**This project will begin in Fall 2008**
We begin with a simple premise: Social and ecological systems are interconnected in complex and often surprising ways. Central to this perspective is the role that ecosystem services play in sustaining human population. Whether for clean air and water, food and fiber production, carbon and nutrient cycling, forests and other natural ecosystems are essential in maintaining human systems. However, our ability to integrate social and ecological sciences is largely in its infancy with few tools and methods for understanding this complex dynamic. This is particularly true for working landscapes consisting of primarily small landholdings. Even over a relatively small landscape (e.g., 5000 ha), there can easily be several hundred different farmers and landowners with varied knowledge, and motivations, and desired outcomes. This situation has long confounded researchers, policymakers, and planners alike and has often led to relatively simple approaches that target farmers, landowners and their properties individually. While somewhat effective for less spatially sensitive ecosystem services (e.g., timber and food production), this ownership-centric approach is ill suited to spatially sensitive ones (e.g., water quality) and may, in some cases, be detrimental to them (e.g., habitat fragmentation).
Purpose, Objectives, and Research QuestionsThe purpose of this project is to understand social networks around the provision of ecosystem services—specifically water quality—and their relationship to ecological systems. The context for our project will be working landscapes that are primarily in small landholdings. As opposed to individual farmers and landowners, we will study change agents (e.g. NRCS staff, DNR foresters, etc.) who often play a central role in farmer and landowner decision-making. This project has three objectives.
- Describe and analyze the social networks—to include their spatial and ecological contexts—for three distinct study watersheds.
- Compare and contrast the direct and indirect relationship between social networks and water quality across the three study watersheds.
- Engage local change agents in a dialogue regarding the implications of the findings toward improving practices and policies.
The overall intent is to assess the effects of change agent behavior on ecological systems and, by extension, to identify opportunities to influence individual and collective decision-making. For example, if the river in Figure 1 could be positively impacted by coordinating activities on the two properties, the likelihood of such coordination would largely depend on the social relationship between change agent A and B.
Figure 1: The relationship between A and B will largely define the landscape management opportunities related to the river.
A consideration of more complex arrangements ground our research questions that include…
- To what extent are water related social networks linked to the physical landscape?
- To what extent do landscape patterns coincide with water related social networks?
- How do social networks on agricultural, forested, and intermixed ag-forest landscapes differ in structure and impact?
- How can an understanding of a combined social network and landscape analysis improve our collective capacity to improve stewardship?
We will use comparative case study research that will triangulate across qualitative, social network, and spatial analyses. For three selected study watersheds (agricultural, forested, intermixed agriculture and forests), we will collect three types of data from change agents: (1) individual characteristics (e.g., attitudes, demographics, and motivations), (2) connections to other social actors (e.g., colleagues, other professionals, and landowners), and (3) geographic locations of the lands they manage or assist in managing. The data will be analyzed using appropriate qualitative and quantitative approaches and combined with other secondary data sources to characterize the socio-ecological systems present in each landscapes. We will also compare and contrast findings across study watersheds to allow for further generalization.
As an outreach component, we will design and implement an extended process whereby our research informs change agent behavior moving forward. We envision a multi-month series of working meetings that allow change agents to understand their collective relationship to the landscape in which they work and to each other in providing local leadership.
- Generate new knowledge related to the role of change agents in facilitating landscape change. Change agents are important local actors whose role and connectivity in adaptive management are poorly understood.
- Apply a relatively new analytical approach (i.e., spatially-explicit social network analysis) to understanding the role of social interaction in shaping individual and collective decision-making. To date, nearly all efforts to understand decision-making related to private lands have focused on individual or collective decisions independent of the social relationships that influence them.
- Contribute to the nascent study of the complex and interacting relationships between human and ecological systems at an ecological scale that has not received much attention. As such, this project will advance fundamental understandings of socio-economic systems.
- Evaluate the capacity of existing social networks of change agents to influence adaptive management behavior on the landscape. In addition, this evaluation will provide insights into the pathways by which new knowledge and decision-support tools might be disseminated.
As these outcomes are realized, we will post results.
