Living on the Edge: Ecological and Cultural Edges as Sources of Diversity for Social—Ecological Resilience

A well-known facet of ecosystems is that the edges—the boundaries or transitions from one ecosystem to another—often exhibit high levels of species richness or biodiversity. These transitional areas often show features of species composition, structure, and function representative of the ecosystems they transcend, as well as having their own unique array of species and characteristics. Cultural transitional areas—zones where two or more cultures converge and interact—are similarly rich and diverse in cultural traits, exhibiting cultural and linguistic features of each of the contributing peoples. This results in an increase in cultural capital, and resilience, by providing a wider range of traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom on which to draw, especially in times of stress and change. We propose that indigenous peoples whose living territories traverse ecological edges have a correspondingly increased access to economically important resources and therefore have a greater capacity for flexibility. Finally, we suggest that indigenous peoples are drawn to areas having a high incidence of ecological edges, and furthermore, that they actively create and maintain ecological edges. This practice provides them with a greater diversity of cultural capital and helps to maintain their flexibility and resilience. Examples from several regions of Canada are provided, from the southern interior of British Columbia, to the Lake Winnipeg watershed of Manitoba and Ontario, to James Bay.     

New Directions for Understanding the Spatial Resilience of Social–Ecological Systems

The concept of spatial resilience has brought a new focus on the influence of multi-scale processes on the dynamics of ecosystems. Initial ideas about spatial resilience focused on coral reefs and emphasized escalating anthropogenic disturbances across the broader seascape. This perspective resonated with a new awareness of global drivers of change, such as growth in international trade and shifts in climate, and the need to respond by scaling up governance and management. We review recent trends and emerging ideas in spatial resilience, using coral reefs and dependent communities as exemplars of multi-scale social–ecological systems. Despite recent advances, management and governance of ecosystems remain spatially fragmented and constrained to small scales. Temporally, many interventions still miss or ignore warning signals and struggle to cope with history, politics, long-term cumulative pressures, feedbacks, and sudden surprises. Significant recent progress has been made in understanding the relevance of spatial and temporal scale, heterogeneity, networks, the importance of place, and multi-scale governance. Emerging themes include better integration of ecology and conservation with social and economic science, and incorporating temporal dynamics in spatial analyses. A better understanding of the multi-scale spatial and temporal processes that drive the resilience of linked social-ecosystems will help address the widespread mismatch between the scales of ongoing ecological change and effective long-term governance of land- and seascapes.     

Building Resilience in Lagoon Social–Ecological Systems: A Local-level Perspective

Building resilience in integrated human and nature systems or social–ecological systems (SES) is key for sustainability. Therefore, developing ways of assessing resilience is of practical as well as theoretical significance. We approached the issue by focusing on the local level and using five lagoon systems from various parts of the world for illustration. We used a framework based on four categories of factors for building resilience: (1) learning to live with change and uncertainty; (2) nurturing diversity for reorganization and renewal; (3) combining different kinds of knowledge; and (4) creating opportunity for self-organization. Under each category, the cases generated a number of items for building resilience, and potential surrogates of resilience, that is, variables through which the persistence of SES emerging through change can be assessed. The following factors were robust across all five lagoon SES cases: learning from crisis, responding to change, nurturing ecological memory, monitoring the environment, and building capacity for self-organization and conflict management.     

Ciguatera Fish Poisoning in La Habana,Cuba: A Study of Local Social–Ecological Resilience

Following the collapse of the Cuban economy in the early 1990s, epidemiologists in the Cuban Ministry of Health noticed dramatic increases in reported outbreaks of ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP) in some coastal communities. This article summarizes the results of a comparative case study which applied an ecosystem approach to human health to investigate this issue. Situated learning and complexity theories were used to interpret the results of the investigation. CFP outbreaks are influenced by a complex set of interactions between ecological and socioeconomic processes. This study found that the level of organization of the local sports fishing community and the degree of degradation of the local nearshore marine ecosystem appear to be key factors influencing the diverging levels of CFP outbreaks recorded in the 1990s in the communities studied.     

Aldo Leopold’s Land Health from a Resilience Point of View: Self-renewal Capacity of Social–Ecological Systems

Health approaches to ecology have a strong basis in Aldo Leopold’s thinking, and contemporary ecohealth in turn has a strong philosophical basis in Leopold. To commemorate the 125th anniversary of Leopold’s birth (1887–1948), we revisit his ideas, specifically the notions of stewardship (land ethic), productive use of ecosystems (land), and ecosystem renewal. We focus on Leopold’s perspective on the self-renewal capacity of the land, as understood in terms of integrity and land health, from the contemporary perspective of resilience theory and ecological theory more generally. Using a broad range of literature, we explore insights and implications of Leopold’s work for today’s human–environment relationships (integrated social–ecological systems), concerns for biodiversity, the development of agency with respect to stewardship, and key challenges of his time and of ours. Leopold’s seminal concept of land health can be seen as a triangulation of productive use, self-renewal, and stewardship, and it can be reinterpreted through the resilience lens as the health of social–ecological systems. In contemporary language, this involves the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and the ability to exercise agency both for conservation and for environmental justice.     

Local Knowledge,Subsistence Harvests,and Social–Ecological Complexity in James Bay

Ecosystems are complex and difficult to predict and control. Western science-based societies have tended to simplify ecosystems to manage them. Some indigenous and other rural groups who interact closely with a given resource system seem to have developed practices that are adapted to live with complexity. This paper examines how indigenous Cree hunters in James Bay, subarctic Canada, understand and deal with ecological complexity and dynamics, and how their understanding of uncertainty and variability shape subsistence activities. The focus is the Canada goose (Branta canadensis) hunt which is adaptive to shifts and changes in local and regional conditions. Ecological understandings of Cree hunters allow them to account for and deal with a very large number of variables at multiples scales. The Cree deal with these variables qualitatively, an approach consistent with some scientific ways of dealing with complexity, such as adaptive management and fuzzy logic.     

Biodiversity Patterns along Ecological Gradients: Unifying β-Diversity Indices

Ecologists have developed an abundance of conceptions and mathematical expressions to define β-diversity, the link between local (α) and regional-scale (γ) richness, in order to characterize patterns of biodiversity along ecological (i.e., spatial and environmental) gradients. These patterns are often realized by regression of β-diversity indices against one or more ecological gradients. This practice, however, is subject to two shortcomings that can undermine the validity of the biodiversity patterns. First, many β-diversity indices are constrained to range between fixed lower and upper limits. As such, regression analysis of β-diversity indices against ecological gradients can result in regression curves that extend beyond these mathematical constraints, thus creating an interpretational dilemma. Second, despite being a function of the same measured α- and γ-diversity, the resultant biodiversity pattern depends on the choice of β-diversity index. We propose a simple logistic transformation that rids beta-diversity indices of their mathematical constraints, thus eliminating the possibility of an uninterpretable regression curve. Moreover, this transformation results in identical biodiversity patterns for three commonly used classical beta-diversity indices. As a result, this transformation eliminates the difficulties of both shortcomings, while allowing the researcher to use whichever beta-diversity index deemed most appropriate. We believe this method can help unify the study of biodiversity patterns along ecological gradients.     

Barriers and Bridges to Prevention and Control of Dengue: The Need for a Social–Ecological Approach

This article critically examines how programs for the prevention and control of dengue fever have been conducted in the absence of an integrated approach, and considers the social and ecological factors influencing their effectiveness. Despite recognition of dengue fever as the most important arboviral disease affecting humans, and in spite of a greater emphasis on community-based control approaches, the burden placed on the communities, countries, and regions affected by this disease continues to rise. In considering historical experience in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the global forces that are exerting new pressures, the important elements of successful control programs are identified as community ownership, partnership with government, leadership, scalability, and control of immature mosquitoes. The key barriers to the exchange of knowledge and the transdisciplinary cooperation necessary for sustainable dengue control are rooted in differences in values among policy-makers, citizens, and scientists and are repeatedly expressed in technical, economic, cultural, geographic, and political dimensions. Through consideration of case studies in Cuba, Guatemala, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, the limitations of control approaches that fail to take into account the complexities of ecological and social systems are presented. Bridges to effective control are identified as the basis for adaptability, both of control programs to the mosquito vector’s changing behavior and of education programs to public, regional and local particularities, as well as transdisciplinarity, community empowerment, the ability to scale local experiences up to the macro-level, and the capacity to learn from experience to achieve sustainability.     

Ecological,Evolutionary and Social Constraints on Reproductive Effort: Are Hoary Marmots Really Biennial Breeders?

Biennial breeding is a rare life-history trait observed in animal species living in harsh, unproductive environments. This reproductive pattern is thought to occur in 10 of 14 species in the genus Marmota, making marmots useful model organisms for studying its ecological and evolutionary implications. Biennial breeding in marmots has been described as an obligate pattern which evolved as a mechanism to mitigate the energetic costs of reproduction (Evolved Constraint hypothesis). However, recent anecdotal evidence suggests that it is a facultative pattern controlled by annual variation in climate and food availability (Environmental Constraint hypothesis). Finally, in social animals like marmots, biennial breeding could result from reproductive competition between females within social groups (Social Constraint hypothesis). We evaluated these three hypotheses using mark-recapture data from an 8-year study of hoary marmot (Marmota caligata) population dynamics in the Yukon. Annual variation in breeding probability was modeled using multi-state mark-recapture models, while other reproductive life-history traits were modeled with generalized linear mixed models. Hoary marmots were neither obligate nor facultative biennial breeders, and breeding probability was insensitive to evolved, environmental, or social factors. However, newly mature females were significantly less likely to breed than older individuals. Annual breeding did not result in increased mortality. Female survival and, to a lesser extent, average fecundity were correlated with winter climate, as indexed by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Hoary marmots are less conservative breeders than previously believed, and the evidence for biennial breeding throughout Marmota, and in other arctic/alpine/antarctic animals, should be re-examined. Prediction of future population dynamics requires an accurate understanding of life history strategies, and of how life history traits allow animals to cope with changes in weather and other demographic influences.     

Hawai‘i’s Mountain-to-Sea Ecosystems: Social–Ecological Microcosms for Sustainability Science and Practice

There is an urgent need to develop the underlying theory and principles of “sustainability science,” based on an understanding of the fundamental interactions between nature and humans. This requires a new research and education paradigm that embraces biocomplexity, integrates the physical, biological, and social sciences, and uses a coupled, human–natural systems approach. An initiative aligned with this paradigm and approach, and centered on the Hawaiian Island’s unique mountain-to-sea ecosystems, is developing at the University of Hawai‘i. These ecosystems, extending from upland tropical forests to the fringing coral reefs, correspond to the roughly wedge-shaped catchments, traditionally called ahupua‘a in the Hawaiian language. Despite the collapse of the ahupua‘a system and, tragically, the Native Hawaiian population, its legacy of ecological and cultural stewardship remains. This legacy, and the potential of these ecosystems as microcosms for addressing the core questions of sustainability science, has provided the impetus for a growing number of projects employing a social–ecological systems perspective. An overview of three projects that employ a “learning community” approach and cultural stewardship perspective inspired by the ahupua‘a system is provided. These include the Ecosystems Thrust Area of Hawai‘i EPSCoR, a U.S. National Science Foundation research infrastructure program, focused on ecosystem research and monitoring activities; a sustainability curriculum program, Mālama I Ka ‘Āina, of the College of Education; and a project that builds on programs of the Division of Ecology and Health and its affiliated Asia-Pacific Center for Infectious Disease Ecology, linking ecosystem resilience and infectious diseases.     

Research Stakeholders’ Views on Benefits and Challenges for Public Health Research Data Sharing in Kenya: The Importance of Trust and Social Relations

Background

There is increasing recognition of the importance of sharing research data within the international scientific community, but also of the ethical and social challenges this presents, particularly in the context of structural inequities and varied capacity in international research. Public involvement is essential to building locally responsive research policies, including on data sharing, but little research has involved stakeholders from low-to-middle income countries.

Methods

Between January and June 2014, a qualitative study was conducted in Kenya involving sixty stakeholders with varying experiences of research in a deliberative process to explore views on benefits and challenges in research data sharing. In-depth interviews and extended small group discussions based on information sharing and facilitated debate were used to collect data. Data were analysed using Framework Analysis, and charting flow and dynamics in debates.

Findings

The findings highlight both the opportunities and challenges of communicating about this complex and relatively novel topic for many stakeholders. For more and less research-experienced stakeholders, ethical research data sharing is likely to rest on the development and implementation of appropriate trust-building processes, linked to local perceptions of benefits and challenges. The central nature of trust is underpinned by uncertainties around who might request what data, for what purpose and when. Key benefits perceived in this consultation were concerned with the promotion of public health through science, with legitimate beneficiaries defined differently by different groups. Important challenges were risks to the interests of study participants, communities and originating researchers through stigmatisation, loss of privacy, impacting autonomy and unfair competition, including through forms of intentional and unintentional ''misuse'' of data. Risks were also seen for science.

Discussion

Given background structural inequities in much international research, building trust in this low-to-middle income setting includes ensuring that the interests of study participants, primary communities and originating researchers will be promoted as far as possible, as well as protected. Important ways of building trust in data sharing include involving the public in policy development and implementation, promoting scientific collaborations around data sharing and building close partnerships between researchers and government health authorities to provide checks and balances on data sharing, and promote near and long-term translational benefits.     

Priming of Social Distance? Failure to Replicate Effects on Social and Food Judgments

Williams and Bargh (2008) reported an experiment in which participants were simply asked to plot a single pair of points on a piece of graph paper, with the coordinates provided by the experimenter specifying a pair of points that lay at one of three different distances (close, intermediate, or far, relative to the range available on the graph paper). The participants who had graphed a more distant pair reported themselves as being significantly less close to members of their own family than did those who had plotted a more closely-situated pair. In another experiment, people's estimates of the caloric content of different foods were reportedly altered by the same type of spatial distance priming. Direct replications of both results were attempted, with precautions to ensure that the experimenter did not know what condition the participant was assigned to. The results showed no hint of the priming effects reported by Williams and Bargh (2008).     

Assessing Social – Ecological Trade-Offs to Advance Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management

Modern resource management faces trade-offs in the provision of various ecosystem goods and services to humanity. For fisheries management to develop into an ecosystem-based approach, the goal is not only to maximize economic profits, but to consider equally important conservation and social equity goals. We introduce such a triple-bottom line approach to the management of multi-species fisheries using the Baltic Sea as a case study. We apply a coupled ecological-economic optimization model to address the actual fisheries management challenge of trading-off the recovery of collapsed cod stocks versus the health of ecologically important forage fish populations. Management strategies based on profit maximization would rebuild the cod stock to high levels but may cause the risk of stock collapse for forage species with low market value, such as Baltic sprat (Fig. 1A). Economically efficient conservation efforts to protect sprat would be borne almost exclusively by the forage fishery as sprat fishing effort and profits would strongly be reduced. Unless compensation is paid, this would challenge equity between fishing sectors (Fig. 1B). Optimizing equity while respecting sprat biomass precautionary levels would reduce potential profits of the overall Baltic fishery, but may offer an acceptable balance between overall profits, species conservation and social equity (Fig. 1C). Our case study shows a practical example of how an ecosystem-based fisheries management will be able to offer society options to solve common conflicts between different resource uses. Adding equity considerations to the traditional trade-off between economy and ecology will greatly enhance credibility and hence compliance to management decisions, a further footstep towards healthy fish stocks and sustainable fisheries in the world ocean.Open in a separate windowFigure 1Summary of multispecies management options in the Baltic.(A) Profit maximum. (B) Economic optimum while respecting sprat B_PA. (C) Equitable optimum while respecting sprat B_PA. Central numbers indicate total profits (million €/year) as well as an equity measure (in brackets). Area of each pie slice is relative to status quo values 2008-2010 (black circle), with error bars from sensitivity analysis.     

Ecological accounting for an integrated “pig–biogas–fish” system based on emergetic indicators

With the expansion of urbanization in China, the integrated biogas-utilization system has gained its popularity for both renewable energy production and multi-level utilization of organic waste. To appraise the ecological performance of the integrated biogas system, systematic accounting is undertaken for an integrated “pig–biogas–fish” system in Hubei province, China. Based on Odum's concept of embodied solar energy as a unified measure for environmental resources, human labors and purchased goods, a set of emergetic indicators are employed to quantify the system sustainability. The results reveal that in a 20-year designed lifetime scenario, 94.69% of the total emergy inputs for the “pig–biogas–fish” system are attributed to purchased social resources. Three kinds of products, namely pig, biogas, fish are taken into consideration, and transformity of the “pig–biogas–fish” system is calculated as 1.26E + 05 seJ/J. Compared with the Chinese conventional agriculture system, the integrated biogas system shows a higher sustainability. Given that most biogas systems have a lifespan less than 20 years, for the “pig–biogas–fish” system, six other scenarios with different lifespans are studied to investigate the impact of the lifespan on sustainability. The findings suggest that the “pig–biogas–fish” system should be well operated for at least 8 years to prove its advantage in ecological economy over the conventional agriculture system. This has essential policy implications that local government should strengthen subsequent management on biogas production to extend the practical service life of the biogas system.     

Is the Social–Ecological Framework Useful in Understanding Infectious Diseases? The Case of HIV/AIDS

The extraordinary complexity of emerging infectious diseases calls for new paradigms and approaches to understand the casual mechanisms underlying pathogen emergence and to improve disease prevention. An attempt was made to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and stimulate transdisciplinary approaches to improve emerging infectious disease research during and subsequent to a meeting held in March 2005 as part of the US NIH Roadmap initiative “Research Teams of the Future.” The meeting drew on models and theories associated with the idea of humans and nature as interactive, complex systems. Of the three diseases chosen as case studies to represent the wide range of social and ecological emergence factors involved (dengue, leptospirosis, and HIV/AIDS), HIV/AIDS proved especially difficult. This Profile examines the meeting themes with a particular focus on the deliberations of a working group focused on HIV/AIDS. Attention is given to the challenges of bridging different disciplines and perspectives in applying a social-ecological framework to analyze HIV/AIDS and the benefits of reductionistic vs. holistic strategies in responding to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. The issues raised point to opportunities to significantly deepen understanding of HIV/AIDS as a transdisciplinary problem. Disclaimer: The author is Director of the Research Program at the East–West Center and was chair of the HIV/AIDS mini-symposium. This Profile is based on the important contributions and efforts of all the members of the HIV/AIDS working group. All omissions or misrepresentations are the author’s.     

Ebola and Localized Blame on Social Media: Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Conversations During the 2014–2015 Ebola Epidemic

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry - This study aimed to analyze main groups accused on social media of causing or spreading the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In this analysis,...     

Managing the Human–Ecological Interface: Marine Resources as Example and Laboratory

The field of resource management integrates human and ecological systems. It is currently undergoing a difficult transition as it broadens to accommodate new values and interests. Some of the problems associated with this transition are evident in marine ecosystems, where the management of the ecological–human interface has been hindered by a lack of basic understanding. Using marine fisheries as examples, this paper describes the proximate and underlying causes of the human–ecological problem. It identifies areas in which basic research is needed on the behavioral dynamics of marine resource use, including incentives, feedbacks, management scale, monitoring and evaluation, alternative management approaches, the role of history, and human capital. It discusses the cost of failing to invest in social science research and identifies barriers to interdisciplinary research. Priorities for interdisciplinary research are listed. Received 30 November 2000; accepted 20 April 2001.     

Counting on β-Diversity to Safeguard the Resilience of Estuaries

Coastal ecosystems are often stressed by non-point source and cumulative effects that can lead to local-scale community homogenisation and a concomitant loss of large-scale ecological connectivity. Here we investigate the use of β-diversity as a measure of both community heterogeneity and ecological connectivity. To understand the consequences of different environmental scenarios on heterogeneity and connectivity, it is necessary to understand the scale at which different environmental factors affect β-diversity. We sampled macrofauna from intertidal sites in nine estuaries from New Zealand’s North Island that represented different degrees of stress derived from land-use. We used multiple regression models to identify relationships between β-diversity and local sediment variables, factors related to the estuarine and catchment hydrodynamics and morphology and land-based stressors. At local scales, we found higher β-diversity at sites with a relatively high total richness. At larger scales, β-diversity was positively related to γ-diversity, suggesting that a large regional species pool was linked with large-scale heterogeneity in these systems. Local environmental heterogeneity influenced β-diversity at both local and regional scales, although variables at the estuarine and catchment scales were both needed to explain large scale connectivity. The estuaries expected a priori to be the most stressed exhibited higher variance in community dissimilarity between sites and connectivity to the estuary species pool. This suggests that connectivity and heterogeneity metrics could be used to generate early warning signals of cumulative stress.