Events

The Toolbox is an NSF-funded project that endeavors to understand and enhance communication in collaborative, cross-disciplinary research (CDR) teams through structured philosophical dialogue that reveals differences in fundamental research assumptions. The project has two parts:

• The outreach com

Reduced diversity of populations can have far-reaching consequences for ecosystem functioning and resilience when it results in lost capacity for individuals to adapt or acclimate to changing environmental conditions. Such losses are of concern for species such as the submersed aquatic plant species

Change is constant for Pastoral Social Ecological Systems (PSES), which have had to respond to social environmental change over the millennia. Livestock domestication, provision of 10% of the planet's meat, and the use of 20% of Earth's land exemplify the scope and scale of PSES responses.

Howeve

Heat Waves in Urban America

Heat wave-related mortality is higher than that of all other disasters combined. With climate change, heat waves are an increasing threat to health. This presentation will explore two facets of this situation. Drawing from in-depth qualitative research in Detroit, New

Demographic & Economic Factors Underlying Social Networks & Sustainability in Rural Alaska

Arctic communities are experiencing unprecedented challenges caused by global forces of climatic, economic, ecological, political, and cultural change. The mixed cash-subsistence economies of rural villages

A defining characteristic of socio-environmental systems, meaning linked systems of human communities and their environmental contexts, is the diversity of their economic or livelihood base. Members of an agrarian community can, for example, grow one strain of corn, multiple strains of corn, or some

Measuring & Mapping Scientific Knowledge

As De Solla Price noted in 1965, scholarly literature forms a vast network - where the nodes are the millions of papers published in scholarly journals and the links are the hundreds of millions of citations connecting these papers. New approaches to

The dramatic feature of social media is that it gives everyone a voice: anyone can speak out and express their opinion to a crowd of followers with little or no cost or effort, which creates a loud and potentially overwhelming marketplace of ideas. The good news is that organizations have more data

Connecting Learners to Complex Science

The rapid acceleration of 21st-century science has revealed that nature is rife with complexity, but the gap between science practice and science education is widening.

In the 21st century, we have transitioned from modeling abstract ideas in nature, then

The U.S. Endangered Species Act requires not only protection of all listed threatened and endangered species, but also recovery of species so that they are no longer at risk of extinction. Determining when species are recovered has proven to be difficult, in part because we do not know how to

Their Global Importance & Management in the 21st Century

Novel ecosystems—where biotic and/or abiotic changes have led to systems that have no analog in the present or past—are a worldwide phenomenon. Myriad interacting environmental changes and thresholds to restoration prevent return to some

Women, Social Media, & Sustainability

Sustainability, social media, and women are a unique combination. How do people network around concepts of sustainability, and what is the role of social media and social networks in particular? The Global Women Scholars Research Network uses the platform of

Alternative Environmental Metaphors and Socio-Environmental Synthesis

Our approach to conservation—and to nature—is shaped in part by our metaphors. In this presentation, Dr. Brendon Larson examines alternative ways of conceptualizing invasive species (e.g., “invasional meltdown” versus “novel