Category Archives: Tools

Tools

Learning tools

Leave a comment

Gilliam Martin Mehers provide a big set of links to different types of teaching/learning facilitation resources and methods on her blog You Learn Something New Every Day.  She writes:

I am currently working with a team focusing on biodiversity conservation and assessment to “makeover” an existing training curriculum into one even more interactive and learner-focused. As a part of this process I offered to put together a selected list of resources, from the raft of those available, that are particularly useful to me in this kind of work.

Gillian points to resources on Games, Discussion and Co-creation Techniques, Storytelling, Improv Comedy and Theatre, Visual Facilitation, and Systems Thinking. For Systems Thinking she writes:

This is one of my personal passions – using systems thinking tools for learning. We have experimented a great deal in applying an approach that might initially appear to be too complicated to introduce in a short workshop. It does have a specialised vocabulary, a number of graphic tools and a set of conventions. We have a tag on this blog devoted to using systems thinking (see: Systems Thinking) which features posts on using it for strategic planning (see: Building Capacity in Systems Thinking: Want More Amplification? Don’t Call it Training), and exploring ways to help learners pick it up and use it in experiential ways (see: Working With Systems Archetypes in Learning Contexts). Systems thinker Linda Booth Sweeney has an interesting site devoted to systems thinking learning and storytelling, and has developed a useful systems thinking resources room.

On her blog Gillian has written about trainings using systems concepts, for example learning with system archetypes and Making a systems thinking playbook for climate change.

Networks, Visualization

Mapping Australian arid land research

Leave a comment

Ryan McAllister and others use the network mapping methods of Martin Rosvall and Carl T Bergstrom (see previous post) to analyze the research impact of Australian arid lands literature in the paper –  McAllister et al. 2009.  Research impact within the international arid literature: An Australian perspective based on network theory.  Journal of Arid Environments 73(9) 862-871 (doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2009.03.014).

The figure below show the different research subfields McAllister et al. identified within arid lands research and the citation links among them.

Figure 4. Linkages between 21 partitions of the Australian arid literature (based on GN-Mod – see Table 7). Location of authoritative-hub articles (from Table 3): “Animal ecology” contains (Buckley et al., 1987) and (Morton and James, 1988), and Stafford Smith and Morton (1990); “Plant ecology” contains (Ludwig and Tongway, 1995), (Mabbutt and Fanning, 1987), (Montaña, 1992) and (Tongway and Ludwig, 1990), and Tongway et al. (1989); and “Geospatial” contains Pech et al. (1986).

Networks, Visualization

Mapping Science

2 Comments

A nice 2008 PNAS paper Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure (PNAS 105, 1118) [pdf] by Martin Rosvall and Carl T Bergstrom creates  beautiful and informative visualizations of citation networks in science (from 2004 ISI data) using a neat method for visualizing and analyzing complex networks.  Martin Rosvall has a created a website that enables the creation of similar maps of network data.

Figure 3. In Rosvall and Bergstrom 2008. A map of science based on citation patterns. Analysis of 6,128 journals connected by 6,434,916 citations were clustered into 88 modules and 3,024 directed and weighted links.

Figure 4. A map of the social sciences. The journals listed in the 2004 social science edition of Journal Citation Reports (32) are a subset of those illustrated in Fig. 3, totaling 1,431 journals and 217,287 citations.

General, Visualization

Visualizing Planetary Boundaries

Leave a comment

Seems like Christmas comes early this year! Visualizing.org just announced the results  of the Visualizing Marathon 2010. One of the challenges was to visualize planetary boundaries, i.e. the concept of multiple and non-linear earth system processes presented by Johan Rockström and colleagues last year.

The winner: MICA Team #3 and the project One Day Cause + Effect: A look at energy emissions and water usage over the course of one day (by Christina Beard, Christopher Clark, Chris McCampbell, Supisa Wattanasansanee). Congratulations! The other visualizations are also well worth a look – and a few clicks as many of them are interactive.

2010 Honorable Mention: SVA Team #1: Pushing the Boundaries: A Visualization of Our Footprint on Earth. Submitted by: Clint Beharry, David Bellona, Colleen Miller, Erin Moore, Tina Ye

2010 Honorable Mention: MICA Team #1: What Kind of World Do You Want?: A visualization of planetary boundaries. Submitted by: Melissa Barat, Bryan Connor, Ann Liu, Isabel Uria

What Kind of World Do You Want?

Visualization

Syr Darya river meanders

Leave a comment

Beautiful pictures from NASA EOS showing paleo and historic river meanders in the floodplain of the Syr Darya River in Kazakstan.

The floodplain is shown here as a tangle of twisting meanders and loops (image center). The darkest areas are brushy vegetation along the present course (filled with blue-green water); wisps of vegetation are also visible along flanking swampy depressions, or sloughs. An older floodplain appears as more diffuse dark vegetation (image upper left), where relict bends are overlain by a rectangular pattern of cotton fields. The straight channel of a new diversion canal—one of 16 from this point downstream—can be seen along the east bank of the river. The older floodplain is fed from the Chardara Reservoir, immediately upstream (not shown).

Networks, Tools

Reading list: Using social network analysis (SNA) in social-ecological studies

2 Comments

The emergent field that uses social network analysis (SNA) to analyze social-ecological systems and problems in natural resource management is growing. For those interested in reading into this field, I thought I share a reading list I am preparing for a PhD course on SNA that I will give at Arizona State University in connection to the Resilience 2011 Conference. The course is only open for ASU students, but for those interested you read more on my blog In Rhizomia [www.rhizomia.net]. If you are interested in discussing network analysis in social-ecological studies, there is, as I have mentioned before on this blog, an e-list called NASEBERRY that you can join (e-mail me at henrik.ernstson[AT]stockholmresilience.su.se and let me know).

Example of literature on SNA in NRM (to be completed and might change)

This is a selective reading list for those interested in starting to use social network analysis (SNA) in social-ecological studies.

The first good empirical study using social network analysis in the social-ecological field is by Schneider et al. (2003) on collaborative networks in estuary management. Together with Örjan Bodin and Beatrice Crona we summarized a set of arguments for the value of SNA for NRM studies in Bodin, Crona and Ernstson (2006), whereas a summary of empirical studies were made later (Bodin and Crona 2009). Christina Prell, Klaus Hubacek, Mark Reed and others have published on stakeholder selection and social learning (Prell et al. 2009), and Saduiel Ramirez-Sanchez has studied fisheries in Mexico (Ramirez-Sanchez and Pinkerton 2009). A good study for those interested in dynamic policy proceses is by Sandström and Carlsson (2008). An interesting application using 2-mode network analysis was recently made by Andrés Marín and Fikret Berkes on small-scale fisheris in Chile (Marín and Berkes 2010). (In an upcoming book edited by Bodin and Prell several of these authors are contributing with chapters, and some of our chapters might replace some of the articles in the final reading list of the course.)

One of the first urban applications using SNA in social-ecological studies was my study of social movements and the protection of urban ecosystems in Stockholm (Ernstson et al. 2008)(See also connection to cultural framing theory and qualitative data (using ANT) in Ernstson and Sörlin (2009).). This has lead to an articulation of “transformative collective action” in an upcoming chapter (Ernstson accepted). Together with collegues, we used social network theory to understand adaptive governance through synthesizing several urban case studies in Stockholm (Ernstson et al. 2010) that could be useful for all interested in multi-scale governance and social learning. An inspiration for me when it comes to urban areas, social movements and social networks has always bin Mario Diani (see e.g. Diani (1992), Diani and McAdam (2003), and Diani and Bison (2004). More urban social-ecological studies using SNA are forthcoming, partly as a result of when I gave this course in 2009 in Cape Town. Students from that .)

The above mentioned references can serve as entry point to the course (those marked with * below are less central), but should be complemented with the following from the SNA field: the short but effective review by Borgatti et al. (2009), the classic by Granovetter (1973), and the very useful SNA textbook and handbook to UCINET by Hanneman and Riddle (2005) (downloable for free, see below). Other good textbooks are Scott’s (2000) and Degenne and Forsé’s (1999). For those getting serious (!), a must-have is still the SNA “cookbook” by Wasserman and Faust (1994). The exact reading list might however still change.

References
(Those marked with * in the list indicates that you can initially skip these. Those marked with ** have notes at the end).

Bodin, Ö., B. Crona, and H. Ernstson. 2006. Social networks in natural resource management: What is there to learn from a structural perspective? Ecology and Society 11:r2. URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss2/resp2/

Bodin, Ö. and B. I. Crona. 2009. The role of social networks in natural resource governance: What relational patterns make a difference? Global Environmental Change 19:366-374. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.05.002

Borgatti, S. P., A. Mehra, D. J. Brass, and G. Labianca. 2009. Network analysis in the social sciences. Science 323:892-895. [Longer pre-publication pdf version can be found on Stephen Borgatti’s homepage here.]

Crona, B. and Ö. Bodin. 2006. WHAT you know is WHO you know? Communication patterns among resource users as a prerequisite for co-management. Ecology and Society 11:7. URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss2/art7/

**Degenne, A. and M. Forsé. 1999. Introducing Social Networks. Sage Publications, London. [Review for this book can be found here.]

*Diani, M. 1992. The concept of social movement. Sociological Review 40:1-25.

*Diani, M. and I. Bison. 2004. Organizations, coalitions and movements. Theory and Society 33:281-309.

*Diani, M. and D. McAdam, editors. 2003. Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Ernstson, H. accepted. Transformative collective action: a network approach to transformative change in ecosystem-based management. Page Ch 11 in Ö. Bodin and C. Prell, editors. Social Networks and Natural Resource Management: Uncovering the Social Fabric of Environmental Governance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Ernstson, H., S. Barthel, E. Andersson, and S. T. Borgström. 2010. Scale-crossing brokers and network governance of urban ecosystem services: The case of Stockholm, Sweden. Ecology and Society:in press.

*Ernstson, H. and S. Sörlin. 2009. Weaving protective stories: connective practices to articulate holistic values in Stockholm National Urban Park. Environment and Planning A 41:1460–1479.

Ernstson, H., S. Sörlin, and T. Elmqvist. 2008. Social movements and ecosystem services – the role of social network structure in protecting and managing urban green areas in Stockholm. Ecology and Society 13:39. URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss2/art39/

Granovetter, M. 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 76:1360-1380.

**Hanneman, R. A. and M. Riddle. 2005. Introduction to Social Network Methods. University of California (published in digital form at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/), Riverside, CA.

Marín, A. and F. Berkes. 2010. Network approach for understanding small-scale fisheries governance: The case of the Chilean coastal co-management. Marin Policy in press.

Prell, C., K. Hubacek, and M. Reed. 2009. Stakeholder Analysis and Social Network Analysis in Natural Resource Management. Society & Natural Resources 22:501-518.

Ramirez-Sanchez, S. and E. Pinkerton. 2009. The impact of resource scarcity on bonding and bridging social capital: the case of fishers’ information-sharing networks in Loreto, BCS, Mexico. Ecology and Society 14:22.

Sandström, A. and L. Carlsson. 2008. The performance of policy networks: the relation between network structure and network performance. Policy Studies Journal 36:497-524.

Schneider, M., J. Scholz, M. Lubell, D. Mindruta, and M. Edwardsen. 2003. Building consensual institutions: networks and the National Estuary Program. American Journal of Political Science 47:143-158.

**Scott, J. 2000. Social Network Analysis. A handbook. 2 edition. Sage Publications, London.

Wasserman, S. and K. Faust. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

** As textbook, choose either Scott, or Degenne and Forsé. Hanneman and Riddle can also be used as a textbook, but is also an instructive manual for UCINET.

Download Hanneman and Riddle 2005 here (it’s freeware): http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/
Or here.

Short about the SNA course in Phoenix

Using Social Network Analysis in (Urban) Social-Ecological StudiesPhD course 6-8 March, 2011 at Arizona State University. Given by Dr Henrik Ernstson, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, & Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.

The course will start in January with reading and essay writing and then have three intense days in Phoenix, 6-8 March, 2011. The main aim is to help students to develop their own empirical case studies. I am not sure yet, but I believe the course will only be open to ASU students (having 10 participants).

Through this course you will:
– Learn about social network theory and methods
– Get the chance to develop your own case study
– Attain basic skills in analyzing empirical data with UCINET software
– Discuss how network analysis can be paired with qualitative methods and theories
– Discuss natural resource management and social-ecology from a network perspective

If you are an ASU student, you can apply through sending an e-mail to me (henrik.ernstson[AT]stockholmresilience.su.se).

More information on my blog In Rhizomia (SNA course).

[This post was originally posted on my blog In Rhizomia]

Ecological Management, Ideas

What is Social Learning?

5 Comments

Ecology and Society has just published a clarifying new paper by Mark S. Reed and others What is Social Learning? (15(4): r1).  Reed and his co-authors argue that while social learning is becoming an increasingly important goal in natural resource management there is little consensus on what social learning actually is, and they attempt to provide a clear definition.

They write [formatting added by me]:

Social learning is often conflated with other concepts such as participation and proenvironmental behavior, and there is often little distinction made between individual and wider social learning. Many unsubstantiated claims for social learning exist, and there is frequently confusion between the concept itself and its potential outcomes. This lack of conceptual clarity has limited our capacity to assess whether social learning has occurred, and if so, what kind of learning has taken place, to what extent, between whom, when, and how. This response attempts to provide greater clarity on the conceptual basis for social learning.We argue that to be considered social learning, a process must:

(1) demonstrate that a change in understanding has taken place in the individuals involved;

(2) demonstrate that this change goes beyond the individual and becomes situated within wider social units or communities of practice; and

(3) occur through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network.

A clearer picture of what we mean by social learning could enhance our ability to critically evaluate outcomes and better understand the processes through which social learning occurs. In this way, it may be possible to better facilitate the desired outcomes of social learning processes.

Tools

Writing and the Scientific Process

1 Comment

George Gopen and Judith Swan write in the American Scientist (Nov/Dec 1990) about The Science of Scientific Writing. They write that complex thoughts can be made accessible and clear without minimizing their complexity if a set of structural principles are followed:

  1. Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb.
  2. Place in the stress position the “new information” you want the reader to emphasize.
  3. Place the person or thing whose “story” a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.
  4. Place appropriate “old information” (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.
  5. Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.
  6. In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new.
  7. In general, try to ensure that the relative emphases of the substance coincide with the relative expectations for emphasis raised by the structure.

…The substance of science comprises more than the discovery and recording of data; it extends crucially to include the act of interpretation. It may seem obvious that a scientific document is incomplete without the interpretation of the writer; it may not be so obvious that the document cannot “exist” without the interpretation of each reader. In other words, writers cannot “merely” record data, even if they try. In any recording or articulation, no matter how haphazard or confused, each word resides in one or more distinct structural locations. The resulting structure, even more than the meanings of individual words, significantly influences the reader during the act of interpretation. The question then becomes whether the structure created by the writer (intentionally or not) helps or hinders the reader in the process of interpreting the scientific writing.

Ecological Management, Ecosystem services

Phosphorus dynamics – mining vs. recycling

Leave a comment

Global P consumption in Millions of Tonnes. Data from FAO.

Phosphorus is essential for sustaining humanity, because it is essential nutrient for producing food, and it is often a limiting nutrient for plant growth. Unlike nitrogen, it cannot be fixed from the air, and must be either recycled or mined.

Modern industrial agriculture relies on continual inputs of mined phosphor. How long phosphorus mining can last is quite uncertain. A new assessment of phosphor supplies suggests these are supplies are much bigger than previously thought.

A recent editorial in Nature Not Quite Assured (Oct 27, 2010)writes:

Reserves of the phosphate rock used to make such fertilizers are finite, and concerns have been raised that they are in danger of exhaustion. It has been argued, for example, that data from the US Geological Survey point to the available supplies peaking in as little as 25 years time (see Nature 461, 716–718; 2009). Because there is no substitute for phosphate in agriculture, this might present an urgent and substantial problem. But initial findings from the World Phosphate Rock Reserves and Resources study conducted this year by the IFDC, an international non-profit organization based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and formerly known as the International Fertilizer Development Center, suggest that phosphate rock deposits should last for between 300 and 400 years.

Accurate information about phosphate reserves is hard to come by, and the IFDC concedes that more work is needed to hone its estimates. The mining industry, governments and interested researchers should accept the organization’s invitation to collaborate in this process.

The phosphate issue runs beyond gaining assurances that total global supply will meet demand. There remain important concerns that phosphate and other fertilizers are being squandered in some parts of the world, whereas farmers in other regions cannot obtain them at a reasonable cost.

… current fertilizer-production methods fail to maximize the efficient conversion of phosphate rock into fertilizer. The supply of the rock is heavily concentrated in two nations, China and Morocco, on whose good faith the rest of the world relies for its phosphate supplies. That faith has been shaken by extreme price fluctuations in recent years.

Yet the heavy dependence of food production on fertilizers, inequalities of supply and the need for sustainable use of fertilizers — including recycling — are largely missing from discussions on approaches to sustainable development. They were only mentioned in passing, for example, at the United Nations’ world summit on food security in Rome last November.

Hydrologists, soil researchers and food scientists have begun to raise awareness of some of the issues surrounding phosphates. A discussion will be devoted to the topic at the Crop World 2010 meeting in London next week, in which researchers will be joined by industry and government representatives, including John Beddington, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, who has worked hard to raise political awareness of food-security issues.

These efforts would be strengthened if an international body, such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, started to seriously champion the issue of sustainable fertilizer use. The organization already tracks fertilizer demand and supply, and has produced reports on phosphate fertilizer use. It doesn’t have a specific programme for sustainable fertilizers, but its departments of agriculture and natural resources do some work in this area, giving it a base on which to build. It now needs to push this issue out from the sidelines and into the policy-making process that will shape the future of agriculture and sustainable development.

My colleague Arno Rosemarin believes that the assessment is wrong.  He has co-authored another assessment of phosphor supplies, and comments on the nature editorial:

The statement in the IFDC report that we have 300-400 years prior to depletion og phosphorus is based on a zero increase in extraction from now on. The rate of annual increase is presently in fact 3-4%. Extraction will hopefully decrease as we become more efficient, start significant reuse programmes, etc. But this will take decades and no UN governance or monitoring plan is in sight. The food security summits in 2008 and 2009 never mention the word phosphorus. The new data on increased reserves from IFDC are based almost entirely on a recalculation for Morocco giving them 10 times more phosphorus and 85% of the global capacity. But the estimates are based on a hypothetical calculation and economic viability does not figure in the calculation. There are no data on reserves from industry in the calculation since this is kept confidential.

Ecosystem ecologist Jim Elser followed with:

While this seems like welcome news, as Dr Rosemarin notes, the new estimate is entirely based on a revision of estimates for Morocco and seems to be derived from a 20-year old geological report and not on any new geological survey data. It is also important to note that the 300-400 year IFDC estimate for P depletion is a different event than the timing of “peak phosphorus”, which refers to the date when global P production will occur (previous estimates placed this timing for 2030-2040). It is likely that, even if this new reserve number for Morocco is correct and the P ore there is indeed of high quality and accessible, a production peak for P is likely only pushed back by a few decades. In any case, the key issue for any such commodity is PRICE and what remains to be analyzed is the likely future dynamics of P fertilizer prices in the face of the need to double food production by 2050 while simultaneously satisfying the burgeoning bioenergy industry. “Not quite assured”, indeed.
Is this any way to run a biogeochemical cycle?