Month: February 2017

Categories
Opinion

The End of Expertise: And Why That Is A Giant Problem for the Anthropocene

By Dr. Bruce Hull

Two game-changing coattails that Trump road to the presidency are fake news and distrusted expertise. They also usher into mainstream governance an end to rationality, modernity, enlightened self-interest, and related strategies and hopes that we can think our way out of the challenges we face. These are deeply troubling trends for those of us concerned with the highly technical, enormously complex, wickedly interdependent sustainability challenges of meeting the needs of 2-5 billion new middle class consumers while sustaining a climate and habitat that nurtures human civilization.

Fake news gets traction because we are hard-wired to have a confirmation bias. Because of it, people search for and remember facts that confirm their initial beliefs and ignore or forget unsupportive evidence. The explosion of information made accessible by the web makes it easy for people to find the support they crave. The slow, difficult, testable, and transparent scientific method is an institution humans invented to help us overcome the confirmation bias.

If confirmation bias wasn’t enough of a threat to experts, expertise, and rationality, then its close cousin, identity protecting reasoning (IPR), is down right frightening.   IPR has the power to burn up democracy: and Trump is pouring fuel on the fire. With IPR, subsets of facts, ideas, and memes become associated with one’s identity. As a result, contrary facts, ideas, and memes are not just rejected (as the confirmation bias would have us do) but perceived as threats to be fought against, triggering a feedback loop that reinforces ones original beliefs and further polarizes opinions (Kahan et al 2012).

Climate change and gun control provide examples. Deniers immediately see any invocation of climate science as a threat to their identity, politics, culture, and heritage. Facts, science, and logic are irrelevant to the resulting discussion. The denier’s internal dialog and framing switches to defending one’s self and one’s people. Statistics, computer models, core samples, and historic trends fall on deaf ears that instead hear blasphemy, disrespect, and arrogance. Gun control arguments would be similar. Facts about accidental deaths or evidence of decreased school safety don’t matter when one only hears Bill of Rights, freedom, and rugged individualism. To invoke climate or guns in a conversation immediately reframes the discussion and triggers the defense of identity and politics. Most people would rather doubt science and experts than question their identity or politics.

The growing distrust of expertise has another troubling cause. As complexity and uncertainty of the world increase, most people struggle understanding their connection to it. How, for example, are one’s declining wages and health and identity and children’s prospects connected to distant and opaque global systems? Moreover, what can one do about it? Simple answers are seductive, especially if they reinforce stereotypes and blame someone else. Reality is more complicated and difficult to comprehend. It requires years of experience, networking, study, travel, and learning by doing.

Information of all types has never been easier to find. But the high quality, peer-reviewed, carefully produced arguments and facts tend to be less accessible, often disguised by jargon and hidden behind professional or disciplinary gates. And even if the information generated by experts is found, it is but one click away from half-baked, last minute, advocacy-driven drivel. People inexperienced with a topic have no way to know the difference between science and drivel. It is understandable that they instead accept the most frequently found, oft-repeated arguments that just so happen to confirm their initial beliefs and assumptions.

The impacts of confirmation bias, identity protecting reasoning, and information access are combining to undermine rationality, expertise, and ultimately threaten democracy. “Unless some sort of trust [of expertise] can be restored, public discourse will be polluted [by confirmation bias, IPR, and nefarious actors]…and in such an environment, anything and everything becomes possible, including the end of democracy…” (Nichols, p73) It certainly will make sustaining development more challenging.

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Dr. Bruce Hull is a Senior Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS), a professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment (CNRE), and an affiliate faculty member in the Global Change Center.

 

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Categories
Uncategorized

Documentary Film Screening in Blacksburg: Between Earth and Sky

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BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY: Climate Change on the Last Frontier

Wednesday, April 12, 2017 at 7:00 p.m.
The Lyric Theatre
Admission is free
Free popcorn to the first 150 attendees!

The Global Change Center at Virginia Tech is proud to sponsor a public screening of the new documentary film, “Between Earth and Sky: Climate Change on the Last Frontier. The film’s Executive Producer, Dr. David Weindorf, will be on hand to introduce the movie to a Blacksburg audience at the Lyric Theatre on April 12th. The pubic is invited and admission is free. Among the many scientists interviewed in the documentary is Virginia Tech’s Dr. John Galbraith, in the Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences.

Synopsis: Alaska has been the source of myth and legend in the imagination of Americans for centuries, and what was once the last frontier of American expansion, has become the first frontier in climate change. Between Earth and Sky examines climate change through the lens of impacts to native Alaskans, receding glaciers, and arctic soil. The island of Shishmaref has been home to the Inupiaq people for thousands of years. As sea ice retreats and coastal storms increase the people of Shishmaref are faced with a disappearing island and a 200 million dollar price tag to move their people with an untold cost on their culture and history.

Permafrost (permanently frozen ground) in northern upland landscapes sequesters 40% of the earth’s carbon.  Alaska has experienced the largest regional warming of any state in the U.S. increasing 3.4 degrees F since 1949. This warming has created a feedback loop of carbon to the atmosphere and the thawing of permafrost impacting the daily life of Alaskans.

Mixing interviews with some of the world’s leading scientists in climate change and arctic soils, with the day to day struggle of native Alaskans living on the front lines of global warming, Between Earth and Sky shows the calamity of climate change that has started in Alaska but is already engulfing the globe.

FILMMAKERS

Director: Paul Allen Hunton is a three time Emmy winning nonfiction filmmaker. He is the creator of 24 Frames, a documentary program highlighting music, art, and culture in the southwest which airs regionally on PBS stations. Paul is the co-creator of the PBS Digital series, Global Weirding with Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, and the Executive Producer of Through the Repellent Fence a documentary film about land art in the American Southwest which screened at the NYC Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight and SXSW in Austin. Hunton is the General Manager of Texas Tech Public Media and teaches Documentary filmmaking in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech. Paul was named Broadcaster of the Year by the Texas Association of Broadcast Educators for 2017.

Executive Producer: Dr. David C. Weindorf currently serves as Associate Dean for Research for the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources and BL Allen Endowed Chair of Pedology in the Department of Plant and Soil Science. Dr. Weindorf holds a B.S. in Range Management, M.S. in Soil Science (geochemistry minor), and Ph.D. in Agronomy from Texas Tech. Dr. Weindorf is a 20+ year member the Soil Science Society of America, past chair (2016) of the Pedology section (S-5), and a licensed Texas Professional Geoscientist. He was formerly editor of the journal Soil Horizons (2011-2013), and currently serves on the editorial boards of Pedosphere and SOIL. Previously, he served on the editorial board of Louisiana Agriculture. Dr. Weindorf also currently serves on the board of trustees for the Composting Council Research and Education Foundation (2013-present) and has served as the past president and board member of the Professional Soil Scientists Association of Texas; as well as past president and board member of the Texas Section of the American Society of Agronomy. 

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FILM FESTIVALS/AWARDS

Invited by the US State Department to be shown at COP 22, the United Nation’s global climate conference, in Marrakesh Morocco, 2016.

Official Selection Colorado Environmental Film Festival 2017

Official Selection Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital, 2017

ONLINE

Website

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Twitter

Film length: 68 minutes

 

 

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Categories
Climate Change New Courses

New Course: Climate Change and Societal Impacts

Climate Change and Societal Impacts is a new course that will be offered by Dr. Anamaria Bukvic (GEOG) in Fall 2017.

Department of Geography
Course Number: 4984
Course Title: Climate change and societal impacts
Semester: Fall 2017
Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10-11:15am
Anticipated Student Enrollment: 40

Instructor: Dr. Anamaria Bukvic, Research Assistant Professor, Geography, ana.bukvic@vt.edu

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Course Description: Accelerated climate change has been permanently changing the natural, built, and social systems around the globe over the last few decades. Many of these impacts are gradual but permanent and tend to exacerbate many preexisting issues in populated communities – shifting from sporadic to frequent occurrence, from minor to major event, from slight societal disruption to a radical one. With sea level rise, more frequent and intense storms, increased precipitation, prolonged and persistent droughts, and many other more subtle environmental changes, societies are facing major challenges in how to respond to these issues given a number of other challenges they are facing, such as political instability, failed economies, environmental degradation, mass migrations, and resource stress.

Therefore, this class will focus on the multidimensional aspects of climate change and adaptation, as well as on the interactions, complexity, uncertainty, and possible outcomes for different societies. It will explore dynamic trends of climate change-induced population movement, conflicts, socioeconomic shifts, geopolitics, and equity issues, as well as their impact on vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity of different societies. The course will utilize contemporary digital tools to facilitate students’ comprehension and engagement with this issue and explore connections across spatiotemporal scales and different systems. In addition, it will apply innovative approaches to understand uncertainty and explore alternative futures via scenarios and foresight analysis. This strategy will empower students to actively participate in discussion, analysis, and interpretation of emerging changes on different social systems, as well as in proposing contextual, robust, and realistic adaptation strategies.

Course Objectives: Upon the successful completion of this course, students will achieve the following objectives/be able to:

  1. Advance knowledge of global climate change issues, complexities and uncertainty (e.g., science, terminology, direct and indirect impacts, adaptation options, and main societal stakeholders).
  2. Define contemporary societal challenges associated with climate change and methodically discuss individual aspects of this problem and their interactions (e.g., feedback loops, ripple effects, thresholds, carrying capacities, system collapse)
  3. Develop skills to identify the problem and its root cause, possible short-term and long-term solutions, implementation barriers and opportunities, as well socioeconomic costs of action vs. inaction.
  4. Demonstrate ability to utilize contemporary methodological approaches and tools to understand, critically analyze, and resolve different societal issues related to climate change.

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Categories
Biodiversity

Indirect effects of invasive Burmese pythons on the Florida Everglades

John D. Willson recently published a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology titled, “Indirect effects of invasive Burmese pythons on ecosystems in southern Florida”.

Willson’s research paper was highlighted in the online magazine, Anthropocene, published by Future Earth:

Invading pythons and the weird, uncertain future of the Florida Everglades

By Brandon Keim | February 8, 2017

The Florida Everglades are one of Earth’s biological marvels, a vast slow-moving river in whose marshes live—even at this late date, with water diverted, pollution injected and human development steadily destroying—a wondrous and singular array of creatures. Yet the Everglades are also undergoing a dramatic ecological upheaval. They’re home to a new and invasive apex predator: Burmese pythons.

Descended from escaped or abandoned pets, the pythons established a breeding population late in the 20th century. Their predatory habits are the stuff of viral legend (Google “python bursts after eating alligator”) and conservation concern, with researchers having documented dramatic mammal declines where pythons have proliferated. In those areas, once-common creatures like raccoons, opossums, and white-tailed deer are nearly extirpated.

So what next? That’s the big question and the subject of a new Journal of Applied Ecology study by biologist John Willson of the University of Arkansas. Curious about the future of a python-regulated ecosystem, Willson dug scores of artificial turtle nests across and outside the pythons’ range, then used motion-triggered cameras to monitor nest predation. (Rather than turtle eggs, Willson’s nests contained quail eggs.)

Where pythons prevailed, the nests were less-disturbed, as would be expected in the near-absence of egg-loving raccoons and opossums. This suggests a possibly turtle-rich future for the Everglades, and is also emblematic of the indirect, cascading consequences of the pythons’ rise.

“It is probable that pythons are having a strong positive indirect effect on turtle nesting success in southern Florida,” writes Willson, “and may also be having positive indirect effects on recruitment of other small egg-laying species in the Everglades such as ground-nesting songbirds, lizards, sea turtles, and oviparous snakes.” It’s not all good news for egg-layers, though. Willson notes that pythons have recently been documented eating the eggs of larger species, including guineafowl and crane-like birds called Limpkin.

As some populations expand and others contract, their ecological roles will also change. Given the importance of animals as seed-dispersers, for example, certain plant populations might also expand and contract; and that principle can be applied in the myriad contexts of each species’ life history. Altogether, writes Willson, changes might be expected in “vegetation composition or structure, nutrient dynamics, food web structure, or ecosystem services.” The very fabric of the Everglades could be rewoven.

Read the full article here.

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John D. Willson, a former postdoc in the Hopkins Lab and current faculty member at the University of Arkansas.

Categories
Climate Change Global Change Other Sponsored Lectures Seminars, Workshops, Lectures

James Hansen to give keynote talk at Appalachian Studies Conference

From VT News

Renowned climatologist James Hansen will visit Virginia Tech on March 10, 2017.
He will give a 4 p.m. lecture entitled “A Peaceful Revolution: Global Justice for Young People Requires a New Approach” in the Squires Student Center, followed by a question-and-answer period.
The event is free and open to the public as seating allows.

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Hansen, who was among the first scientists to argue that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, is the keynote speaker in the 40th Annual Appalachian Studies Conference entitled “Extreme Appalachia.”

His lecture is sponsored by the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, the Appalachian Studies Association, Virginia Tech Appalachian Studies Program, Applied Interdisciplinary Research in Air Lab, Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, College of Natural Resources and Environment, College of Science, Department of Political Science, Fralin Life Science Institute, Pathways Grant from the Office of Undergraduate Academic Affairs, Sigma Xi, and the Virginia Water Resources Research Center at Virginia Tech.

Formerly director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen is now an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness, and Solutions. He was trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of James Van Allen at the University of Iowa.

Hansen’s early research on the clouds of Venus helped identify their composition as sulfuric acid. Since the late 1970s, he has focused his research on Earth’s climate, especially human-made climate change. He is best known for his testimony to congressional committees on climate change in the 1980s, which helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue.

Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and was designated by Time magazine in 2006 as one of the 100 most influential people on Earth.

“We chose Dr. Hansen as our conference keynote because we wanted to engage people from the humanities and the sciences across campus in thinking about issues central to Appalachia,” said conference chair Anita Puckett, an associate professor in the Department of Religion and Culture and director of the Appalachian Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. “Dr. Hansen is an expert in the effects of extreme resource extraction and use. His lecture will be an important component of this conference.”

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The conference’s theme, “Extreme Appalachia,” is meant to represent the impassioned commitments people have to the region as well as the extreme issues it faces: exorbitant natural resource mining and use, underfunding of public education and services, and dismal job opportunities.

“All of these factors together have sparked community resilience and activism that advance a sustainable future for the region,” said Emily Satterwhite, an associate professor in the Department of Religion and Culture and a member of the Appalachian Studies faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.

Mountaintop mining causes extensive fragmentation of forests, as well as high salt and heavy metal concentrations in nearby freshwater streams that are toxic to fish and birds, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Exposure to coal dust also affects human health; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that surveillance data show a surge in progressive massive fibrosis, the most severe form of black lung disease.

“We are privileged to serve as one of many Virginia Tech cosponsors of this important and timely lecture by Dr. Hansen,” said Bill Hopkins, director of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech. “The issues he will discuss are critically important in our region, but global in nature. There are very few scientists who have Dr. Hansen’s breadth and depth of knowledge on issues related to climate change, cultivated by decades of experience in Washington and around the world.”

The conference is sponsored by the Appalachian Studies Association, which was formed in 1977 by a group of scholars, teachers, and activists passionate about the region. It will be the first time in more than 20 years that Virginia Tech has served as host.

The lecture will take place in Colonial Hall in the Squires Student Center, located at 290 Colonial Ave. in Blacksburg.

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Story by Lindsay Key, Fralin Life Science Institute Communicator

Hansen photo by Bill Ebbesen via Wikimedia Commons

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Categories
Climate Change Seminars, Workshops, Lectures

Carol Franco: Global Climate Change Policy-Why should we care?

Dr. Carol Franco, a senior research associate in the College of Natural Resources and Environment’s Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation (FREC), will give a seminar on Friday, February 17, 2017 at 11:15 a.m., in Fralin Auditorium. Her seminar will be titled:

Global Climate Change Policy – Why should we care?

Abstract

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international treaty that provides a platform for multilateral efforts to address the impacts of climate change on people and ecosystems. By establishing a process, the UNFCCC allows for Parties to propose actions and agree to those actions. An important recent achievement was the Paris Agreement (PA) that was adopted by 194 Parties to the Convention on December 2015 with the goal of strengthening global efforts to reduce green house gases emissions, adapting to the effects of climate change, and providing support to developing countries. The main objective of the PA is to limit increases in average global temperature to 2o C above pre-industrial levels. Therefore, the PA requires Parties to put forward commitments to strengthen country-level mitigation efforts and to enhance their adaptive capacity to the impacts of climate change; these are known as National Determined Contributions (NDCs). The PA includes three main work areas: mitigation efforts, e.g. Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation; foster forest conservation, sustainable management and enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+) and Nationally Appropriated Mitigation Actions; adaptation efforts, e.g. National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), loss and damage; and means of implementation, technology transfer, capacity building, and the mobilization of financial resources to support developing countries. These efforts constitute a growing field of work on which FREC, based on its experience, could engage productively.

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Related story at VT News:

Climate deal success in Paris just the beginning for Virginia Tech researcher

Categories
Research

John Jelesko is Super Poison Ivy Man

From VT News

John Jelesko’s resume runs long with all the hallmarks of a serious scientist:

  • Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • Primary author of studious journal publications
  • Winner of prestigious National Science Foundation fellowships
  • Post-doctoral work at University of California, Berkeley
John Jelesko, PPWS

Now the Virginia Tech associate professor of plant pathology, physiology, and weed science can add one more notch to his storied CV: character in a comic.

While his character doesn’t wear a cape or have super-human powers, Jelesko is being prominently featured in the comic that is about something near and dear to Jelesko’s (very human) heart – poison ivy. And the research that he has done in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences just might help save the day.

Jelesko’s making his claim to fame in the online comic Partners 5, which is about a team of horticulturalists-turned-heroes who are fighting an evil villain named Heart Root and his band of praying mantises who are taking over the world. Toward the end of the strip, the team calls in famed scientist J.J. Burkman (Get it? John Jelesko? J.J.?) who has a few tricks up his sleeve on how to defeat Heart Root.

The casual reader may wonder what all this has to do with poison ivy. But they first need to know that the brainchild behind Partners 5 is no casual poison ivy observer.

Umar Mycka is more than just a horticulturalist at the Philadelphia Zoo. A renaissance man of sorts, Mycka is also passionate about poison ivy – so much so that he has a side business removing it from wherever the dreaded, itch-inducing vine is found. And if you know poison ivy, it’s just about everywhere.

In his nine years in the poison ivy business, Mycka has removed the creeping vine from homes around the east coast as well sets of movies being made by M. Night Shyamalan. One time he removed a 930-pound, 25-year old plant from a New Jersey home. The name of that particularly large and nasty strain of poison ivy is called Heart Root, hence the name of the villain in his comic.

Mycka is so passionate about poison ivy that he holds an annual conference on the topic, which is where he met Jelesko, who is an affiliated faculty member with the Fralin Life Science Institute and the Global Change Center.

Jelesko has done extensive research on poison ivy that includes developing a natural fungus to kill it (spoiler alert: that fungus plays into how J.J. Burkman and the other heroes defeat the villain). In real life, Jelesko and his colleagues are also planning an outing that would be well suited for the Flash — he’s organizing an experiment to hike the entire Appalachian Trail and study the DNA of poison ivy along the trail.

When Mycka launched the comic last year, he began asking Jelesko for advice to make sure the comic was rooted in science. Sure, poison ivy isn’t an actual two-legged menace like it is in the comic, but Mycka makes sure to give Heart Root some characteristics that the plant has. The city is being overrun by Heart Root in part because of climate change — which in reality is going to allow poison ivy to spread more easily. The praying mantises in the comic are there because they thrive where poison ivy does.

When Mycka asked Jelesko if it was OK to write him into comic, Jelesko wasn’t sure at first.

“I was flattered — and scared at the same time,” said Jelesko, who was a Superman fan as a kid. “Would I be portrayed as this nerdy professor who wears glasses and trips over his own feet? Or would it go the other way and I’d be a mad scientist?”

Turns out Jelesko’s alter ego is none of those things.

J.J. Burkman made his debut on the 91st page of the comic, which has a new installment posted every week. He’s bearded and wears glasses (like Jelesko) but otherwise bears little resemblance. J.J. is talking about how urushiol — the oil that makes poison ivy itch — is coursing through another character’s bloodstream.

Jelesko gets to have a say in anything that comes out of his character’s mouth to make sure it is scientifically accurate, but otherwise he lets Mycka have free rein. The strip is written by the graphic novelist Kaja Blackley and drawn by Blackley’s wife, Christina, but Mycka is the driving force.

Jelesko said that while it has been fun to see how he looks when drawn into a comic, it serves a good purpose, too.

“The interface between art and science is very segregated and things like this are a way to bring them together in a way which each of them benefit from the input of the other,” he said. “I see this as a way to get people thinking about poison ivy in a way that is accessible to lots of different people.”

The comic is going to wrap up soon, and Mycka says J.J. will play an important role in the grand finale.

But fear not, loyal readers, this is not the end of J.J. and the band of heroes in Partners 5 who are saving the world from the tyranny of evil poison ivy.

A sequel is in the works.

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Story by Zeke Barlow

Categories
Conservation

New position at VT builds social science capacity within the bird conservation community

From VT News

With many bird populations declining, scientists are looking for new ways to help protect and conserve vital species.

Thanks to a partnership with the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, Virginia Tech is now home to a new, high-profile position that aims to build social science capacity within the bird conservation community through research, partnerships, and outreach.

Dr. Ashley Dayer

According to Ashley Dayer, assistant professor of human dimensions in the College of Natural Resources and Environment’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, two national-level workshops of bird conservation community leaders in the past three years helped elevate the need for integrating social science (also referred to as “human dimensions”) into bird conservation.

“Social science is the study of people, including disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology,” said Dayer, who is also affiliated with Virginia Tech’s Global Change Center, housed in the Fralin Life Science Institute. “Those in the bird conservation community are interested in integrating social science into conservation efforts because they recognize that the solution to bird conservation challenges typically isn’t about changing bird behavior but about changing human behavior.”

Ashley Gramza has joined Virginia Tech to serve as the new national bird conservation social science coordinator. In this position, based in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, she will also co-chair the Human Dimensions Subcommittee of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, a forum of government agencies, private organizations, and bird initiatives dedicated to promoting and advancing bird conservation.

This position came to fruition owing to the efforts of the initiative’s Human Dimensions Subcommittee, including committee chair Tammy VerCauteren, who is executive director of the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, and Dayer, who currently serves as co-chair.

Over the course of three years, VerCauteren and Dayer built consensus in the bird conservation community about the focus and structure of the position; gained endorsement from the initiative’s U.S. Committee, composed of agency and organization leaders; and secured funding support.

Gramza brings a unique blend of experience in wildlife biology and social science to the position, having worked on topics ranging from wildlife habitat conservation on private lands in Iowa to understanding the motivations for negative human-wildlife interactions at National Park Service sites.

She holds a bachelor’s in wildlife ecology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a master’s in human dimensions of natural resources from Colorado State University. She is currently finishing her doctorate in wildlife biology at Colorado State, where she studied the human and biological factors related to interactions between outdoor domestic cats and wildlife.

“Ashley Gramza’s applied experience collaborating with multiple conservation agencies, training conservation professionals, and working with private landowners provides the skill set we need for this job,” Dayer said. “She is well-suited for the position and will be a great asset to the bird conservation community.”

In her new role, Gramza will work alongside Dayer to conduct research and outreach aimed at integrating social science into bird conservation initiatives. The research aspect of the position will focus on studying various aspects of the human dimensions of bird conservation.

Their first project will examine why landowners choose to enroll in the Conservation Reserve Program, a voluntary initiative funded by the USDA Farm Service Agency that pays landowners to remove environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production to improve ecosystem health.

“The Farm Service Agency wants to know why landowners get involved with the program and what they do on their property after they leave the program,” Dayer said.

Gramza also plans to work with the bird conservation community to learn how she can best assist them.

“I want to learn their social science needs, hear about what common human dimensions issues might be affecting bird conservation, and find out what tools they would find most helpful,” she said.

According to Gramza, almost all wildlife work has a human component. Understanding the way people think about and behave toward wildlife can help conservation professionals understand how to communicate about wildlife-related issues, increase public involvement in conservation, and promote pro-conservation behaviors.

To that end, she is looking forward to helping the bird conservation community develop outreach initiatives and research projects that help engage various stakeholders and understand how people affect, and are affected by, bird conservation.

“I’m excited to conduct research that will be used to conserve bird populations and increase the social science capacity within the bird conservation community,” Gramza said. “I’ve always wanted to do applied social science research that is both scientifically rigorous and is used by conservation practitioners.”

Gramza’s position is funded by the USDA Farm Service Agency, U.S. Forest Service State and Private Forestry, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, and Virginia Tech.

The advisory team for the position is comprised of a diverse set of leaders in bird conservation, including Dayer and VerCauteren, as well as Todd Fearer of the Appalachian Mountain Joint Venture, Natalie Sexton of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Scott Anderson of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, and Judith Scarl of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative.

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Story by Lynn Davis, College of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation