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Spring 2013

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Experiential programs for educators: a case study on coastal policy communication in Cebu, Philippines
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013-02-13) Knight, David, speaker
    Optimizing citizen engagement for coastal policy implementation is an ongoing, ubiquitous challenge for governments around the world. This presentation will describe a recent project in which an experiential learning program for educators was piloted as a coastal policy communication tool in the southern part of Cebu Province, Philippines. The process of program design and implementation allowed over thirty educators to collaborate with local policy makers and fish wardens while learning about salient coastal policy issues in their community. Project outcomes suggest that experiential learning programs for educators could drastically improve the policy communication efforts of local-level governments, leading to an increased awareness of and engagement in community-based coastal resource management among citizens.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Reaching across cultures: comparing local community perceptions toward a national park in Colorado and Tanzania
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013-01-29) Wilkins, Kate, speaker
    Parks and protected areas around the world are beginning to realize the importance of practicing collaborative conservation with various stakeholders, especially people living near their borders. Focusing on human interactions with the environment is crucial for finding effective solutions to environmental issues. Conducting comparisons of collaborative research may enable different communities to learn from each other's experiences. Kate used open-ended interviews and Photovoice to collect information about the attitudes and perceptions of local communities toward Great Sand Dunes National Park in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. She also assisted Gloria Sumay with similar interviews conducted with villagers living near Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. They compared responses from both communities in an effort to explore what researchers and various stakeholders can learn from conducting cross-cultural comparisons of collaborative conservation research.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Working with the Front Range Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project to develop tools to monitor forest spatial patterns
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013-05-07) Dickinson, Yvette, speaker; Pelz, Kristen, speaker
    Federally-funded Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration projects (CFLRPs) in Colorado are required to collectively monitor progress towards spatially explicit, landscape-scale, forest restoration goals. However, methods for evaluating these long-term projects have not been developed. This seminar will summarize the process of, and our progress towards, developing monitoring tools with Front Range CFLRP stakeholders. We will first present tools developed to monitor change in forest canopy cover at the stand scale. We will then discuss progress towards monitoring changes in forest at the landscape scale.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The tragedy of enclosure: climate change, fencing, and local environmental knowledge in Tibet
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013-03-12) Hopping, Kelly, speaker
    The impacts of climate change are distributed unevenly, and they may be exacerbated by top-down policies that are insensitive to the consequences of these changes for local communities. On the Tibetan Plateau, a shift toward privatized land management is dividing the land into smaller parcels and constraining pastoralists' traditional institutions for coping with environmental stressors. To understand how these changes are affecting herders in central Tibet, I interviewed members from every household in my study village about their concerns and knowledge of changing environmental conditions. I then combined their observations with data from satellite images to analyze how rangeland conditions have changed over the last four decades. I show how recently fenced grazing boundaries are causing the burdens of climate-induced land change to be shared unequally among pastoralists, with consequences for their ability to continue sustaining their traditional livelihoods.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Sex and ecosystem services: the importance of gendered ethnobotanical knowledge in the Bale Mountains, Ethiopia
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013-04-23) Luizza, Matt, speaker
    Integrating local ecological knowledge (LEK) of resource users with conventional scientific methods can promote effective collaboration among diverse stakeholders, facilitate access to decision-making power for marginalized communities, and provide a more holistic understanding of the landscape in question. Although this LEK integration is inherent to ethnobotanical studies, the importance of the knowledge-gender link is often overlooked. Understanding gender-based differences in local knowledge of plants is important for promoting collaborative conservation of plant-derived ecosystem services. Building on existing research of men's knowledge of plants in the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia and extensive vegetation data collected by the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Matt conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups to catalogue women's knowledge of plants in the Bale Mountains. This mixture of ecological field data and ethnobotanical data were examined in an effort to understand gender-based differences in plant-derived ecosystem services and the relative scarcity and abundance of service-providing plants across the landscape.