Toward a management framework for smart and sustainable resource management: The case of the Appalachian Trail.

With the Appalachian Trail (AT) as our research setting, grounded theory as our methodological approach, and qualitative interviews and archival analysis as our methods, we investigate the role crowdsourced data, social media, and smartphone apps could play in sustainable resource management (SRM). Centering the perspectives of AT resource managers, our analysis reveals that digital technologies can create new challenges and exacerbate existing ones. Place-centered challenges intensified by digital technologies are overcrowding and trail infrastructure degradation.

How emergency managers (mis?)interpret forecasts.

Emergency managers who work on floods and other weather-related hazards constitute critical frontline responders to disasters. Yet, while these professionals operate in a realm rife with uncertainty related to forecasts and other unknowns, the influence of uncertainty on their decision-making is poorly understood. Consequently, a national-level survey of county emergency managers in the United States was administered to examine how they interpret forecast information, using hypothetical climate, flood, and weather scenarios to simulate their responses to uncertain information.

The dynamic nature of risk perceptions after a fatal transit accident.

In 2009, two trains of Washington, DC's Metrorail system collided, resulting in nine deaths and 50 serious injuries. Based on a multiwave survey of Metrorail users in the months after the crash, this article reports how the accident appears to have (1) changed over time the tradeoffs among safety, speed, frequency of service, cost, and reliability that the transit users stated they were willing to make in the postaccident period and (2) altered transit users' concerns about safety as a function of time and distance from the accident site. We employ conditional logit models to examine tradeoffs among stated preferences for system performance measures after the accident, as well as the influence that respondent characteristics of transit use, location, income, age, and gender have on these preference tradeoffs.

Turning brownfields into greenspaces: examining incentives and barriers to revitalization.

This study employs interviews, document review, and a national survey of local government officials to investigate the factors that influence the success of efforts to convert underutilized contaminated properties into greenspace. We find that the presence of contamination continues to be a concern despite federal and state efforts to ease liability fears but also that site and project features can overcome this hurdle. In particular, jurisdictions appear more likely to convert distressed properties into greenspace if recreational parks, rather than open space, are planned, sites are already owned rather than available only through tax foreclosure, and the state is perceived as being supportive of the conversion.