Social-ecological soundscapes: examining aircraft-harvester-caribou conflict in Arctic Alaska

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017As human development expands across the Arctic, it is crucial to carefully assess the impacts to remote natural ecosystems and to indigenous communities that rely on wild resources for nutritional and cultural wellbeing. Because indigenous communities and wildlife populations are interdependent, assessing how human activities impact traditional harvest practices can advance our understanding of the human dimensions of wildlife management. Indigenous communities across Arctic Alaska have expressed concern over the last four decades that low-flying aircraft interfere with their traditional harvest practices. For example, communities often have testified that aircraft disturb caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and thereby reduce harvest opportunities. Despite this longstanding concern, little research exists on the extent of aircraft activity in Arctic Alaska and on how aircraft affect the behavior and perceptions of harvesters. Therefore, the overarching goal of my research was to highlight the importance of aircraft-harvester conflict in Arctic Alaska and begin to address the issue using a scientific and community-driven approach. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated that conflict between aircraft and indigenous harvesters in Arctic Alaska is a widespread, understudied, and complex issue. By conducting a meta-analysis of the available literature, I quantified the deficiency of scientific knowledge about the impacts of aircraft on rural communities and traditional harvest practices in the Arctic. My results indicated that no peer-reviewed literature has addressed the conflict between low-flying aircraft and traditional harvesters in Arctic Alaska. I speculated that the scale over which aircraft, rural communities, and wildlife interact limits scientists' ability to determine causal relationships and therefore detracts from their interest in researching the human dimension of this social-ecological system. Innovative research approaches like soundscape ecology could begin to quantify interactions and provide baseline data that may foster mitigation discourses among stakeholders. In Chapter 2, I employed a soundscape-ecology approach to address concerns about aircraft activity expressed by the Alaska Native community of Nuiqsut. Nuiqsut faces the greatest volume of aircraft activity of any community in Arctic Alaska because of its proximity to intensive oil and gas activity. However, information on when and where these aircraft are flying is unavailable to residents, managers, and researchers. I worked closely with Nuiqsut residents to deploy acoustic monitoring systems along important caribou harvest corridors during the peak of caribou harvest, from early June through late August 2016. This method successfully captured aircraft sound and the community embraced my science for addressing local priorities. I found aircraft activity levels near Nuiqsut and surrounding oil developments (12 daily events) to be approximately six times greater than in areas over 30 km from the village (two daily events). Aircraft sound disturbance was 26 times lower in undeveloped areas (Noise Free Interval =13 hrs) than near human development (NFI = 0.5 hrs). My study provided baseline data on aircraft activity and noise levels. My research could be used by stakeholders and managers to develop conflict avoidance agreements and minimize interference with traditional harvest practices. Soundscape methods could be adapted to rural regions across Alaska that may be experiencing conflict with aircraft or other sources of noise that disrupt human-wildlife interactions. By quantifying aircraft activity using a soundscape approach, I demonstrated a novel application of an emerging field in ecology and provided the first scientific data on one dimension of a larger social-ecological system. Future soundscape studies should be integrated with research on both harvester and caribou behaviors to understand how the components within this system are interacting over space and time. Understanding the long-term impacts to traditional harvest practices will require integrated, cross-disciplinary efforts that collaborate with communities and other relevant stakeholders. Finally, my research will likely spark efforts to monitor and mitigate aircraft impacts to wildlife populations and traditional harvest practices across Alaska, helping to inform a decision-making process currently hindered by an absence of objective data

Identifying risks for male street gang affiliation: a systematic review and narrative synthesis

Gang violence has increased in recent years. Individuals are becoming gang affiliated younger, and many have suffered historic maltreatment. Subsequent exposure to violence can result in profound consequences, including acute psychological harm. This review aims to identify predictive risk factors for male street gang affiliation. A systematic literature search was conducted utilising PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Medline, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and the Social Policy and Practice databases (from the databases’ inception to 03/04/15). From this search, n=244 peer-reviewed papers were included in an initial scoping review, and n=102 thereafter met criteria for a systematic review; a narrative synthesis follows. Gang members have typically faced numerous historic adversities across multiple domains; individual, family, peers, school and community. Cumulative factors generated an independent risk. The meta-narrative described an overarching failure to safeguard vulnerable individuals, with the motivation for gang affiliation hypothetically arising from an attempt to have their basic needs met. Clinical and research recommendations were made to inform early intervention policy and practice

Beyond Bambi and Big Bucks: Exploring the Social Complexity of Deer Management in Indiana

Human interactions with white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) continue to change across the U.S. The growth of deer populations and urbanization of human populations have shifted values for wildlife away from traditional use toward mutual coexistence while simultaneously providing habitat for deer to thrive. Still, a mismatch exists between the reality of human-deer interactions and the management of them. Despite a changing social landscape, the human dimensions of deer management remain focused on hunting interests and the mitigation of crop damage to agricultural producers. Amid a national push to broaden wildlife ‘stakeholders’ to encompass all potential beneficiaries of wildlife, state wildlife agencies need to assess the needs and concerns of the broader public they serve to determine whether and how to engage nontraditional groups in wildlife management planning. Recognizing these needs, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (IN-DNR) partnered with Purdue University in 2018 to initiate the Integrated Deer Management Project (IDMP). As part of the IDMP, this dissertation comprises the first empirical assessment of social perceptions of white-tailed deer across Indiana. My research aimed to: (i) examine the initial context of human-deer interactions in Indiana and identify key social and cognitive factors that shape them; (ii) investigate how emotions, an understudied construct, interact with beliefs and attitudes to influence resident judgements about deer management; (iii) understand existing levels of satisfaction with deer management, potentials for social conflict over management approaches, and their social-ecological drivers; and (iv) develop indices and tools that can help IN-DNR officials better account for social perceptions and concerns in deer management planning. Due to a lack of prior knowledge about human-deer interactions in the state, I used an exploratory mixedmethods research design to address these objectives. I began by conducting 59 semi-structured interviews with residents around Indiana and two focus groups in the city of Bloomington (n=14) to understand their existing perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions related to deer and deer management. These interviews informed the development of a quantitative survey which I distributed to 6,000 residents across the state. I received 1806 completed surveys for a response rate of 33%. My data show that social perceptions of deer and deer management remain complex, driven by dynamic feedbacks among emotions, personal experiences, livelihood and behavioral contexts, beliefs about deer management, and beliefs about other social groups. I found that mixed emotions, situational contexts, and perceived power imbalances play key roles in shaping and shifting deerrelated cognitions, yet models of cognitive processing, and human-wildlife interactions more broadly, neglect these dynamics. Emotions, specifically, have been marginalized by researchers and practitioners, likely due to the perception that they represent irrational reactions rather than calculated judgements. Under different scenarios of encountering deer, however, I found that respondent emotions exert a mediating effect on their judgments about deer management, and that the type of deer encountered matters. Emotions thus work together with cognitions to process various stimuli in a human-wildlife encounter and reach a normative decision. I posit that understanding when and why emotional responses arise will help practitioners develop more effective and socially accepted approaches to wildlife management. I next developed and analyzed indices of public satisfaction with the IN-DNR and potentials for social conflict over deer management approaches. I found that public satisfaction with deer management is nuanced and multidimensional. Cognitive variables like residents’ perceived acceptability of management methods and their deer-related concerns most strongly predicted agency performance and quality measures of satisfaction, whereas demographic characteristics including self-identity, wildlife value orientation, and allowance of hunting on one’s property exerted the strongest influences on trust components of satisfaction. Future studies should advance a multidimensional conception of satisfaction and associate it with key variables that I suspect underly satisfaction but were not captured in this study: perceived control, psychological distance, and norms of knowledge exchange between wildlife agencies and the public

A Review of Aircraft-Subsistence Harvester Conflict in Arctic Alaska + Supplementary Appendix 1

The traditional harvest of wild resources carries significant nutritional, economic, and sociocultural values for rural residents in the Arctic, especially for Indigenous subsistence communities. Rural communities in the Alaskan Arctic have expressed concern that aircraft activity from industry, commercial hunting, research, and tourism disrupts their harvest of wildlife, particularly caribou (Rangifer tarandus). However, little research exists on how aircraft impact harvest opportunities. Our objective was to assess the extent of scientific knowledge on aircraft-harvester interaction in the Arctic through a systematic search of the available literature. We found that no peer-reviewed publications addressed the conflict between aircraft and harvesters in the region. Some literature addressed aircraft impacts to subsistence species, but did not discuss how those impacts would affect local harvesters. Most research has been directed towards studying aircraft impacts on wildlife or humans in urbanized areas rather than in rural, subsistence communities. Therefore, we expanded our review to draw from gray literature (e.g., public records, government documents) to synthesize the current state of concern and perceptions on aircraft disturbance to subsistence harvesters. Based on the gray literature, we found that harvester frustrations were primarily directed toward low-flying aircraft and non-local operations. However, an absence of quantitative information on the extent of interaction between aircraft activity and harvesters hinders an objective assessment of the conflict. Mitigating conflict will require research focused on this data gap and may begin with better cooperation among rural communities, aircraft users, and decision-makers.La récolte traditionnelle des ressources sauvages comporte d’importantes valeurs nutritionnelles, économiques et socioculturelles pour les résidents des milieux ruraux de l’Arctique, surtout pour les collectivités autochtones axées sur les récoltes de subsistance. Les collectivités rurales de l’Arctique alaskien s’inquiètent du fait que l’activité aérienne à caractère industriel, la chasse commerciale, la recherche et le tourisme perturbent la récolte de la faune, plus particulièrement le caribou (Rangifer tarandus). Cependant, peu de recherches ont été effectuées au sujet des incidences des aéronefs sur les possibilités de récoltes. Notre objectif consistait à évaluer l’étendue des connaissances scientifiques sur l’interaction entre les aéronefs et les récolteurs de l’Arctique en faisant le dépouillement systématique de la documentation disponible. Cela nous a permis de constater qu’il n’existe pas de publications révisées par des pairs au sujet du conflit entre les aéronefs et les récolteurs de la région. Certains documents abordaient les incidences des aéronefs sur les espèces de subsistance, mais ne déterminaient pas les effets de ces incidences sur les récolteurs de la région. La plupart des études portaient sur les incidences des aéronefs sur la faune ou les humains des secteurs urbains plutôt que des collectivités rurales de subsistance. Par conséquent, nous avons poussé notre dépouillement plus loin au point d’inclure la documentation parallèle (comme les dossiers publics, les documents gouvernementaux) afin de faire la synthèse de l’état actuel des préoccupations et des perceptions sur la perturbation causée par les aéronefs à l’égard des récolteurs de subsistance. La documentation parallèle nous a permis de découvrir que les frustrations des récolteurs concernaient principalement les aéronefs volant à basse altitude et les opérations qui ne sont pas locales. Toutefois, l’absence d’information quantitative sur l’étendue de l’interaction entre l’activité aérienne et les récolteurs nuit à l’évaluation objective du conflit. Pour atténuer ce conflit, il faudra faire des recherches visant à combler ce manque de données. Cela pourrait commencer par une meilleure coopération entre les collectivités rurales, les utilisateurs d’aéronefs et les preneurs de décisions