<p>Human interactions with white-tailed deer (<em>Odocoileus virginianus</em>) continue to change across the U.S. The growth of deer populations and urbanization of human populations have shifted values for wildlife away from traditional use toward mutual coexistence while simultaneously providing habitat for deer to thrive.<strong> </strong>Still, a mismatch exists between the reality of human-deer interactions and the management of them. Despite a changing social landscape, the human dimensions of deer management remain focused on hunting interests and the mitigation of crop damage to agricultural producers. Amid a national push to broaden wildlife ‘stakeholders’ to encompass all potential beneficiaries of wildlife, state wildlife agencies need to assess the needs and concerns of the broader public they serve to determine whether and how to engage non-traditional groups in wildlife management planning.</p> <p>Recognizing these needs, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (IN-DNR) partnered with Purdue University in 2018 to initiate the Integrated Deer Management Project (IDMP). As part of the IDMP, this dissertation comprises the first empirical assessment of social perceptions of white-tailed deer across Indiana. My research aimed to: (i) examine the initial context of human-deer interactions in Indiana and identify key social and cognitive factors that shape them; (ii) investigate how emotions, an understudied construct, interact with beliefs and attitudes to influence resident judgements about deer management; (iii) understand existing levels of satisfaction with deer management, potentials for social conflict over management approaches, and their social-ecological drivers; and (iv) develop indices and tools that can help IN-DNR officials better account for social perceptions and concerns in deer management planning. Due to a lack of prior knowledge about human-deer interactions in the state, I used an exploratory mixed-methods research design to address these objectives. I began by conducting 59 semi-structured interviews with residents around Indiana and two focus groups in the city of Bloomington (n=14) to understand their existing perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions related to deer and deer management. These interviews informed the development of a quantitative survey which I distributed to 6,000 residents across the state. I received 1806 completed surveys for a response rate of 33%.</p> <p>My data show that social perceptions of deer and deer management remain complex, driven by dynamic feedbacks among emotions, personal experiences, livelihood and behavioral contexts, beliefs about deer management, and beliefs about other social groups. I found that mixed emotions, situational contexts, and perceived power imbalances play key roles in shaping and shifting deer-related cognitions, yet models of cognitive processing, and human-wildlife interactions more broadly, neglect these dynamics. Emotions, specifically, have been marginalized by researchers and practitioners, likely due to the perception that they represent irrational reactions rather than calculated judgements. Under different scenarios of encountering deer, however, I found that respondent emotions exert a mediating effect on their judgments about deer management, and that the type of deer encountered matters. Emotions thus work together with cognitions to process various stimuli in a human-wildlife encounter and reach a normative decision. I posit that understanding when and why emotional responses arise will help practitioners develop more effective and socially accepted approaches to wildlife management.</p> <p>I next developed and analyzed indices of public satisfaction with the IN-DNR and potentials for social conflict over deer management approaches. I found that public satisfaction with deer management is nuanced and multidimensional. Cognitive variables like residents’ perceived acceptability of management methods and their deer-related concerns most strongly predicted agency performance and quality measures of satisfaction, whereas demographic characteristics including self-identity, wildlife value orientation, and allowance of hunting on one’s property exerted the strongest influences on trust components of satisfaction. Future studies should advance a multidimensional conception of satisfaction and associate it with key variables that I suspect underly satisfaction but were not captured in this study: perceived control, psychological distance, and norms of knowledge exchange between wildlife agencies and the public. Next, I found that potentials for social conflict over deer management varied with resident self-identities and management methods but showed more predictable variation with political ideologies. Geographically, hotspots of social conflict clustered around urban areas, indicating that cities and their residents should serve as a focus for public engagement efforts and mixed management strategies. Expanding agency conceptions of public satisfaction and social conflict represents a critical step towards broadening support for wildlife management and practicing good wildlife governance.<strong> </strong>I conclude by discussing barriers to integrating social and ecological data and the practicality of incorporating complex social dimensions into wildlife management planning.</p>

Limiting cities’ negative impact for global sustainability suggests compact city development. However, extensive and accessible urban nature is important for urban dwellers’ wellbeing. Aligning efforts to make cities locally and globally sustainable means resolving this conflict. This thesis applies spatial analysis of urban dwellers’ regularly occurring experiences, as these are important wellbeing indicators, looking specifically at Stockholm, Sweden. The aim is to contribute to a nuanced understanding of urban environments’ influence on urban dwellers’ experiences. Paper I investigates how accessibility to various environment features impact the probability that people have positive or negative experiences. Paper II applies resilience principles to investigate what experiences exist together in neighbourhoods. The environment have considerable influence on people’s experiences. Some common indicators in urban planning display weak relationships with experiential outcome, while other less common ones have larger effects. Neighbourhood compositions of experiences display consistent patterns, both spatially across Stockholm and with respect to resilience principles. Many neighbourhoods harbour diverse positive experiences, while a few are dominated by negative ones. The results suggest that human-environment relations should be given more consideration in urban discourse and urban planning. A relational approach could improve urban dweller’s experiences, and positively influence their wellbeing. For urban planning to be able to handle the complexity of such an approach, I suggest that resilience principles can be heuristics for an urban development that does not compromise people’s experiences. The methodological framework developed here can be applied in other cities, as it can identify specific places for transformation, but also increase knowledge of the interplay between urban environments and people’s experiences across different contexts. / För att begränsa städers negativa påverkan på global hållbarhet förordas ofta kompakta stadsmiljöer. För att säkra stadsbors välbefinnande krävs emellertid stora och tillgängliga naturområden. Denna konflikt måste lösas för att nå en stadsutveckling som bidrar till både lokal och global hållbarhet. Denna avhandling består av två studier av Stockholm som tillämpar rumslig analys av människors upplevelser, då dessa är viktiga indikatorer för välbefinnande. Den undersöker hur tillgänglighet till olika miljöfaktorer är relaterade till positiva och negativa upplevelser. Vidare tillämpar den resiliensprinciper för att undersöka vilka upplevelser som samexisterar på områdesskala. Stadsmiljön har betydande påverkan på människors upplevelser. Vissa vanliga indikatorer inom stadsplanering visar svaga samband med upplevelser, medan andra mindre vanliga har större effekter. Sammansättningar av upplevelser på områdesskala uppvisar genomgående mönster, både rumsligt och i förhållande till resiliensprinciper. Många områden innehåller en mångfald av positiva upplevelser, medan ett fåtal domineras av negativa upplevelser. Resultaten visar att relationer mellan människa och miljö bör ta en mer central plats i stadsplaneringen, då detta erbjuder möjligheter att förbättra stadsbors upplevelser. Resiliensprinciper kan fungera som tumregler inom stadsplaneringen för en stadsutveckling som inte äventyrar människors upplevelser. Metoden som utvecklats här kan appliceras i andra städer, då den kan identifiera specifika platser för omvandling, men också leda till djupare förståelse för samspelet mellan stadsmiljöer och människors upplevelser i olika sammanhang.

The increasing demand for food and fiber, the need for climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as for environmental protection impose severe challenges on land systems worldwide. Solutions to support the transformation towards a sustainable development of land systems are needed. One response to the multiple challenges is the introduction of policy options aimed at steering land use activities towards a bundle of societal goals. However, it is difficult to empirically foresee the effectiveness and unintended consequences of policy options prior to their deployment. A second response is environmental education because human consumption behavior, among other factors, strongly influences natural ecosystems. However, it is a non-trivial task to develop effective communication strategies for complex topics such as sustainable land management. In both cases, modeling can help to overcome the different obstacles along the way. In this thesis, dynamic process-based social-ecological models at the individual scale are developed and analyzed to study effectiveness and unintended side effects of policy options, which promote agricultural management strategies and were intentionally designed to cope with multiple societal challenges. Two case studies of political intervention are investigated: the promotion of perennial woody crops in European agricultural landscapes for a sustainable bioeconomy and governmental supplementary feeding programs to cope with climate risks in pastoral systems in drylands. These two case studies are complemented by the development of a serious online game on sustainable land management in general that bridges the gap between land use modeling and environmental education. Simulation results of this thesis provide insights into (i) the performance of the politically promoted agricultural management strategies in meeting various intended goals such as poverty alleviation or the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services, (ii) the emergence of unintended (environmental and social) side effects such as land use conflicts, land degradation or cost explosion and (iii) the mitigation of such side effects by appropriately adjusting the design of the policy options. These insights are enabled by representing temporal as well as spatial variability in the developed models. Furthermore, different mechanistic approaches of transferability analyses based on stylized landscapes are developed and applied. They enable to check whether and in what respect policy impacts actually differ substantially between regional contexts, to identify what regional factors steer the impact and to derive indicators for grouping regions of similar policy impacts. Finally, based on a conducted survey-based evaluation and experiences from various applications, the value of the developed serious game for environmental education is revealed and discussed.Altogether, this thesis contributes to model-based decision support for steering transformation towards the sustainable development of land systems in an appropriate way. This is done by developing appropriate social-ecological modeling approaches, by performing specific policy impact analyses in two transformative agricultural systems using these models and by providing a model-based communication tool for environmental education.

No description available.

Denna studie har gjorts i syfte att få en överblick av var det svenska livsmedelssystemet befinner sig i förhållande till de fem strategier som tagits fram och föreslås av The EAT-Lancet Commission för en global och nationell omställning av våra livsmedelssystem, och uppfyllelse av nationella och globala hållbarhetsmål. Studiens utgångspunkt startar i det lokala med anledning av jordbrukets enorma miljöpåverkan, kommunernas planmonopol över markanvändningen, och av det faktum att det är i det lokala vi lever och verkar. Resultatet visar att de utmaningar som i nuläget hindrar utvecklingen av en lokal livsmedelsproduktion framför allt är ett kunskaps-/medvetandeglapp, centraliserade strukturer och system, jordbruksmarkens nedläggning och igenväxning, kommunala prioriteringar av infrastruktur och bostäder samt slutligen bristande samverkan mellan flertalet samhällssektorer och även inom kommunerna, möjligheter och stödsystem för nyetablering och omställning till hållbara cirkulära metoder. Ett återkommande tema under webinarier och intervjuer har varit sårbarheten i importberoendet och behovet av en högre beredskap för oväntade och plötsliga händelser. Dessutom har ett människo-decentrerat perspektiv uttryckts i vikten och värdet av att återskapa en ömsesidig relation till ekosystemen. Resultatet visar att kunskap (vetenskaplig och erfarenhetsbaserad) och kulturella värden som gemenskap och livskvalitet ger ökade förutsättningar för utveckling av lokalt jordbruk, och därmed en ökad livsmedelsförsörjning. Lokalt hållbart jordbruk är rättskaligt, giftfritt och diverst. Utvecklat, har det möjligheten att skapa beredskap inför oväntade händelser och plötsliga kriser, samt gynna hållbarhet genom samtliga dimensioner. Lokal livsmedelsproduktion är ett potent verktyg för en ökad grad av nationell självförsörjning samt som betydelsefull drivkraft i en hållbar samhällsbyggnad. / This paper was made with the purpose of reaching a broad perspective of where the Swedish food system is in relation to the five strategies that were brought threw and proposed by The EAT-Lancet Commission for a global transformation of our food systems, and to reach the national and global sustainable development goals. The base for the paper takes off in the local because of the enormous environmental impact caused by agriculture, the monopoly of land use within municipalities, and by the fact that we live and act from the local context. The result shows the challenges that today are blocking the development of a local food production is first and foremost a gap of knowledge and awareness, centralized structures and systems, shutdowns and overgrowth of agricultural land, municipalities prioritizing infrastructure and habitations, and lacking co-operation within and between civil sectors, possibilities and support systems for new establishments and transformation to sustainable circular agricultural methods. A reoccurring theme during webinars and interviews have shown the vulnerability in the import dependency and the need to raise preparedness for unexpected and sudden changes. In addition, the need for a human-de-centred perspective expressing the importance and value of re-connecting a mutual relationship to the ecosystems. The result shows that knowledge (scientific and experience-based) and cultural values of community and quality of life increase the conditions of developing local agriculture, and thereby increased self-sufficiency. Local sustainable agriculture is right-scaled, toxin-free and diverse. Developed, it has the capability to create preparedness for unexpected sudden changes, and promote sustainability threw all dimensions of sustainability. Local food production is a potent tool to increase national self-sufficiency and a significant driver towards building sustainable societies.

Med en växande stadspopulation världen över har förtätning av urbana områden ökat markant de senaste åren och Malmö är inget undantag. I takt med denna utveckling blir även frågan om den gröna infrastrukturens funktion och plats i den täta staden mer och mer aktuell. Detta examensarbetet syftar till att öka medvetenheten kring grön infrastruktur och ekosystemtjänster i den förtätade staden samt visa på vikten av att inkludera dessa i stadsplaneringen.Uppsatsen grundar sig i litteraturstudier och intervjuer med en en grupp av varierande kompetens inom forskningsområdet. Genom att sammanställa vilka kvaliteter och förutsättningar som finns i staden tar vi fram olika lösningar på hur man kan implementera grönska i en tät miljö. Detta resulterar i olika gestaltningsförslag med lösningar som riktar sig dels till kommunen och erbjuder en möjlighet till uppskalning som då ger en applicerbarhet på både lokal och regional nivå. Förslagen vänder sig även mot Malmös medborgare med exempel om hur man kan bidra till att skapa egna social-ekologiska system och bidra till gröna korridorer genom staden.Resultatet visar problematiken i att kombinera en tät stad med ett grönt nätverk. Det finns en vilja och ett intresse hos aktörer, ett relativt välfungerande samarbete mellan instanser samt ett fåtal handfasta verktyg som finns att tillgå för att mäta effekterna av ekosystemtjänster. I Malmö har kommunen kontroll över en liten del av stadsytan då mycket av den är privatägd, utvecklingen av den gröna infrastrukturen lämnas därför ofta till aktörer som tenderar att ha vinstdrivande intressen. Ytterligare faktorer som försvårar arbetet är att kunskapen om den gröna infrastrukturen är bristfällig, kommunikationen mellan olika parter undermålig och att förvaltningen blir lidande därefter. Det framkommer att konkurrensen om yta blir avgörande i planeringen och att det ställs höga krav på den grönska som finns i staden. Det är därför av yttersta vikt att starka samarbeten upprätthålls och att aktörer på området kontinuerligt utbildas i ämnet om grön infrastruktur och ekosystemtjänster. / The densification of urban areas have increased significantly in the last years due to the growing population in cities worldwide and Malmö is no exception. Along with this development, the question of function and place of the green infrastructure in the city is also becoming more and more relevant.This thesis aims to increase awareness of green infrastructure and ecosystem services in a dense city and show the importance of including these in urban planning.The thesis is based on a literature review and interviews with a group of varying expertise within the research area. By compiling the qualities and conditions of the city, we develop different solutions on how to implement greenery in a dense environment. This results in various design proposals where two of them entail solutions aimed at the municipality that offer an opportunity for upscaling, making them applicable at both a local and a regional level. The proposals are also aimed at the citizens of Malmö providing them with examples on how to create their own social-ecological systems and thereby contribute to green corridors throughout the city.The results display the issues of combining a dense city with a green network. There is a will and an interest among actors, a relatively well-functioning collaboration between agencies and a few tangible tools that are available to measure the effects of ecosystem services. In Malmö, the municipality has control over a small portion of the city space as much is privately owned. The development of the green infrastructure is therefore often left to actors who tend to have interests related to profit. Additional factors that further complicate the work is that there is a lack of knowledge of green infrastructure, communication between different actors is substandard and that maintenance suffers thereafter. It is made clear that the competition for space is one of the deciding factors in planning and that it puts high demands on the quality of greenery that exist in the city. It is therefore of utmost importance that strong collaborations are upheld and that stakeholders within the field are continuously educated on the subject of green infrastructure and ecosystem services.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur professionella som är verksamma inom socialtjänst, äldrevård och HVB-hem arbetar med individer som visar tecken på kognitiv svikt, demens och alkoholmissbruk. Datainsamlingsmetoden utgjordes av semistrukturerade intervjuer. Sex (6) intervjuer genomfördes totalt och transkriberades sedan ordagrant. Det insamlade materialet analyserades sedan genom kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Det analyserade materialet tolkades sedan genom den socialekologiska systemteorin. Vissa delar av resultatet från intervjuerna visar att kunskapsbristen inom området skapar olika förutsättningar för arbetsgruppen. Andra delar visade även positiva och negativa exempel på samverkan mellan olika verksamheter. Dessutom visade resultatet även hur politiska beslut och avsaknaden av evidens kan orsaka förändrade förutsättningar för de professionellas arbete. Sammanfattningsvis visade resultaten vikten av samverkan i en kontext där klientens behov kan erbjudas av flera olika verksamheter. Dessutom visade även resultatet hur verksamheterna påverkas av både kunskapsbrister och svårigheter med att samla in evidens. Det kan även föreligga ett behov att reflektera över tidigare socialt arbete för att förstå hur framtidens sociala arbete eventuellt kan förbättras. / The purpose of this study is to examine how professional employees working at social work offices and care homes experience possible opportunities and obstacles while working with individuals showing signs of both cognitive impairment, dementia and the misuse of alcohol. The method of which the material was collected was through semi-structured interviews. In total, six (6) interviews were conducted and later transcribed verbatim. The material was compiled through qualitative content analysis. The compiled material was then later analysed through the social ecological systematic theory. Some of the contents provided through the interviews showed a lack of knowledge regarding the work surrounding the group mentioned above. Other parts of the interview showed both positive and negative examples within cooperation between multiple organisations. The contents also gave examples of how the work is affected by political decisions and also obstructed by the lack of evidence surrounding the group. In conclusion, the results showed how crucial cooperation can be in a context where the afflicted is in need of several instances of help from several different organisations. Moreover, the results also showed a lack in both knowledge and the acquiring of evidence. There may also be a need to reflect on earlier social work to see how future social work can be improved.

No description available.

Increasingly, firms like Patagonia, IKEA, General Mills, or Barilla actively seek to understand their interdependence with nature, build innovative capabilities, and generate more radical shifts toward sustainability. This creates exciting opportunities to investigate exactly how these companies obtain knowledge about ecosystem dynamics and processes and how they use it both to cope with climate change or declining ecosystem resilience and contribute to maintain or even strengthen ecosystems. Despite the considerable potential to advance research on organizational strategy and corporate sustainability, the notion of ‘ecological knowledge’ has yet to enter the scholarly work of management and business organization in a substantive manner. At present, we know almost nothing about the processes, mechanisms, and routines that enable an organization to, first, recognize the value of such knowledge and to, then, systematically access, co-create, integrate and utilize such knowledge into its broader knowledge and resource base. My dissertation attempts to fill this gap and opens up new directions for research on the role of ecological knowledge in corporate sustainability management. More specifically, I ask: What are the processes through which organizations can effectively access, co-create, integrate and utilize ecological knowledge with current organizational knowledge and strategies? I link strategic and organization-focused concepts of knowledge and the perspective of absorptive capacity with the notion of ecological knowledge from modern ecology, especially from the social-ecological systems literature, to shed light on the processes through which organizations can effectively access, co-create, integrate and utilize new ecological knowledge into their operational and strategic decision making. I adopt a qualitative, emergent, and inductive strategy drawing on a grounded research approach to gain an in-depth, cross-validated, and processual understanding of the mechanisms through which organizations can promote and enhance ecosystem health including biodiversity. I undertook my study on the organic agriculture sector, a sub-sector of the modern agriculture and agri-food industry. I collected data from nineteen agriculture and agri-food organizations based in British Columbia (BC), the westernmost province of Canada, using multiple data sources including in-depth interviews, observations, company documents, reports, newspaper articles and field reports. Based on my analysis, I develop a grounded theory about the processes through which organizations can successfully deepen their ecological knowledge and then utilize this knowledge to more sustainably manage their relationships with nature and contribute to protecting or even strengthening ecosystem functionality. With my dissertation, I address the call from scholars in Organization and the Natural Environment (ONE) and Corporate Sustainability for more transdisciplinary cross-fertilization as an essential approach to building compelling new theory and models in the field. First, my analysis offers a more fine-grained understanding of the types, components, dimensions, and characteristics of ecological knowledge. Second, my analysis uncovers a micro-level account of the processes by which individuals as critical actors identify, evaluate and make sense of the organization-environment interrelationships across various scales of time and space. I also identify the multiple personal characteristics of individual actors that influence these processes in various stages and circumstances. Third, my study offers insights into the factors that can strengthen an organization’s relational capacity to build mutual trust and collaboration with holders of ecological knowledge. Fourth, it sheds light on how firms engage with and motivate multiple community stakeholders in building a collaborative process of mutual learning, knowledge sharing, and knowledge co-creation to build joint capacity for coping successfully with many complex challenges of sustainability, thus contributing to the wellbeing of the entire social-ecological system. Collectively, these contributions provide a deeper and more holistic understanding of the processes of acquiring and co-creating ecological knowledge that can allow an organization to transition successfully towards greater ecological sustainability. My dissertation also offers numerous practically relevant insights for businesses facing the challenges of economic, social and environmental sustainability, as well as specific guidance on how companies can protect or enhance their supply of natural capital and contribute toward greater stability of the broader human-nature systems in which they are embedded. / Graduate / 2023-11-15

Les pressions anthropiques peuvent avoir une influence négative sur la qualité de l’eau et sur la capacité d'un lac à fournir des services écosystémiques (SÉ). Cependant, une approche intégrant les connaissances écologiques et sociales nécessaires pour identifier les lacs les plus à risque de perdre leurs SÉ fait actuellement défaut. Nous fournissons ici un cadre qui intègre l'état écologique des lacs, les menaces pour la qualité de l’eau et l’utilisation des SÉ récréatifs à des échelles régionales pour identifier les zones vulnérables. En utilisant les données de plus de 660 lacs échantillonnés à travers le Canada, une classification régionale des lacs basée sur les caractéristiques biophysiques de lacs peu impactés a été déterminée. L'écart des lacs impactés par rapport aux caractéristiques naturelles de leur région a permis d'identifier les concentrations d'azote total et de chlorure comme les indicateurs les plus constants d’une altération de l’état écologique des lacs par l’activité humaine. L'état écologique, le niveau de menace et l’utilisation des SÉ ont été combinés et cartographiés avec un modèle de couleur additif. Les lacs du sud de l'Ontario et du Québec étaient les plus préoccupants, car ils étaient très altérés, menacés et fortement utilisés. Les lacs situés près des centres urbains des deux côtes étaient altérés et utilisés, mais apparemment moins menacés, tandis que ceux des Prairies étaient altérés et menacés, mais moins utilisés. Notre nouveau cadre fournit la première biogéographie socio-écologique des lacs canadiens et constitue un outil de gestion prometteur pour évaluer l'état et la vulnérabilité des lacs. / Anthropogenic pressures can negatively influence water quality and a lake's ability to provide ecosystem services (ES). However, an approach that integrates the ecological and social knowledge needed to identify lakes most at risk of losing their ES is currently lacking. Here, we provide a framework that integrates lake ecological status, water quality threats, and recreational ES use at regional scales to identify vulnerable areas. Using data from over 660 lakes sampled across Canada, a regional classification of lakes based on the biophysical characteristics of low impact lakes was determined. The deviation of impacted lakes from the natural characteristics of their region identified total nitrogen and chloride concentrations as the most consistent indicators of altered ecological state of lakes due to human activity. Ecological status, threat level and ES use were combined and mapped using an additive color model. Lakes in southern Ontario and Quebec were of greatest concern as they were highly altered, threatened and heavily used. Lakes near urban centers on both coasts were altered and used, but apparently less threatened, while those in the Prairies were altered and threatened, but less used. Our new framework provides the first socio-ecological biogeography of Canadian lakes and is a promising management tool for assessing lake state and vulnerability.