All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Greenlash, Ideas

Estimating Greenlash from Agriculture via Climatic Regulation

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Ecological greenlash occurs when human action aimed at increasing the supply of a desired ecosystem service (e.g. food production) inadvertenly degrade other ecosystem services (e.g. climatic regulation or pollination) that are essential for the provision of the desired ecosystem service, consquently reducing the supply of the desired ecosystem service.

While ecologists have documented many examples of greenlash at small spatial scales, a gap has existed between ecological research and the questions and spatial scales of ecological policy. Research is starting to close bridge this gap.

Roger Pielke Sr. points to several New Papers on the Importance of Land Use/Land Cover Change on Climate on his Climate Science blog. These include one by my new McGill Geography colleague, Navin Ramankutty and several of his colleagues from SAGE at U Wisconsin. In the paper:

Ramankutty, Navin, Christine Delire, and Peter Snyder, 2006. Feedbacks between agriculture and climate: An illustration of the potential unintended consequences of human land use activities. Global and Planetary Change, in press, corrected proof available online.

Ramankutty and colleagues examine agricultural greenlash by estimating the impact land conversion from agriculture has had via feedbacks on climate on the ability of people to practice agriculture. They find that globally the change is minimal, but in specific regions the change is substantial (a result similar to what Line Gordon and colleagues found in their estimates of how agriculture has altered global green water flows).

Ramankutty climate suitability

Figure 4 in the paper shows areas where the suitability for agriculture (where 1 is max suitability and cross hatching indicates areas where changes appears to be statistically significant) has increased or decreased due to the impact of agricultural land use change on global climate.

Ecological Management, General, New Orleans, Reorganization

Mississippi meanders

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NASA’s Earth Observation newsroom presents satelite images to go with the geological map of Mississippi Meanders used to make the top image of this blog.

NASA EOS image

NASA explains:

As it winds from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River is in constant flux. Fast water carries sediment while slow water deposits it. Soft riverbanks are continuously eroded. Floods occasionally spread across the wide, shallow valley that flanks the river, and new channels are left behind when the water recedes. This history of change is recorded in the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944.

This map of an area just north of the Atchafalaya River shows a slice of the complex history of the Mississippi. The modern river course is superimposed on channels from 1880 (green), 1820 (red), and 1765 (blue). Even earlier, prehistoric channels underlie the more recent patterns. An oxbow lake—a crescent of water left behind when a meander (bend in the river) closes itself off—remains from 1785. A satellite image from 1999 shows the current course of the river and the old oxbow lake. Despite modern human-made changes to the landscape, traces of the past remain, with roads and fields following the contours of past channels.

In the twentieth century, the rate of change on the Mississippi slowed. Levees now prevent the river from jumping its banks so often. The levees protect towns, farms, and roads near the banks of the river and maintain established shipping routes and ports in the Gulf of Mexico. The human engineering of the lower Mississippi has been so extensive that a natural migration of the Mississippi delta from its present location to the Atchafalaya River to the west was halted in the early 1960s by an Army Corps of Engineers project known as the Old River Control Structure (visible in the full-size Landsat image).

The delta switching has occurred every 1,000 years or so in the past. As sediment accumulates in the main channel, the elevation increases, and the channel becomes more shallow and meandering. Eventually the river finds a shorter, steeper descent to the Gulf. In the 1950s, engineers noticed that the river’s present channel was on the verge of shifting westward to the Atchafalaya River, which would have become the new route to the Gulf. Because of the industry and other development that depended on the present river course, the U.S. Congress authorized the construction of the Old River Control Structure to prevent the shift from happening.

For some related reading, John McPhee discusses the Old River Control Structure and US Army Corps attempts to regulate the Mississippi in his great 1989 book the Control of Nature. John Barry provides a history of the regulation of the Mississippi in his book Rising tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

I previously wrote about the ecology of the Mississippi, Michael Grunwald has an article in Grist Rotten to the Corps arguing that the Corps is behind New Orleans destruction, and wikipedia has an article about levee failures in New Orleans.

Ecological Economics, Ecological Management, General

Low input agriculture as a tool for poverty alleviation

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In many places around the world farmers are discovering that lower input (of fertilizers and pesticides) agriculture can be more profitable, and lower risk, than conventional high input alternatives.

Ethan Apri on NextBillion.net points to an  Asia Times article Turkey’s born-again farmer about Nazmi Ilicali, a farmer in Eastern Turkey who promotes organic agriculture to reduce rural poverty. The region grows organic wheat, rye, barley, white beans, green lentils, chickpeas and bulgur wheat and promotes itself and organizes sales via www.daphan.org. In the article Ilicali explains why and how he promotes organic agriculture:

He explains why, ironically, the poverty of this area makes it perfect for starting organic farming projects: “The earth in this area is especially suitable, because the local population is so poor that for years they have been unable to afford chemical fertilizers. The climate is good for organic agriculture, too. The frost and cold here even kill the eggs laid in the earth by insects, and because of that there is no need for pesticides – we have a totally chemical-free soil.”

Soon after joining the Daphan project, Nazmi took a further step. “After doing extensive research, I decided that organic agriculture was the only investment with good potential in the east of Turkey. But I also knew that any efforts would have to be made in an organized way. When I first became involved three years ago, I brought 633 farmers together, and the European Community gave me the financial support to set up the Eastern Anatolian Farmers and Livestock Keepers Union. Now we have 3,000 members, and are still gathering members like an avalanche gathers snow.”
…

Nazmi explains that when they first started, the biggest problem they had was the packaging and processing of their organic products. Rather than allowing this to stall their progress, they built a small factory and made every member of the association a shareholder. The factory began to grind their own cereals into flour and package it. Their brand identity, sales and profit margins have all improved since.

This experience is placed in a broader context by Bill McKibben. In April 2005 he had a good rich article The Cuba Diet, about Cuba’s semi-successful, involuntary transition to low-input organic agriculture in Harper’s magazine . To put Cuba’s unusual agricultural system (McKibben calls it something like high fedualism) in context he talks to Jules Pretty about other alternative agriculture systems around the world:

… strict organic agriculture isn’t what the Cubans practice (remember those pesticides for the potato bugs). “If you’re going to grow irrigated rice, you’ll almost always need some fertilizer,” said Jules Pretty, a professor at the University of Essex’s Department of Biological Sciences, who has looked at sustainable agriculture in fields around the world. “The problem is being judicious and careful.” It’s very clear, he added, “that Cuba is not an anomaly. All around the world small-scale successes are being scaled up to regional level.” Farmers in northeast Thailand, for instance, suffered when their rice markets disappeared in the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. “They’d borrowed money to invest in ‘modern agriculture,’ but they couldn’t get the price they needed. A movement emerged, farmers saying, ‘Maybe we should just concentrate on local markets, and not grow for Bangkok, not for other countries.’ They’ve started using a wide range of sustainability approaches—polyculture, tree crops and agroforestry, fish ponds. One hundred and fifty thousand farmers have made the shift in the last three years.”

Almost certainly, he said, such schemes are as productive as the monocultures they replaced. “Rice production goes down, but the production of all sorts of other things, like leafy vegetables, goes up.” And simply cutting way down on the costs of pesticides turns many bankrupt peasants solvent. “The farmer field schools began in Indonesia, with rice growers showing one another how to manage their paddies to look after beneficial insects,” just the kinds of predators the Cubans were growing in their low-tech labs. “There’s been a huge decrease in costs and not much of a change in yields.”

See also Elena Bennet’s Resilience Science post on Ecological synergisms in agriculture.

Ecological Management, Greenlash

Complicated ecological tradeoffs from water & agriculture

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A recent paper in Water Resources Research (2006: 42) by Eloise Kendy and John Bredehoeft Transient effects of groundwater pumping and surface-water-irrigation returns on streamflow shows how a long history of excess irrigation in the US west has prodcued streamflow that ecosystems and people have come to rely upon. Now improvements in irrigation effectiveness (i.e. more crop per drop) could reduce this streamflow. These connections show how complicated tradeoffs between different water uses can become. Fortunately, in this case, as in many others, it appears that more sophisticated water management can reduce the intensity of this tradeoff.

Abstract: In surface-water-irrigated western valleys, groundwater discharge from excess irrigation sustains winter streamflow at levels that exceed natural flows. This unnatural condition has persisted for so long that hydrologists, water managers, and water users consider it to be normal. Changing land uses and irrigation practices complicate efforts to manage groundwater discharge and, in turn, to protect instream flows. We examined the impacts on streamflow of (1) seasonal groundwater pumping at various distances from the Gallatin River and (2) improving irrigation efficiency in the Gallatin Valley, Montana. We show that the greater the distance from a seasonally pumping well to a stream, the less the stream depletion fluctuates seasonally and the greater the proportion of annual depletion occurs during the nonirrigation season. Furthermore, we show that increasing irrigation efficiency has implications beyond simply reducing diversions. Improving irrigation efficiency reduces fall and winter flows to a lower, but more natural condition than the artificially high conditions to which we have become accustomed. However, existing water users and aquatic ecosystems may rely upon return flows from inefficient irrigation systems. By strategically timing and locating artificial recharge within a basin, groundwater and surface water may be managed conjunctively to help maintain desirable streamflow conditions as land uses and irrigation practices change.

Eloise Kendy has a short related article in Geotimes (June 2005) Water woes: predictable but not inevitable, where she writes how land-use change produces inadvertent ecological engineering that should become more intentional and less haphazard.

The change from irrigated agriculture to residential development entails more than simply pumping groundwater. Most irrigation systems in the West — especially the oldest systems on the most productive ground — use diverted surface water. Irrigation water that crops do not use seeps into the soil and eventually reaches the water table, where it recharges groundwater in the underlying aquifer. So-called irrigation return flow is a major source of groundwater recharge in irrigated western valleys.

The irrigation-charged groundwater slowly makes its way underground to rivers, streams and springs, where it eventually discharges. Groundwater discharge from irrigation return flow keeps rivers flowing well into late summer and fall, even after all the snow has long since melted, even after the rains have stopped. Although not a natural phenomenon, we consider this annual flow pattern “normal,” for it has recurred for more than 30 years.

The most important hydrologic change brought on by urban and suburban development is a drastic reduction in groundwater recharge. Urban land surfaces such as roofs, roads and parking lots are impermeable. Rain and snowmelt run off these surfaces, instead of seeping into the ground and recharging aquifers. In a typical engineering design, runoff is quickly shunted into the nearest stream or river to rid the area of potential flood waters. Consequently, localized recharge greatly decreases, streamflow becomes “flashier” (larger fluctuations over shorter periods of time), and late-season, groundwater-fed streamflow decreases. When irrigation stops, seepage from excess irrigation water also stops, or continues to recharge the aquifer only from leaky ditches.

Almost without exception, rural residential development in the West relies on well water for domestic use. So, on top of reducing aquifer recharge, the change from surface-water-irrigated cropland to groundwater-irrigated yards increases aquifer discharge. Less water goes into the aquifer than before, and more water goes out.

Previously, irrigation diversions depleted streamflow in the spring and early summer, and irrigation return flow maintained streamflow well into the late summer and fall. Now, with fewer surface-water diversions, early flows increase, as does the risk of flooding. Conversely, late-season flows decrease, potentially leaving fish and downstream irrigators high and dry.

…

When sewers were put in place in Long Island, N.Y., in the 1950s, wastewater that previously recharged the aquifer now discharges straight into the ocean. The loss of aquifer recharge caused the water table to drop about 20 feet. To save the aquifer, more than 3,000 small recharge basins were constructed. Their average combined infiltration rate of 150 millions gallons per day has successfully reversed the trend of declining water levels in the aquifer.

Out West, many creative options exist for water management. Most of the basins within the Basin and Range province, which, loosely defined, extends from Canada to Mexico, provide ideal geologic settings for storing artificially recharged water underground. Using existing irrigation infrastructure, we could spread spring runoff onto benchlands, allowing it to flow underground toward rivers, where it would replace irrigation return flow as a resource for late-season use. Another simple option is to discourage landscaping that requires irrigation.

via Kevin Vranes’s No Se Nada.

General, Reorganization, Tools

Using Tera Preta increase soil resilience

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A Nature News article Black is the new green (10 August 2006) explains research that aims to reinvent Terra Preta, anthropogenic highly productive charcoal rich soils, to improve soil for agriculture while sequestering carbon.
New ways of producing biofuels can to produce charcoal that can be used to enrich soil. This carbon is stored in the soil, and may be able to produce carbon negative fuels in a way that can boost agricultural productivity. From the Nature News article:

…[a group met at the] World Congress of Soil Science. Their agenda was to take terra preta from the annals of history and the backwaters of the Amazon into the twenty-first century world of carbon sequestration and biofuels.

They want to follow what the green revolution did for the developing world’s plants with a black revolution for the world’s soils. They are aware that this is a tough sell, not least because hardly anyone outside the room has heard of their product. But that does not dissuade them: more than one eye in the room had a distinctly evangelical gleam.

The soil scientists, archaeologists, geographers, agronomists, and anthropologists who study terra preta now agree that the Amazon’s dark earths, terra preta do índio, were made by the river basin’s original human residents, who were much more numerous than formerly supposed. The darkest patches correspond to the middens of settlements and are cluttered with crescents of broken pottery. The larger patches were once agricultural areas that the farmers enriched with charred trash of all sorts. Some soils are thought to be 7,000 years old. Compared with the surrounding soil, terra preta can contain three times as much phosphorus and nitrogen. And as its colour indicates, it contains far more carbon. In samples taken in Brazil by William Woods, an expert in abandoned settlements at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the terra preta was up to 9% carbon, compared with 0.5% for plain soil from places nearby
…Take the work of Danny Day, the founder of Eprida. This “for-profit social-purpose enterprise” in Athens, Georgia, builds contraptions that farmers can use to turn farm waste into biofuel while making char. Farm waste (or a crop designed for biofuel use) is smouldered — pyrolysed, in the jargon — and this process gives off volatile organic molecules, which can be used as a basis for biodiesel or turned into hydrogen with the help of steam. After the pyrolysation, half of the starting material will be used up and half will be char. That can then be put back on the fields, where it will sequester carbon and help grow the next crop.

The remarkable thing about this process is that, even after the fuel has been burned, more carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere than is put back. Traditional biofuels claim to be ‘carbon neutral’, because the carbon dioxide assimilated by the growing biomass makes up for the carbon dioxide given off by the burning of the fuel. But as Lehmann points out, systems such as Day’s go one step further: “They are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative”.

Day’s pilot plant processes 10 to 25 kg of Georgia peanut hulls and pine pellets every hour. From 100 kg of biomass, the group gets 46 kg of carbon — half as char — and around 5 kg of hydrogen, enough to go 500 kilometres in a hydrogen-fuel-cell car (not that there are many around yet). Originally, Day was mostly interested in making biofuel; the char was just something he threw out, or used to make carbon filters. Then he discovered that his employees were reaping the culinary benefits of the enormous turnips that had sprung up on the piles of char lying around at the plant. Combining this char with ammonium bicarbonate, made using steam-recovered hydrogen, creates a soil additive that is now one of his process’s selling points; the ammonium bicarbonate is a nitrogen-based fertilizer.

update: WorldChanging has a bit more on the article

General

Major new resilience research center funded in Stockholm

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The three Swedish Resilience Alliance members (the Centre for Transdisciplinary Environmental Research (CTM) at Stockholm University, the Stockholm Environment Institute, and the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) have just recieved a the largest environmental research grant ever distributed in Sweden (22 million Euros) to build a new international transdisciplinary institute for research and policy dialogue on sustainable development.

From the CTM press release:

The new institute will conduct cutting edge research on how human welfare and viable ecosystems can develop together, and also act as a platform for dialogue between politicians, authorities and resource users all over the world. In this way, research results can be turned into practical solutions and contribute to sustainable societal development.

“Until now, political decision-making on the environment appears to have amounted to little more than reshuffling the deck chairs of the Titanic. In order to solve the great environmental problems of the world, we need to change course. Our hope is that the new Institute will contribute essential knowledge that is needed to steer development onto a sustainable path”, says Johan Rockström, Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and Director–to-be of the Institute.

Behind Mistra’s commitment lies the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a UN-led study on the world’s ecosystems which was released last year. In it, 1400 experts state that the ecosystems which are the basis for human welfare and economic development are deteriorating. Today, 60 percent of the free ecosystem services that we use are exploited in an unsustainable manner. Crucial ecosystem services such as air- and water purification, the pollination of crops and the seas’ capacity to produce fish are in serious decline. The changes are occurring so rapidly today that society is unable to adapt to the new environmental circumstances and thus cannot effectively develop strategies and frameworks for sustainable use of the ecosystems.

“We want to build a unique transdiciplinary research environment where innovative ideas can flourish. By combining new forms of cooperation with a holistic perspective, we hope to generate the insights that are needed to strengthen societies’ and the ecosystems’ capacities to meet a world which spins faster and faster”, says Carl Folke, Director of the Centre for Transdisciplinary Research and Science Director-to-be of the Institute.

“Our societies are an integrated part of the biosphere and dependent upon functioning ecosystems. That is why we need to manage ecosystems so that we can handle the future’s challenges and maintain our capacity to evolve in a positive way”, concludes Carl Folke.

…

The Institute will conduct internationally leading research on how human welfare and robust ecosystems can co-develop, as well as serving as a platform for dialogue with politicians, authorities and resource users at a local, regional and international level; emphasis will be placed on the dissemination of information and communication through different media.

The Institute’s research will contribute answers to questions of the future such as: How can human societies – from a local to international level – be organized in order to meet future climate change? How can we reform agriculture so that there is enough food for a growing population? How should networks of marine reserves be shaped in order to secure the world’s future fisheries? How do we decrease the level of vulnerability in the megacities of today and tomorrow?

Congratulations Calle, Johan, Thomas and everyone else who worked on the research proposal!  I hope the center will be a huge success.

Ecological Economics, Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Ecological Engineering and New Orleans

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Robert Costanza, William Mitsch, and John Day, three ecologists with long experience with wetlands, New Orleans, and ecological economics, have an editorial in the journal Ecological Engineering on Creating a sustainable and desirable New Orleans (pdf). Their arguement is a more ecological version of the vison of a new bright green city presented by Alan AtKisson in his post Dreaming a New New Orleans.

Costanza et al write:

The Federal government has pledged over US$ 100 billion for the New Orleans and Gulf coast region to be rebuilt after this terrible (but predictable) tragedy. The question is not if but how it should be rebuilt. What was there can simply be replaced, but this would merely be setting the pins up to be knocked down again by a future big hurricane, the destructive powers of which are increasing worldwide, probably due to global warming. In addition, sea level is rising and New Orleans continues to sink, making the city even more vulnerable over time.

What is needed is a new vision of a truly New Orleans—one that can provide a sustainable and high quality of life for all of its citizens while it works in partnership (not in futile opposi- tion) with the natural forces that shaped it. This New Orleans can serve as a metaphor and a model for the sustainable devel- opment of western industrial society more generally.

…

The built capital of New Orleans has been radically depleted and must be rebuilt. We can recreate the vulnerable and unsustainable city that was there, or we can reinvent New Orleans as a model of a sustainable and desirable city of the future. To do this, we need to redesign and restore not only the built infrastructure, but also the social, human, and natural capital of the region. How do we do this and what would a truly sustainable and desirable New Orleans look like? Here are some of the elements of a sustainable vision:

1. Let the water decide: Building a city below sea level is always a dangerous proposition. While parts of New Orleans are still at or above sea level, much of it had sunk well below sea level since the first quarter of the 20th century. It is not sustainable or desirable to rebuild these areas in the same way they were before. They should be either replaced with coastal wetlands which are allowed to trap sediments to rebuild the land (see below), or replaced with buildings that are adapted to occasional flooding (i.e., on pilings or floats). Wetlands inside the levees can help clean waters, store short-term flood waters, provide habitat for wildlife, and become an amenity for the city. Coastal wetlands outside the levees should be rebuilt so that the city has both wetlands and levees to protect the city.

2. One should avoid abrupt boundaries between deepwater sys- tems and uplands. Gentle slopes with wetlands are the best division, and avoid putting humans, particularly those who have few resources to avoid hydrologic disasters, in harm’s way. Of course the abrupt boundaries of the levees are nec- essary, since wetlands alone cannot protect the city, but we need to use both as appropriate.

3. Restore natural capital: Coastal wetlands in Louisiana have been estimated to provide US$ 375/acres/yr (US $940/ha/yr—these and all subsequent figures have been converted to US$ 2004) in storm and flood protection services. Hurricane Katrina has shown this to be a large underestimate. Restoring Louisiana’s coastal wetlands and New Orleans levees has been estimated to cost US$ 25 billion. Had the original wetlands been intact and levees in better shape, a substantial portion of the US$ 100 billion plus damages from this hurri- cane probably could have been avoided. Prevention would have been much cheaper and more effective than recon- struction. In addition, the coastal wetlands provide other ecosystem services which when added to the storm pro- tection services have been estimated to be worth about US$ 5200/acres/yr (US$ 12,700/ha/yr). Restoring the 4800 km2 (480,000 ha) of wetlands lost prior to Katrina would thus restore US$ 6 billion/yr in lost ecosystem services, or US$ 200 billion in present value (at a 3% discount rate).

4. In order to do this we should use the resources of the Mississippi River to rebuild the coast, changing the current system that constrains the river between levees, and allow the resources of freshwater, sediments, and nutrients to flow into the deeper waters of the Gulf. Diversions of water, nutrients, and sediments from the Mississippi are a major component of the LCA plan. These planned diversions should be greatly expanded in order to allow more rapid restoration of the coastal wetlands. Levees are necessary in some locations, but where possible the levees should be breeched by structures in a controlled way to allow marsh rebuilding.

5. We should restore the built capital of New Orleans to the highest standards of high-performance green buildings and a car-limited urban environment with high mobility for everyone. New Orleans has abundant renewable energy sources in solar, wind, and water. What better message than to build a 21st-century sustainable city running on renewable energy on the rubble of a 20th century oil and gas production hub. In other words, New Orleans should be built higher, stronger, much more efficient, and designed to make extensive use of renewable energy. One can imag- ine a new pattern for the residential neighborhoods of New Orleans with strong, multistory, multifamily buildings surrounded by green space, each with enough water and fuel storage for several weeks, and operating principally on wind and solar energy.

6. We should rebuild the social capital of New Orleans to 21st-century standards of diversity, tolerance, fairness, and justice. New Orleans has suffered long enough with social capital dating from the 18th (or even the 15th) century. To do this the planning and implementation of the rebuilding must maximize participation by the entire community. This will certainly be difficult for a number of reasons, including the historical antecedents of racism and classcism in the region, and the fact that much of the population has been forcibly removed from the city. But it is absolutely essential if the goals of a sustainable and desirable future are to be achieved.

7. Finally, we should restore the Mississippi River Basin to min- imize coastal pollution and the threats of river flooding in New Orleans. Upstream changes in the 3 million km2 Mississippi drainage basin have significantly changed nutrient and sediment delivery patterns to the delta. Changes in farming practices in the drainage basin can improve not only the coastal restoration process, but also improve the nation’s agricultural economy by promoting sustainable farming practices in the entire basin.

Ideas, Reorganization

Peñalosa @ World Urban Forum

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In Vancouver’s Tyee.ca, Charles Montgomery reports from the World Urban Forum on The Mayor Who Wowed the World Urban Forum – Enrique Peñalosa, fomer mayor of Bogota, Columbia who helped transform Bogota from a city famous for murder and cocaine, to a city famous for its bike paths and bus system.

Enrique Peñalosa presided over the transition of a city that the world–and many residents–had given up on. Bogota had lost itself in slums, chaos, violence, and traffic. During his three-year term, Penalosa brought in initiatives that would seem impossible in most cities, even here in the wealthy north. He built more than a hundred nurseries for children. He built 50 new public schools and increased enrolment by 34 percent. He built a network of libraries. He created a highly-efficient, “bus highway” transit system. He built or reconstructed hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, more than 300 kilometres of bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, and more than 1,200 parks.

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General, Networks, Visualization, Vulnerability

Resilience networks in global environmental change science

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In a new paper, Scholarly networks on resilience, vulnerability and adaptation within the human dimensions of global environmental change, Marco Janssen and others have analyzed the networks of co-authorships and citation among research on resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation in human dimensions of global change research. They analyzed co-authorship and citations among 2286 publications between 1967 and 2005 (3860 unique authors and 10,286 co-authors).

Janssen et al identified the most central scholars, publications, and journals in the knowledge domains of resilience, vulnerability and adaptation.

network of coauthorship

Figure 2 Co-author network of most productive and best connected authors with the strongest co-authorship relations. Circles denote author nodes and are labeled by the authors’ last name and first initials. The larger the node, the more publications. The darker the node, the more the co-authors. Black nodes refer to 50 or more co-authors, while white nodes refer to less than 10 co-authors. Edges represent co-authorship relations. The width of an edge represents the relative number of co-author relationships (Janssen et al 2006).

Janssen et al found that the number of publications in all domains increased rapidly between 1995 and 2005, while co-authorship increased from 1.5 authors to 2.5 authors per paper between the 1970s and early 2000s. Despite this increase in number of publications and co-authorship, the resilience knowledge domain is only weakly connected with the other two domains. However, overall there is an increasing number of cross citations and papers contributing to multiple knowledge domains.

The complete database of papers can be analyzed online, on Marco Janssen’s website. However, because this is the Resilience Science weblog, I’ve an image showing the citation network among the most cited papers on resilience (in human dimensions of global change) is shown below. Size corresponds to the number of citations.

Citations within resilience domain
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