Anglers as potential vectors of aquatic invasive species: Linking inland water bodies in the Great Lakes region of the US.

Unimpeded transfer and spread of invasive species throughout freshwater systems is of global concern, altering species compositions, disrupting ecosystem processes, and diverting economic resources. The magnitude and complexity of the problem is amplified by the global connectedness of human movements and the multiple modes of inter-basin transport of aquatic invasive species. Our objective was to trace the fishing behavior of anglers delineating potential pathways of transfer of invasive species throughout the vast inland waters of the Great Lakes of North America, which contain more than 21% of the world's surface freshwater and are among the most highly invaded aquatic ecosystems in the world.

Public attitudes and intentions toward engaging in reintroduction of wolves to Japan.

Reintroducing apex predators is an important approach in ecosystem restoration; however, it is challenging. Wolves (Canis lupus) were exterminated in Japan around 1900, and since then, there has been a lack of top predators throughout the country. Currently, the wild ungulate population is increasing, causing agricultural and forest damage.

Climate resilience and risks of rigidity traps in Iceland's fisheries.

Iceland's fisheries system is well-governed, data-rich, and has adapted to past ecological change. It thus provides an opportunity to identify social-ecological attributes of climate resilience and interactions among them. We elicited barriers and enabling conditions for adaptation in Iceland's fisheries from semi-structured expert interviews, using projections of fish habitat shifts by mid-century to guide discussion.

Pride and guilt as place-based affective antecedents to pro-environmental behavior.

The interrelated concepts of place attachment and place meaning are antecedents to pro-environmental behavior and essential for supporting decisions that foster relationships between people and places. Previous research has argued that affect is instrumental in conceptualizing place-related phenomena but has not yet been considered in terms of discrete emotions. We disentangled the empirical relationships between concepts of place and the emotions of pride and guilt to understand how they collectively contributed to individuals' decisions about environmental sustainability.

What Causes Harmful Algal Blooms? A Case Study of Causal Attributions and Conflict in a Lakeshore Community.

Environmental management involves the complex interaction between identifying the causes of problems and implementing solutions. Our exploratory study draws on attribution theory to analyze the causal attributions among community members experiencing frequent and intensifying harmful algal blooms in a lake of western New York State. Our interviews (n = 21) revealed that causal attributions were grounded in observation but that scientific observations led to very different causal attributions than direct observations among a subset of the lay public.

Thinking Upstream: How Do Landowner Attitudes Affect Forested Riparian Buffer Coverage?

Little is known about the conservation of intermittent and ephemeral streams on private lands despite the importance of these waterways for ecosystem and hydrologic outcomes. Our case study of a watershed of central New York State considers landowners' attitudes toward perennial and intermittent streams on their property. We combine social science survey responses with aerial imagery to assess the underlying drivers of landowners' attitudes about their streams, and the extent to which these attitudes shape riparian conservation behaviors on their properties.

Integrating Subjective and Objective Dimensions of Resilience in Fire-Prone Landscapes.

Resilience has become a common goal for science-based natural resource management, particularly in the context of changing climate and disturbance regimes. Integrating varying perspectives and definitions of resilience is a complex and often unrecognized challenge to applying resilience concepts to social-ecological systems (SESs) management. Using wildfire as an example, we develop a framework to expose and separate two important dimensions of resilience: the inherent properties that maintain structure, function, or states of an SES and the human perceptions of desirable or valued components of an SES.

Integration of social and ecological sciences for natural resource decision making: challenges and opportunities.

The last 25 years have witnessed growing recognition that natural resource management decisions depend as much on understanding humans and their social interactions as on understanding the interactions between non-human organisms and their environment. Decision science provides a framework for integrating ecological and social factors into a decision, but challenges to integration remain. The decision-analytic framework elicits values and preferences to help articulate objectives, and then evaluates the outcomes of alternative management actions to achieve these objectives.

Sense of place and experimentation in urban sustainability transitions: the Resilience Lab in Carnisse, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Experimentation as a means of governance for sustainability transitions has been advocated for years by transition scholars and geography scholars. We propose that examining the impact of experimentation requires an understanding of its embeddedness in place as a socio-spatial context. This notion of embeddedness, which conceptually aligns well with the understanding of sense of place, is under-examined in sustainability transitions literature.

The potential impact of aquatic nuisance species on recreational fishing in the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi and Ohio River Basins.

Concern over the potential transfer of aquatic nuisance species (ANS) between the Great Lakes basin and the Upper Mississippi River basin has motivated calls to re-establish hydrologic separation between the two basins. Accomplishing that goal would require significant expenditures to re-engineer waterways in the Chicago, IL area. These costs should be compared to the potential costs resulting from ANS transfer between the basin, a significant portion of which would be costs to recreational fisheries.

Sense of Place, Fast and Slow: The Potential Contributions of Affordance Theory to Sense of Place.

Over the past 40 years, the sense of place concept has been well-established across a range of applications and settings; however, most theoretical developments have "privileged the slow." Evidence suggests that place attachments and place meanings are slow to evolve, sometimes not matching material or social reality (lag effects), and also tending to inhibit change. Here, we present some key blind spots in sense of place scholarship and then suggest how a reconsideration of sense of place as "fast" and "slow" could fill them.

Mainstreaming the social sciences in conservation.

Despite broad recognition of the value of social sciences and increasingly vocal calls for better engagement with the human element of conservation, the conservation social sciences remain misunderstood and underutilized in practice. The conservation social sciences can provide unique and important contributions to society's understanding of the relationships between humans and nature and to improving conservation practice and outcomes. There are 4 barriers-ideological, institutional, knowledge, and capacity-to meaningful integration of the social sciences into conservation.

Wildlife Conservation and Private Protected Areas: The Discrepancy Between Land Trust Mission Statements and Their Perceptions.

In 2010, land trusts in the U.S. had protected nearly 50 million acres of land, with much of it providing habitat for wildlife.

What's a stream without water? Disproportionality in headwater regions impacting water quality.

Headwater streams are critical components of the stream network, yet landowner perceptions, attitudes, and property management behaviors surrounding these intermittent and ephemeral streams are not well understood. Our research uses the concept of watershed disproportionality, where coupled social-biophysical conditions bear a disproportionate responsibility for harmful water quality outcomes, to analyze the potential influence of riparian landowner perceptions and attitudes on water quality in headwater regions. We combine social science survey data, aerial imagery, and an analysis of spatial point processes to assess the relationship between riparian landowner perceptions and attitudes in relation to stream flow regularity.

Linking knowledge to action in collaborative conservation.

Authors have documented a "research-implementation gap" in conservation. Research intended to inform conservation practice often does not, and practice often is not informed by the best science. We used the literature on policy learning (i.

Benefits, motivations, and barriers related to environmental volunteerism for older adults: developing a research agenda.

Interest in civic engagement focused on the natural environment has grown dramatically, as has the population of older adults. Our article explores the potential for increased environmental volunteerism among older adults to enrich the lives of volunteers while benefitting the community and environmental quality. Curiously, this convergence has been relatively neglected by researchers and program developers.

A comparative analysis of predictors of sense of place dimensions: attachment to, dependence on, and identification with lakeshore properties.

Sense of place can be conceived as a multidimensional construct representing beliefs, emotions and behavioural commitments concerning a particular geographic setting. This view, grounded in attitude theory, can better reveal complex relationships between the experience of a place and attributes of that place than approaches that do not differentiate cognitive, affective and conative domains. Shoreline property owners (N=290) in northern Wisconsin were surveyed about their sense of place for their lakeshore properties.

Risk and climate change: perceptions of key policy actors in Canada.

This article examines factors that predict perceptions of risk associated with global climate change. The research focuses on the perceptions of those associated with climate change policy making in the prairie region of Canada. The data are from an online survey (n=851) of those policy actors.