Category Archives: discussion

Hunting in the tropics: examining hunter rationality [Wed, Feb 3]

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Excessive hunting pressure is a major threat to tropical vertebrates. Research on hunters has broadly assumed that hunters are rational economic agents, willing to switch to more attractive alternative activities. However, my study in Southwest China demonstrates that villagers may be highly unwilling to stop hunting, despite low expected catch rates and stiff penalties for hunting and gun ownership. I will primarily discuss a project that used quantitative and qualitative interviews to elucidate the behavior of hunters, as well as the application of novel techniques to analyze these data. I will also discuss ongoing research that combines field data with theoretical models to explore how resilient prey may subsidize the continued harvest of rare game species. I am eager to receive feedback and share ideas with audience members.

Charlotte Chang
PhD candidate | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Princeton University
chc2@princeton.edu

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Barriers to Diversity in Higher Education and the Promise of Diverse Scientific Teams [Wednesday, Jan 27]

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This Wednesday’s roundtable will be led by Dr. Barbara Endemaño Walker and Professor Kyle Lewis from UCSB.

The Center for Research, Excellence and Diversity in Team Science (CREDITS) at UCSB is an integrated research and training program to increase and enhance the capacity and effectiveness of transdisciplinary scientific teams in California.  Diversity on teams is known to have positive effects on creativity, innovation, and productivity.  Apart from its contribution to scientific breakthroughs and grand challenge problems, collaborative transdisciplinary science – “Team Science” – has beneficial impacts on individual research careers.  Team Science projects garner more funding, and yield greater publication productivity and higher impact publications.  Despite the benefits of diversity to teams, women and URM scientists are less likely to participate in team science collaborations, and their participation in these networks develops later in their careers.  In this presentation we will provide an overview of key interventions to increase the broader participation of women and URM faculty in higher education, and summarize the research on diversity and collective intelligence.

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Kyle Lewis
Professor of Technology Management
College of Engineering, UCSB

Barbara Endemaño Walker
Special Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor for Diversity Initiatives /
Director of Research Development for the Social Sciences, Humanities and Fine Arts
Office of Research, UCSB

 

Kyle Lewis is Professor of Technology Management in the College of Engineering. She holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, an MS in Industrial Administration (MBA) from Carnegie-Mellon University, and degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Duke University. She joined the faculty of UCSB in the Fall of 2014. Prior to joining UCSB, Dr. Lewis was a tenured professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Lewis’ research examines how organizations leverage individual and collective knowledge. She examines the performance of teams, especially those teams engaged in knowledge work such as professional services, new product development, and project-based tasks. She has published articles in the top journals in the field of Management, including Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Management Science, Journal of Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Group Dynamics. Dr. Lewis served as Division Chair in the Academy of Management (Managerial and Organization Cognition Division) and was a past senior editor for Organization Science.

 

Barbara Louise Endemaño Walker is the Special Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor for Diversity Initiatives, and the Director of Research Development for the Social Sciences, Humanities and Fine Arts in the Office of Research at UC Santa Barbara. Walker’s research on the gendered political ecology of marine resources in Ghana, French Polynesia, and California has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and NOAA Sea Grant, among others. Her current research programs examine a) the intersections of team science and broadening participation in STEM and higher education, and b) alternative food networks among US fishing communities. Her work has been published in the Professional Geographer; Gender Place and Culture; Society and Natural Resources; PLOS ONE; and the Journal of Geography and Higher Education among others. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Geography from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Anthropology and African Studies from UCLA.

 

Development at NCEAS, Fundraising for Ecology [Jan 13, 2016]

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This round-table will be led by Jeanne Kearns who is the new Director of Development at NCEAS. Jeanne will be discussing what development is, in the context of NCEAS and how the NCEAS community can contribute to its development. In particular, Jeanne will present on:

1) Who I am and why I do what I do?
2) What is Development and What does Development look like at UCSB?
3) How does NCEAS fit into this picture?
and then answer any questions and hopefully have a fruitful discussion!
Jeanne Kearns

Director of Development

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

University of California Santa Barbara

735 State Street, Suite 300
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
JSK blazer

Open Science with the Ocean Health Index [Nov 18, 2015]

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The Ocean Health Index (OHI) is a framework to assess the state of our marine systems. With a definition of ‘healthy’ that includes sustainable human use, the OHI scores locations from 0-100 depending on how sustainably their waters provide a suite of benefits to people. The OHI framework was first used to assess all coastal nations globally, and was published in 2012 (Halpern et al. 2012, Nature).
Following the 2012 publication, the OHI framework has been used to assess smaller-scale locations, most often states or provinces within a single nation. These smaller spatial scales often have information that better represents local characteristics of marine systems and are also often the scale at which policy decisions are made.
To date, eleven assessments using the OHI framework have been completed at global, national, and regional scales, four of which have been led by independent academic or government groups. To facilitate these assessments, we have developed a suite of open-source tools and instruction. The OHI Toolbox provides structure for data organization and storage, with data processing and goal modeling done in the programming language R and RStudio for reproducibility and repeatability. The OHI Toolbox is stored on the open-source online platform GitHub, which allows for transparency and collaboration and also houses websites to display and communicate methods and results with interactive visualizations. More information can be found at ohi-science.org (currently under a major restructuring and improvement, stay tuned!).
Julia Stewart Lowndes, PhD
Project Scientist, Ocean Health Index
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
735 State Street, Suite 300
Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, USA
ohi • ohi-science • github • twitter
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Climate change, plant ecology and conservation: a case study of the SF Bay Area [Thurs, Nov 5]

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Climate change is expected to profoundly impact terrestrial vegetation, and the mechanisms, rate and extent of change will influence biodiversity conservation and the ecological functions of natural ecosystems. The San Francisco Bay Area has steep climate gradients and rugged topography, supporting a wide range of natural habitats. Using a novel application of multinomial logistic regression, we have modeled the projected impacts of climate change on Bay Area vegetation. Model projections are evaluated over a wide range of possible future climates, allowing us to evaluate sensitivity of vegetation to changing climate, without choosing specific future climate scenarios. Sensitivity is highly variable across the Bay Area. Perhaps surprisingly, sensitivity to climate change is modeled to be greater on north-facing slopes and cooler locations. The model projections are best interpreted as the long-term equilibrium response to a particular degree of climate change, but they do not provide insight into how fast this equilibrium will be achieved or the transient states that may occur in response to rapid climate change. We combine model results with a discussion of the ecological mechanisms of vegetation change to better understand the challenges raised by disequilibrium dynamics and the implications for conservation biology in coming decades.

Dr. David D. Ackerly
Professor,
Department of Integrative Biology
University of California, Berkeley
(www.ackerlylab.org)

Ackerly

A Network Approach to Assessing Social-Ecological Systems in the Cook Islands (Nov 10)

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A social-ecological system approach emphasizes the connectivity that exists between natural and human systems. This coupling is evident at a local scale, with people accessing natural resources for food provisioning and economic gain, and ecosystems providing services such as storm protection and food security. At a larger scale, institutions, and regional and global ecological processes influence how systems function. I present findings from research in Colombia and the Solomon Islands where social networks, institutions, livelihoods, and local ecological knowledge were analyzed to determine the factors that influence an individual’s motivation to comply with marine resource management and to withstand large-scale ecological disturbances. Finally, I propose a network-based approach to quantify social-ecological system interaction and assess the drivers of resilience in the Cook Islands.

Dr. Jaime Matera
Anthropology Program
California State University Channel Islands

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Protecting and predicting genetic diversity of whole communities – a case study of Hawaiian reefs

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Conservation strategies increasingly call for preserving areas of high genetic diversity. This shift necessitates a look beyond single-species studies toward methods to predict and map community-level trends in genetic diversity. Theory suggests that genetic diversity primarily responds to habitat area and isolation, but ecology particular to each species nevertheless modify spatial patterns across co-distributed species. The balance and sources of convergent and divergent forces shaping genetic diversity of a community are largely unexplored.  With data for 47 reef species sampled across 16 Hawaiian Islands, we test a suite of hypotheses about drivers of biodiversity with a novel metric representing the emergent genetic diversity of the community. Results reassuringly support foundational theory on the relationship of diversity to habitat, but also suggest intriguing eco-genetic feedbacks and concerning signs that thermal stress has effected the genetic resilience of the whole reef community. I discuss the implications of these results for managing and protecting genetic diversity at the community level.

Kimberley Selkoe

Center Associate, NCEAS, UCSB /
Associate Research Biologist, Marine Science Institute, UCSB

selkoe

Transitions of social-ecological subsistence systems in the Arctic

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In this round-table, I will discuss how global change are transforming small-scale, native, resource-dependent communities in the Arctic. These social-ecological systems are increasingly exposed to global warming, industrial development and globalization, which subsequently alter the local SES dynamics. Subsistence use of fish and wildlife is a cornerstone in these communities. This traditional utilization of natural resources are commonly assumed to be donor-controlled, in which the users do not control the resource level but adapt to the fluctuating availability of fish and wildlife. A combination of increased harvest efficiency through the introduction of new technology, increased resource demand through population increase and commercialization, and reduced resource stocks by exogenous pressures such as climate change, is likely to increase the pressure on the stocks of fish and wildlife. The result could be a transition of the SES from a provisioning action situation, where the collective challenge is to secure subsistence on a local scale, to an appropriation action situation where the collective challenge is to avoid overuse of a common-pool resource on the scale of the resource stock. We applied cross-national comparison of Arctic Alaska, Canada and Greenland, synthesized secondary data from documents, official statistics and grey and scientific literature, and asked: What are the evidence for SES transitions in the Arctic? Which exogenous pressures are associated with transitions, and what conditions might prevent transitions? How does the transitions change the focus and sustainability challenges faced by the governance systems?

Although the results I will present are from the Arctic, I hope the talk will stimulate a more general discussion on how global change might transform local social-ecological systems.

Dr Per Fauchald

NCEAS visiting scientist

Senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research

Per

Habitats, coastal protection and the SNAP Coastal Defenses Working Group

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For this round-table, I’ll start by giving an overview of a number of topics around the fascinating field of coastal ecosystems and coastal risk reduction. I’ll give an update on the activities of the SNAP Coastal Defenses Working Group and my work within this group, touch upon a closely coastal hazards assessment exercise in Papua New Guinea and an upcoming project on mangrove restoration for coastal resilience. I would like to combine this talk with a discussion on the challenges of small data; of bringing together diverse disciplines to bear on a single issue and; of finding ways to tie these disparate strands together.

For a sneak preview, here is an outline of some results from an almost (but never) complete meta-analysis:

We synthesize global evidence from field measurements of wave and storm surge reductions in natural coastal habitats and data on the costs and benefits of habitat restoration projects targeted at coastal protection. 76 field measurements show that coastal habitats can reduce wave heights up to 79% (or wave energy up to 96%). Coral reefs are the most effective habitats for wave reduction, followed by salt-marshes, mangroves and seagrass and kelp beds. In addition to waves, coastal mangrove and marsh wetlands can reduce storm surge heights by up to 70% over extents of several kilometers. We find a strong relationship between incident wave heights and wave reduction extents for all habitat types. Other critical biophysical parameters that influence wave reduction include habitat width (coral reefs and seagrass/kelp) and vegetation height (mangroves, salt-marshes). We also discuss the influence of a few engineering ratios (e.g. the ratio of wave height H over water depth, h) on wave reduction extents. We conduct the first global review of the costs and benefits of past and on-going habitat restoration projects targeted at coastal protection. The projects provide a wide range of coastal protection and risk reduction benefits including reductions in erosion, flood damage and engineering costs. Quantitative assessments of benefit-cost ratios and comparisons to engineering structures suggest that mangrove projects are the most cost-effective and are, on average, twice as cheap as comparable engineering structures for wave reduction.

Hope to see you there!

Sid
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Looking for hotspots while the world gets hotter: multi-species genetic data inform landscape-scale conservation in the face of climate change in the San Joaquin Desert of California.

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Global climate change can create patterns of biodiversity where once-widespread species become restricted to small islands of persistence, commonly called climate refugia. Species can subsequently recolonize the intervening spaces between the islands, masking the historical range restriction. Advances in molecular genetic technology now allow us to see the signature of these historical restriction events. In our ongoing study of desert vertebrates in the San Joaquin Valley, we are layering patterns of population subdivision from multiple species into a composite map of historical population centers. We have significant population subdivison as well as pattern concordance among some species, suggesting past refuges in the Panoche Hills and the Carrizo Plain. A parallel study projecting the distribution of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard following the current climate change event shows both spots as potential refugia, suggesting the tantalizing possibility that contemporary hotspots may serve as future redoubts.

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Michael Westphal
Bureau of Land Management
Hollister Field Office, CA