This will be an informal discussion related to sustainability issues for organizations such as our own. Please come prepared to share your experiences, opinions and ideas! I hope that through this discussion we might come up with some concrete ideas about what we, as individuals, can do to help to promote sustainability within our current and future organizations.

Some questions we might use to guide the discussion include:

– Do organizations that focus on environmental issues have a responsibility to be environmentally (and socially) sustainable? Do they have special responsibilities in these areas because of the environmental focus of their work?
– What is meant by ‘sustainability’? What does environmental and social sustainability for an organization like NCEAS look like?
– How do environmental organizations know if they have achieved sustainability, or are making progress toward a goal? What responsibilities do they have (if any) to monitor sustainability performance?
– Do individuals who work for environmental organizations have a responsibility to invest effort in contributing to the sustainability of those organizations? If so, what kinds of actions can they take?

If you have ideas for additional questions we might discuss, please send them to me and I’ll add them to the list.

Dr. Stacy Rebich Hespanha
NCEAS Research Associate

The need to reconcile food production, multiple ecosystem services (ES) and biodiversity conservation has spurred the search for more sustainable ways of farming. In this context, my approach consists in getting insights from the past to support the management of present and future agroecosystems.

First, I investigated how past agricultural practices can affect current ecosystem functioning. A better understanding of such legacy is of key importance for predicting human environmental impacts. In some South American wetlands, I found that humans have created favorable habitat for crops, but also for a high diversity of organisms that today maintain the vestiges of fields against erosion since they were abandoned hundred years ago. Based on these results, I came to understand how to exploit synergies between human actions and those of natural soil organisms (such as social insects, earthworms and plants) to design agroecosystems that support food production, biodiversity and soil fertility.

Second, I tested how a historical perspective on ES can help meet the challenge of managing multiple ES simultaneously. To do this, I reconstructed the provision of nine ES (including food production, carbon storage, flood regulation, recreational activities) over the past 35 years in an agroforested landscape in Quebec, Canada. My results demonstrated that individual ES, ES assemblages, and interactions among ES changed across both time and space, driven by combination of policy changes, biophysical and socio-economic characteristics of the study region. My approach led to a better understanding of how multiple ES interact, how trade-offs and synergies emerge, and how interactions may shift through time as social-ecological conditions change.

Dr. Delphine Renard
McGill University & Quebec Center for Biodiversity Science

In December 2011, an important cultural and ecological process was reignited in Pinnacles National Park when the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band gathered alongside agency fire crews and land managers to burn a stand of native deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens). Throughout California, California Indian people traditionally burned selected areas to manage and promote food and fiber. This project is unique in that it incorporates two distinct knowledge systems and welcomes an indigenous perspective in park research and management. From the project’s beginning, tribal partners participated in establishing research questions and goals of the project. Tribal members, and especially tribal youth, regularly participated in collecting data and implementing treatments. The burn is one of several highlights of this integrated program at Pinnacles that aims to gain a better understanding of California Indian management practices and its role in shaping the landscape over centuries of time, and how this awareness influences today’s management.

Brent Johnson
Park Botanist, Acting Chief
Research and Resource Management Division
Pinnacles National Park

Navigating working group dynamics can be challenging but is a necessary step to achieve synthesis. Here we discuss hurdles to synthesis and navigating collaborations in working groups (e.g. data availability and integration, analysis techniques, and social / collaborative issues). We will start with a brief informal presentation of key elements of the issue, and aim to spend most of the time engaged in discussion with the NCEAS community. Please come prepared to discuss a hurdle to synthesis (and/or solution!) which you have experienced.

Rachael Blake, NCEAS Post Doc
Jessica Couture, NCEAS Research Associate
Colette Ward, NCEAS Post Doc

Hi all –

Sorry for the delay in posting this. Below are links to the R packages for text mining and topic modeling that I used for my project. In the topic modeling package I used the LDA with Gibbs sampling function.

• Introduction to the tm package
• An R package for fitting topic models

Finally here is the powerpoint with the initial results of my analysis. It has all of the images in case you want to take a second look:

• topicmodelsPPT

Thanks to everyone for participating in the discussion and offering great new ideas!