This manuscript examines marine resource users' perceptions of, experiences with, and responses to federal and territorial fisheries management processes in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. ...Drawing on anthropological critiques of common pool resources (CPR) institutions and political ecology, I describe the historical, social, and political factors that influence how fisheries management occurs at multiple scales and how it is experienced by fishers, managers, and other stakeholders. This multi-scale approach is both timely and important, as resources and communities throughout the world are increasingly globalized and inter-connected; it is virtually impossible to find an example of a CPR being managed at the local scale, devoid of the influence of external factors. As a result, it is becoming more common for resources and resource users to be subject to regulations and management regimes at multiple levels and scales (such as federal and territorial). For this reason, it is critical to examine how management institutions across scales impact one another and influence key elements of management, such as stakeholder participation. Fisheries management in St. Croix provides an opportunity to explore how the complexities of multiscale resource management occur at the local level and how resource users and other stakeholders experience and perceive those processes. Specifically, this manuscript describes whether and how fishers and other marine resource stakeholders participate in management processes and how factors such as demographic heterogeneity, historical patterns of social group interactions, and the complexity of management processes influence participation.
For fishers throughout the Caribbean, major storm events such as hurricanes are a significant component of their life experiences. Over the past few decades, fishers in the US Virgin Islands (USVI) ...frequently experienced major storms and their aftermath, including Hurricanes Hugo (1989), Marilyn (1995), and Irma and Maria (2017). Using the resilience literature as our theoretical lens, we provide historical context and analyze current preliminary data on fishers' perspectives to develop a better understanding of fishers' and institutional responses to storms. We examine individual experiences and interactions with the institutions engaged in direct storm relief and post-storm fishery management. Preliminary analysis of these fishers' perspectives is used to inform recommendations for a future research agenda by identifying the variables most prominent in both the resilience literature and fishers' experiences.
Flood mitigation and adaptation measures, among other tools to improve resiliency, will be necessary to sustain coastal communities in the face of climate change. Key to successful adaptation will be ...engineering projects, and critical to the success of those projects will be community engagement and support. Despite the recognized importance of community engagement when addressing complex issues like coastal flooding on which engineers work, most undergraduate engineering programs offer little to no training in community engagement. In this paper, we describe our experiences working with undergraduate engineering students to develop community-driven designs to address flooding and water quality issues in the Lake Mattamuskeet watershed in eastern North Carolina. Through an interdisciplinary approach, student teams learned to engage with local stakeholders to better integrate local knowledge and address issues identified by community members in their designs. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, all community engagement aspects of the project moved to virtual forums, and we discuss the impact this shift had on the engineering designs as well as student learning outcomes and community connections.
Citizen science is the participation of non-scientists in the collection of scientific data and other aspects of the scientific process. In this manuscript, we explore what it means to participate in ...citizen science from two perspectives-that of a researcher designing and facilitating a citizen science project, and that of a citizen scientist volunteering the time and energy required for participation. We examine the methods and goals of the projects, describing the challenges faced by researchers and science volunteers alike as they participate in research processes aimed to increase community involvement in science and, by extension, environmental management issues. We describe how the constraints of citizen science models and methods underscore the importance of incorporating alternative anthropological and ethnographic approaches in coastal research, and offer eco-ethnography as a way for scientists to extend their citizen science projects to better reflect the needs and concerns of local communities impacted by climate change and sea-level rise.
Princeville, NC, is the oldest town chartered by Blacks in America. Founded as Freedom Hill in 1865 and incorporated as Princeville in 1885, the town continues to be predominantly African American ...today. Built on the unwanted and flood-prone lands adjacent to the Tar River, Princeville has flooded multiple times throughout its history, including after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Because of the town’s historical significance, residents and town officials alike have been reluctant to accept offers for widespread buyouts from the government. Despite having limited financial resources and political clout, the town has developed a unique approach to managed retreat while rebuilding from Matthew—one that emphasizes the importance of historical sites while also recognizing the need to relocate residents out of harm’s way from future floods. This manuscript uses a historical and narrative approach to examine how Princeville’s unique history, and the relationship between the town and the Tar River, play important roles in the town’s decisions regarding retreat and redevelopment in the aftermath of major flooding events. We highlight the voices of current residents, including leaders, as well as the structural and cultural conditions that both constrain and enable the town’s collective agency. While focused on the present day, this case study is historically informed, using oral histories and archival documents.
Given the importance of coral reef ecosystems to not only the health, livelihoods, and well-being of individuals and communities throughout the world, but also to global biodiversity, it is critical ...to improve our understanding of coral reef small scale fisheries (SSF) as social-ecological systems (SES). When examined using a SES approach, SSF operate within coupled-feedbacks with their surrounding marine ecosystems, and environmental outcomes depend upon interactions among a variety of social, ecological, and institutional factors. In a SES context, social network analysis (SNA) can illuminate how structure and process contribute to governance successes or failures among actors and natural resource systems. To address gaps in understanding what factors impact community cohesion, the flow of information, and potential for collective action in SSF, SNA was combined with rich ethnographic data focused on fishers in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Results suggest that fishers in St. Croix are not organized into one cohesive group, and that demographic and fishing-related attributes influence group membership in non-uniform ways. These findings align with and build on recent work on SSF, but further demonstrate that the processes that influence the formation and maintenance of ties among fishers are complex and potentially site-specific. This makes it challenging to come to meaningful conclusions related to the potential for collective action based on SNA alone, but highlights the important role that in-depth ethnographic and other qualitative data can play.
Este ensayo revisa los alcances de la oceanografía social tal como fue presentada y discutida en la Primera Reunión de Oceanografía Social organizada en el Centro de Estudios en Geografía Humana de ...El Colegio de Michoacán en septiembre de 2017. La oceanografía social es un campo innovador e híbrido de estudio, situado en el umbral entre las ciencias naturales y sociales que abarca el estudio de las relaciones e interacciones de las sociedades humanas, presentes y pasadas, con el ambiente costero/marino. Dividimos el ensayo en dos secciones. Primero, describimos cronológicamente el surgimiento y evolución de la disciplina, así como un panorama contemporáneo del quehacer del oceanógrafo social y la imperante necesidad de expandir esta aproximación a todas las esferas de los estudios marinos. Finalmente, ofrecemos una síntesis de las fortalezas y retos que ofrece la oceanografía social y de cómo nos proponemos enfrentarlos a partir de la formación de un CoLaboratorio.
Currently, there is widespread debate regarding the overall status of the world's fisheries, with some researchers projecting their total collapse in only a few decades, and others concluding the ...situation is not quite as bleak. Additional debates include what strategies should be used to manage fisheries at various scales, and further research is needed to determine which strategies are most appropriate for use in particular situations and locales, as context is critical. Recently, prominent common pool resources scholars have expressed the need for ethnographic approaches to studying resource management institutions in order to move beyond the current focus of simply identifying the factors and conditions that lead to the self-organization of resource users and long-term sustainability of management institutions. These authors describe the need for examining the larger context in which management institutions exist and taking various historical, political, and sociocultural factors into account when examining common pool resources. This dissertation is a response to that request. This research is the result of over 20 months of ethnographic research in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands (USVI). Drawing on research in political ecology and building on anthropological critiques of common pool resource institutions, I describe the historical, social, and political factors that influence how fisheries management occurs at the federal and territorial levels, and how commercial fishers, managers, and other stakeholders experience and participate in multi-scale management processes. Ethnographic data suggest that there are a variety of historical, social, and political factors that influence how commercial fishers, managers, and other stakeholders perceive the federal fisheries management process, the extent of their participation in that process, as well as interactions within and between stakeholder groups. Additionally, the mismatch that exists between the centralized management structure of the US federal system and the small-scale, multi-method nature of St. Croix's fishery creates a complex management environment in which few stakeholders participate.
Public participation in groundwater projects is increasing, however, the efficacy of the data collected in such studies, is not well‐documented in the literature. In this study, the authors describe ...a citizen science project focused on measuring and recording groundwater levels in an aquifer and evaluate whether the groundwater data collected by the participants are trustworthy. A total of 31 participants were initially recruited to measure and record groundwater levels from 29 monitoring wells on a barrier island. Following recruitment, the authors provided training to the citizen scientists by introducing groundwater concepts, and showing the participants how to measure, record and report groundwater level data (over an 81‐day period) with an electronic water level meter. The water level data recorded by the citizen scientists (i.e., 35 time series datasets with over 450 unique measurements) were then compared to high frequency data recorded by automated water level loggers that were already deployed in the groundwater monitoring wells to assess the trustworthiness of the data. Trustworthiness was evaluated using measures of reliability (i.e., consistency in measuring the same thing), validity (i.e., degree to which results are truthful), and other standard graphical and statistical techniques. The results suggest that with proper training, guidance, and motivation, citizen scientists can collect trustworthy groundwater level data that could be useful for monitoring the sustainability of aquifers and managing of groundwater levels. It is noted however, that such positive outcomes require significant investments of time and effort on the part of the project managers.
Article impact statement: Groundwater level data collected by citizen scientists are trustworthy, but project managers of citizen science projects are cautioned that acquisition of robust data requires significant investments of time and effort.
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