Relationships between tree rings and Landsat EVI in the Northeast United States

Changes in the productivity of temperate forests have important implications for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, and many efforts have focused on methods to monitor both gross and net primary productivity in temperate forests. Remotely sensed vegetation indices provide spatially extensive measures of vegetation activity, and the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) has been widely linked to photosynthetic activity of vegetation. Networks of tree ring width (TRW) chronologies provide ground-based estimates of annual net carbon (C) uptake in forests, and time series of EVI and TRW may capture common productivity signals. Robust correlations between mean TRW and EVI may enhance spatial extrapolations of TRW-based productivity estimates, ultimately improving understanding of spatio-temporal variability in forest productivity. The research presented in this thesis investigates potential empirical relationships between networks of TRW chronologies and time series of Landsat EVI and Landsat-based phenological metrics in the Northeast United States. We hypothesized that mean TRW is positively correlated with mean monthly EVI during the growing season, EVI integrated over the growing season, and growing season length. Results indicate that correlations between TRW and EVI are largely not significant in this region. The complex response of tree growth to a variety of limiting climatic factors in temperate forests may decouple measures of TRW growth and canopy reflectance. However, results also indicate that there may be important lag effects in which EVI affects mean TRW during the following year. These findings may improve understanding of links between C uptake and growth of tree stems over large spatial scales

Rulemaking 2.0: Understanding and Getting Better Public Participation

More than a decade after the launch of Regulations.gov, the government-wide federal online rulemaking portal, and nearly four years since the Obama Administration directed agencies to use “innovative tools and practices that create new and easier methods for public engagement,” there are still more questions than answers about what value social media and other Web 2 .0 technologies can bring to rulemaking–and about how agencies can realize that value. This report, commissioned by the IBM Center for the Business of Government, begins to provide those answers. Drawing on insights from a number of disciplines and on three years of actual experience in the Regulation Room project, CeRI researchers explain the barriers that new rulemaking participants must overcome. And they make specific recommendations for lowering these barriers using outreach strategies, information design, and choice of participation tools. Although the particular focus is public participation in the context of rulemaking, much of what is discussed here will help any government or civil society group seeking broader, better public engagement in complex policy decisions

Rulemaking 2.0: Understanding and Getting Better Public Participation

More than a decade after the launch of Regulations.gov, the government-wide federal online rulemaking portal, and nearly four years since the Obama Administration directed agencies to use “innovative tools and practices that create new and easier methods for public engagement,” there are still more questions than answers about what value social media and other Web 2 .0 technologies can bring to rulemaking–and about how agencies can realize that value. This report, commissioned by the IBM Center for the Business of Government, begins to provide those answers. Drawing on insights from a number of disciplines and on three years of actual experience in the Regulation Room project, CeRI researchers explain the barriers that new rulemaking participants must overcome. And they make specific recommendations for lowering these barriers using outreach strategies, information design, and choice of participation tools. Although the particular focus is public participation in the context of rulemaking, much of what is discussed here will help any government or civil society group seeking broader, better public engagement in complex policy decisions

Rulemaking vs. Democracy: Judging and Nudging Public Participation That Counts

An underlying assumption of many open government enthusiasts is that more public participation will necessarily lead to better government policymaking: If we use technology to give people easier opportunities to participate in public policymaking, they will use these opportunities to participate effectively. Yet, experience thus far with technology-enabled rulemaking (e-rulemaking) has not confirmed this “if-then” causal link. This Article considers how this flawed causal reasoning around technology has permeated efforts to increase public participation in rulemaking

The Problem with Words: Plain Language and Public Participation in Rulemaking

This Article, part of the special issue commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Administrative Conference of the United States (“ACUS”), situates ACUS’s recommendations for improving public rulemaking participation in the context of the federal “plain language” movement. The connection between broader, better public participation and more comprehensible rulemaking materials seems obvious, and ACUS recommendations have recognized this connection for almost half a century. Remarkably, though, the series of presidential and statutory plain-language directives on this topic have not even mentioned the relationship of comprehensibility to participation until very recently. In 2012, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (“OIRA”) issued “Executive Summary Guidance,” instructing that “straightforward executive summaries” be included in “lengthy or complex rules.” OIRA reasoned that “[p]ublic participation cannot occur . . . if members of the public are unable to obtain a clear sense of the content of [regulatory] requirements.” Using a novel dataset of proposed and final rule documents from 2010 through 2014, this Article examines the effect of the executive summary requirement. The results show that the use of executive summaries increased substantially compared with the modest executive-summary practice pre-Guidance. Additionally, agencies have done fairly well in providing summaries for “lengthy” rules. Success in providing the summary in “complex” rules, and in following the standard template recommended by the Guidance is mixed. The most significant finding is the stunning failure of the new executive summary requirement to produce more comprehensible rulemaking information. Standard readability measures place the executive summaries at a level of difficulty that would challenge even college graduates. Moreover, executive summaries are, on average, even less readable than the remainder of the rule preambles that they are supposed to make more accessible to a broader audience. Still, some bright spots appear in this generally gloomy picture, as some agencies (or parts of agencies) have become better at producing readable executive summaries. After speculating about why efforts to “legislate” more comprehensible rulemaking documents persistently fail, this Article urges ACUS to pursue its commitment to broader rulemaking participation by studying successful—and unsuccessful—agency practices in this area. The goal should be to identify best practices and make informed and practicable recommendations for producing rulemaking materials that interested members of the public could actually understand

Balancing Inclusion and “Enlightened Understanding” in Designing Online Civic Participation Systems: Experiences from Regulation Room

New forms of online citizen participation in government decision making have been fostered in the United States (U.S.) under the Obama Administration. Use of Web information technologies have been encouraged in an effort to create more back-and-forth communication between citizens and their government. These “Civic Participation 2.0” attempts to open the government up to broader public participation are based on three pillars of open government—transparency, participation, and collaboration. Thus far, the Administration has modeled Civic Participation 2.0 almost exclusively on the Web 2.0 ethos, in which users are enabled to shape the discussion and encouraged to assess the value of its content. We argue that strict adherence to the Web 2.0 model for citizen participation in public policymaking can produce “participation” that is unsatisfactory to both government decisionmakers and public participants. We believe that successful online civic participation design must balance inclusion and “enlightened understanding,” one of the core conditions for democratic deliberation. Based on our experience with Regulation Room, an experimental online participation platform trying to broaden meaningful public engagement in the process federal agencies use to make new regulations, we offer specific suggestions on how participation designers can strike the balance between ease of engagement and quality of engagement—and so bring new voices into the policymaking process through participating that counts

Designing an Online Civic Engagement Platform: Balancing More vs. Better Participation in Complex Public Policymaking

A new form of online citizen participation in government decisionmaking has arisen in the United States (U.S.) under the Obama Administration. “Civic Participation 2.0” attempts to use Web 2.0 information and communication technologies to enable wider civic participation in government policymaking, based on three pillars of open government: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Thus far, the Administration has modeled Civic Participation 2.0 almost exclusively on a universalist/populist Web 2.0 philosophy of participation. In this model, content is created by users, who are enabled to shape the discussion and assess the value of contributions with little information or guidance from government decisionmakers. The authors suggest that this model often produces “participation” unsatisfactory to both government and citizens. The authors propose instead a model of Civic Participation 2.0 rooted in the theory and practice of democratic deliberation. In this model, the goal of civic participation is to reveal the conclusions people reach when they are informed about the issues and have the opportunity and motivation seriously to discuss them. Accordingly, the task of civic participation design is to provide the factual and policy information and the kinds of participation mechanisms that support and encourage this sort of participatory output. Based on the authors’ experience with Regulation Room, an experimental online platform for broadening effective civic participation in rulemaking (the process federal agencies use to make new regulations), the authors offer specific suggestions for how designers can strike the balance between ease of engagement and quality of engagement – and so bring new voices into public policymaking processes through participatory outputs that government decisionmakers will value

Knowledge in the People: Rethinking Value in Public Rulemaking Participation

A companion piece to Rulemaking vs. Democracy: Judging and Nudging Public Participation that Counts, this Essay continues to examine the nature and value of broader public participation in rulemaking. Here, we argue that rulemaking is a “community of practice,” with distinctive forms of argumentation and methods of reasoning that both reflect and embody craft knowledge. Rulemaking newcomers are outside this community of practice: Even when they are reasonably informed about the legal and policy aspects of the agency’s proposal, their participation differs in kind and form from that of sophisticated commenters. From observing the actual behavior of rulemaking newcomers in the Regulation Room project, we suggest that new public participation is often, if not predominantly, experiential in nature and narrative in form. We argue that it is unrealistic to expect that rulemaking newcomers can be significantly inculcated into the norms and methods of the existing rulemaking community of practice. Yet, the potential policymaking value of the on-the-ground, situated knowledge they can bring to the discussion justifies efforts to expand our understanding of the kinds of comments that should “count” in the process. We take some first steps in that direction in this Essay

Balancing Inclusion and “Enlightened Understanding” in Designing Online Civic Participation Systems: Experiences from Regulation Room

New forms of online citizen participation in government decision making have been fostered in the United States (U.S.) under the Obama Administration. Use of Web information technologies have been encouraged in an effort to create more back-and-forth communication between citizens and their government. These “Civic Participation 2.0” attempts to open the government up to broader public participation are based on three pillars of open government—transparency, participation, and collaboration. Thus far, the Administration has modeled Civic Participation 2.0 almost exclusively on the Web 2.0 ethos, in which users are enabled to shape the discussion and encouraged to assess the value of its content. We argue that strict adherence to the Web 2.0 model for citizen participation in public policymaking can produce “participation” that is unsatisfactory to both government decisionmakers and public participants. We believe that successful online civic participation design must balance inclusion and “enlightened understanding,” one of the core conditions for democratic deliberation. Based on our experience with Regulation Room, an experimental online participation platform trying to broaden meaningful public engagement in the process federal agencies use to make new regulations, we offer specific suggestions on how participation designers can strike the balance between ease of engagement and quality of engagement—and so bring new voices into the policymaking process through participating that counts