm of, nature. References to taking action to protect nature now became linked to a green recovery from the pandemic. We conclude that NGOs used social media not as a space separate from the outdoors, but as an augmented space where online and offline interactions were interwoven and a space in which during the COVID-19 pandemic, new avenues for engagement were being explored. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog

The study of social dynamics in juvenile vervet monkeys

Using a longitudinal approach, I sought to deepen my understanding on social integration in wild juvenile vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus). First, I focused on the analytical tools used to capture the social and temporal dynamics within my data, which led me to provide my own flexible and reliable methods. Second, I used these methods to address theoretical questions regarding the development of social networks as well as the emergence of sex-specific social behaviours in male and female juveniles, throughout social development. Overall, my findings showed that juveniles develop social networks composed of few strong and many weak ties, through social niche construction. Taking a closer look at these strong ties, in turn, demonstrated that the value of sociality not only lies in the formation of a subset of strong ties, but also in the formation of a more extended social network, where the offspring’s mother grooming partners were found.National Research Foundation (South Africa) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC

Regimes of justification : competing arguments and the construction of legitimacy in Dutch nature conservation practices

Legitimacy of environmental management and policies is an important topic in environmental research. Based on the notion of ‘regimes of justification’, we aim to analyse the dynamics in argumentations used to legitimize and de-legitimize Dutch nature conservation practices. Contrary to prior studies, we demonstrate how actors in two locations where environmental disputes arose showed little willingness to switch between arguments in order to reach a compromise. Instead, some actors constructed incompatibilities between arguments in order to delegitimize competing actors. Especially in the visioning phase, institutional actors emphasized technical efficiency, planning and global environmentalism, and arguments related to emotional accounts, inspiration and locality were de-legitimized. In the discussion, we argue that it is not the formal or informal inclusion of the actors in the process, but the construction of the legitimacy of their arguments that determines the inclusiveness and outcome of the process

Communicating nature during lockdown – how conservation and outdoor organisations use social media to facilitate local nature experiences

Social media impact not only our communication and social interactions but also our relationships to the natural environment. Social media can increase understanding of our environment by offering information and sharing calls to action, while at the same time, they might present a glamourised, standardised picture of nature and distract from actual outdoor interactions. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to study the spaces created for interactions between the online and offline natural world, especially in countries where movement and thus outdoor activities were restricted during lockdowns. To understand these interactions, we investigated the social media communication of nature conservation and outdoor organisations by analysing Twitter posts of four prominent NGOs in Scotland. We found that during the first COVID-19-induced UK lockdown in spring 2020, Scottish nature conservation and outdoor organisations made distinctive efforts in supporting followers to connect with nature in the face of restrictions. Organisations showed signs of moving towards community-building through sharing experiences often related to nearby nature, while calls for environmental action, more prominent in the previous year, receded in relative importance. Emphasis was put on sensory engagement with, and finding solace in the rhythm of, nature. References to taking action to protect nature now became linked to a green recovery from the pandemic. We conclude that NGOs used social media not as a space separate from the outdoors, but as an augmented space where online and offline interactions were interwoven and a space in which during the COVID-19 pandemic, new avenues for engagement were being explored. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog

Emotions in communicative practices : Legitimation and De-legitimation in Environmental Conflicts in the Netherlands and Sweden

This chapter moves beyond the debate between deliberative and agonistic approaches to natural resource management (NRM) conflict to investigate the mostly hidden process of the de-legitimation of emotions in communication and decision-making. It explores how expressions of emotions were managed in two cases and discusses the consequences of this for the construction of community as well as for the opportunities for deliberation and participation. Research on environmental decision-making displays how difficult it is for decision-making-bodies to listen to and incorporate the values and emotions relative to nature that stakeholders express. Such a focus on the rationality and scientification of nature has been inherent in the Western world from the rise of modernity. The chapter draws from the experiences of two different cases; one from the Netherlands and one from Sweden. Deliberative democracy theory has been criticized for its focus on the forming of consensus and for neglecting the conflictual dimension of the political process.This chapter moves beyond the debate between deliberative and agonistic approaches to natural resource management (NRM) conflict to investigate the mostly hidden process of the de-legitimation of emotions in communication and decision-making. It explores how expressions of emotions were managed in two cases and discusses the consequences of this for the construction of community as well as for the opportunities for deliberation and participation. Research on environmental decision-making displays how difficult it is for decision-making-bodies to listen to and incorporate the values and emotions relative to nature that stakeholders express. Such a focus on the rationality and scientification of nature has been inherent in the Western world from the rise of modernity. The chapter draws from the experiences of two different cases; one from the Netherlands and one from Sweden. Deliberative democracy theory has been criticized for its focus on the forming of consensus and for neglecting the conflictual dimension of the political process