Disaster research often focuses on how and why communities are affected by a discrete extreme event. We used the community capitals framework to understand how community characteristics influence their preparedness, response to, and recovery from successive or multiple disasters using the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake and the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill as case studies.
The Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) population in Prince William Sound, Alaska suffered a sudden collapse in 1993 and has failed to recover. No consensus has been reached for the causes of the collapse, but hypotheses span a range of ecological, environmental, and anthropogenic drivers. During the course of investigations into changes in PWS herring and salmon population dynamics and fisheries we discovered that the observed percentage of male herring in spawning biomass estimates appeared to increase since the mid-1980s.
Increasingly, big data, coding, and quantitative methods contribute to contemporary ecological and evolutionary endeavours. This is not in opposition to effective ideation nor does it play to the false dichotomy of theory versus data. Computational expeditions with data, models, simulations or any other number of approaches both expand the toolkit of science and promote more structured reasoning.
1.Pollution from landâ€ÂÂbased runâ€ÂÂoff threatens coastal ecosystems and the services they provide, detrimentally affecting the livelihoods of millions people on the world's coasts. Planning for linkages among terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems can help managers mitigate the impacts of landâ€ÂÂuse change on water quality and coastal ecosystem services. 2.We examine the approaches used for landâ€ÂÂsea planning, with particular focus on the models currently used to estimate the impacts of landâ€ÂÂuse change on water quality and fisheries.
Georeferencing is the process of aligning a text description of a geographic location with a spatial location based on a geographic coordinate system. Training aids are commonly created around the georeferencing process to disseminate community standards and ideas, guide accurate georeferencing, inform users about new tools, and help users evaluate existing geospatial data.
Single species conservation unites disparate partners for the conservation of one species. However, there are widespread concerns that single species conservation biases conservation efforts towards charismatic species at the expense of others. Here we investigate the extent to which sage grouse (Centrocercus sp.) conservation, the largest public-private conservation effort for a single species in the US, provides protections for other species from localized and landscape-scale threats.
Interest in land application of organic amendments--such as biosolids, composts, and manures--is growing due to their potential to increase soil carbon and help mitigate climate change, as well as to support soil health and regenerative agriculture. While organic amendments are predominantly applied to croplands, their application is increasingly proposed on relatively arid rangelands that do not typically receive fertilizers or other inputs, creating unique concerns for outcomes such as native plant diversity and water quality.
Tropical forests are globally important for both biodiversity conservation and the production of economically valuable wood products. To deliver both simultaneously, two contrasting approaches have been suggested: one partitions forests (sparing); the other integrates both objectives in the same location (sharing). To date, the ‘sparing or sharing’ debate has focused on agricultural landscapes, with scant attention paid to forest management.
The programming language R is widely used in many fields. We explored the extent of reported R use in the field of ecology using the Web of Science and text mining. We analyzed the frequencies of R packages reported in more than 60,000 peerâ€reviewed articles published in 30 ecology journals during a 10â€yr period ending in 2017. The number of studies reported using R as their primary tool in data analysis increased linearly from 11.4% in 2008 to 58.0% in 2017. The top 10 packages reported were lme4, vegan, nlme, ape, MuMIn, MASS, mgcv, ade4, multcomp, and car.
Sustainability indices are proliferating, both to help synthesize scientific understanding and inform policy. However, it remains poorly understood how such indices are affected by underlying assumptions of the data and modelling approaches used to compute indicator values. Here, we focus on one such indicator, the fisheries goal within the Ocean Health Index (OHI), which evaluates the sustainable provision of food from wild fisheries.