Beyond despair: Leveraging ecosystem restoration for psychosocial resilience.

Ecosystem restoration has historically been viewed as an ecological endeavor, but restoration possesses significant, yet largely untapped, potential as a catalyst for personal and social transformation. We highlight the opportunity for restoration to enhance community resilience by increasing agency and collective action and countering the pervasive perception that we are powerless witnesses to environmental decline. In this perspective, we take a "bright spots" approach and highlight successful examples of ecosystem restoration that have helped to nurture a sense of place, foster optimism, and cultivate stronger and more diverse social networks.

Visual policy narrative messaging improves COVID-19 vaccine uptake.

In the face of vaccine hesitancy, public health officials are seeking more effective risk communication approaches to increase vaccination rates. We test the influence of visual policy narratives on COVID-19 vaccination behavior through a panel survey experiment conducted in early 2021 ( = 3,900) and then 8 weeks later ( = 2,268). We examine the effects of three visual policy narrative messages that test the narrative mechanism of character selection (, , and ) and a nonnarrative control on COVID-19 vaccine behavior.

Policy learning and change during crisis: COVID-19 policy responses across six states.

Whereas policy change is often characterized as a gradual and incremental process, effective crisis response necessitates that organizations adapt to evolving problems in near real time. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the case of COVID-19, which forced subnational governments to constantly adjust and recalibrate public health and disease mitigation measures in the face of changing patterns of viral transmission and the emergence of new information. This study assesses (a) the extent to which subnational policies changed over the course of the pandemic; (b) whether these changes are emblematic of policy learning; and (c) the drivers of these changes, namely changing political and public health conditions.

Building Resilience during Recovery: Lessons from Colorado's Watershed Resilience Pilot Program.

As the potential for and scope of some types of disasters increases, so too does the need to build greater disaster resilience across the globe. Communities ideally begin building resilience prior to experiencing a disaster in order to reduce negative impacts and ease recovery processes; however, numerous environmental and sociopolitical factors can impede such efforts until a disaster occurs. While the disaster recovery period offers opportunities for communities to build resilience as they replace infrastructure and restore services, a host of new issues arise during this time that can further complicate or delay resilience building.

The role of coalitions in disaster policymaking.

Disasters have the potential to act as focusing events, which can increase the amount of attention on disaster-related problems and encourage policy action. Understanding of the political characteristics of disaster policymaking is underdeveloped, yet it is known that these features may be dissimilar to those of non-disaster policy areas, especially concerning the coalitions of policy actors engaged in the disaster policy process. Coalitions in the realm of disaster policy processes may be less likely to form, may look very different, and may have different goals than those in non-disaster domains.

Quantity of flowback and produced waters from unconventional oil and gas exploration.

The management and disposal of flowback and produced waters (FP water) is one of the greatest challenges associated with unconventional oil and gas development. The development and production of unconventional natural gas and oil is projected to increase in the coming years, and a better understanding of the volume and quality of FP water is crucial for the safe management of the associated wastewater. We analyzed production data using multiple statistical methods to estimate the total FP water generated per well from six of the major unconventional oil and gas formations in the United States.

Parental dietary seleno-L-methionine exposure and resultant offspring developmental toxicity.

Selenium (Se) leaches into water from agricultural soils and from storage sites for coal fly ash. Se toxicity causes population and community level effects in fishes and birds. We used the laboratory aquarium model fish, Japanese medaka (Oryzias latipes), an asynchronous breeder, to determine aspects of uptake in adults and resultant developmental toxicity in their offspring.

A study of anthropogenic and climatic disturbance of the New River Estuary using a Bayesian belief network.

The present paper utilizes a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) approach to intuitively present and quantify our current understanding of the complex physical, chemical, and biological processes that lead to eutrophication in an estuarine ecosystem (New River Estuary, North Carolina, USA). The model is further used to explore the effects of plausible future climatic and nutrient pollution management scenarios on water quality indicators. The BBN, through visualizing the structure of the network, facilitates knowledge communication with managers/stakeholders who might not be experts in the underlying scientific disciplines.