Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Untapped Capacity For Resilience In Environmental Law, Ahjond Garmestani, J. B. Ruhl, Brian C. Chaffin, Robin K. Craig, Helena F.M.W. Van Rijswick, David G. Angeler, Carl Folke, Lance Gunderson, Dirac Twidwell, Craig R. Allen

Papers in Natural Resources

Over the past several decades, environmental governance has made substantial progress in addressing environmental change, but emerging environmental problems require new innovations in law, policy, and governance. While expansive legal reform is unlikely to occur soon, there is untapped potential in existing laws to address environmental change, both by leveraging adaptive and transformative capacities within the law itself to enhance socialecological resilience and by using those laws to allow socialecological systems to adapt and transform. Legal and policy research to date has largely overlooked this potential, even though it offers a more expedient approach to addressing environmental change than waiting …

Discontinuity Analysis Reveals Alternative Community Regimes During Phytoplankton Succession, David G. Angeler, Craig R. Allen, Dirac L. Twidwell Jr., Monika Winder

Papers in Natural Resources

It is well-recognized in plankton ecology that phytoplankton development can lead to distinct peaks (i.e., blooms) during spring and summer. We used a 5-year (2007–2011) phytoplankton data set and utilized discontinuity analysis to assess resilience attributes of spring and summer blooms based on the cross-scale resilience model. Using the size structure (i.e., cross-scale structure as an indicator of resilience) in the sampled plankton data, we assessed whether spring and summer blooms differ substantially between but not within blooms; that is, whether they comprise alternative community regimes. Our exploratory study supported this expectation and more broadly resilience theory, which posits that …

Convergence Science In The Anthropocene: Navigating The Known And Unknown, David G. Angeler, Craig R. Allen, Ana Carnaval

Papers in Natural Resources

1. Rapidly changing ecological and social systems currently pose significant societal challenges. Navigating the complexity of social-ecological change requires ap- proaches able to cope with, and potentially solve, both foreseen and unforeseen societal challenges.

2. The emergent field of convergence addresses the intricacies of such challenges, and is thus relevant to a broad range of interdisciplinary issues.

3. This paper suggests a way to conceptualize convergence research. It discusses how it relates to two major societal challenges (adaptation, transformation), and to the generation of policy-relevant science. It also points out limitations to the further development of convergence research.