Models are commonly used to identify lands that will best maintain the ability of wildlife to move between wildland blocks through matrix lands after the remaining matrix has become incompatible with ...wildlife movement. We offer a roadmap of 16 choices and assumptions that arise in designing linkages to facilitate movement or gene flow of focal species between 2 or more predefined wildland blocks. We recommend designing linkages to serve multiple (rather than one) focal species likely to serve as a collective umbrella for all native species and ecological processes, explicitly acknowledging untested assumptions, and using uncertainty analysis to illustrate potential effects of model uncertainty. Such uncertainty is best displayed to stakeholders as maps of modeled linkages under different assumptions. We also recommend modeling corridor dwellers (species that require more than one generation to move their genes between wildland blocks) differently from passage species (for which an individual can move between wildland blocks within a few weeks). We identify a problem, which we call the subjective translation problem, that arises because the analyst must subjectively decide how to translate measurements of resource selection into resistance. This problem can be overcome by estimating resistance from observations of animal movement, genetic distances, or interpatch movements. There is room for substantial improvement in the procedures used to design linkages robust to climate change and in tools that allow stakeholders to compare an optimal linkage design to alternative designs that minimize costs or achieve other conservation goals. /// Los modelos son utilizados comúnmente para identificar tierras que mantengan la habilidad de la vida silvestre para moverse entre bloques de tierras silvestres a través de una matriz de tierras que habían sido incompatibles con el movimiento de vida silvestre. Ofrecemos 16 opciones y supuestos que se originan en el diseño de enlaces para facilitar el movimiento o el flujo de genes de especies focales entre 2 o más bloques de tierras silvestres predefinidos. Recomendamos el diseño de enlaces que sirvan a múltiples (y solo a una) especies focales que funjan como una sombrilla colectiva para todas las especies nativas y los procesos ecológicos, que explícitamente admitan supuestos no comprobados y que utilicen análisis de incertidumbre para ilustrar efectos potenciales de la incertidumbre del modelo. La mejor forma de mostrar tal incertidumbre a los interesados es mediante mapas de los enlaces modelados bajo diferentes suposiciones. También recomendamos modelar a habitantes de corredores (especies que requieren más de una generación para mover sus genes entre bloques de tierra silvestre) de manera diferente que las especies pasajeras (un individuo se puede mover entre bloques de tierras silvestres en unas cuantas semanas). Identificamos un problema, que denominamos el problema de traducción subjetiva, que surge porque un analista debe decidir subjetivamente cómo traducir medidas de selección de recursos a resistencia. Este problema puede ser sobrepuesto mediante la estimación de la resistencia a partir de observaciones de movimientos de animales, distancias genéticas o movimientos entre fragmentos. Hay espacio para la mejora sustancial de los procedimientos utilizados para diseñar enlaces robustos ante el cambio climático y en herramientas que permiten que los interesados comparen un diseño óptimo con diseños alternativos que minimicen costos o alcancen otras metas de conservación.
•Describe translocal mobilization against the proposed mining of Niyamgiri.•Use DeLanda’s assemblage theory to describe the translocal mobilization.•Discuss the emergence of Niyamgiri movement ...assemblage.•Discuss agency, maintenance and power relationships within the assemblage.
Translocal mobilizations on issues of social and environmental justice have arisen across the world, often in response to the depredations of extractive industries linked to global capital networks. A key challenge in theorizing such mobilization is to understand how dispersed and diverse actors come together contingently around common campaigns of justice, and enable powerless and marginal actors to contend with powerful state and corporate actors. In my paper, I draw on DeLanda’s work on assemblages to engage with this question in the context of the case of Niyamgiri in India. The proposal to mine Niyamgiri, a mountain located in South Odisha in India, gave rise to a transnational mobilization which included local grassroots movements, activists, lawyers, conservation organizations and human rights/indigenous rights networks from around the world. I describe the mobilization as a translocal assemblage of resistance, individuated out of interactions between diverse actors across locations and scales. I discuss how this assemblage emerged through interactions between pre-existing actors, networks and institutions, and enabled marginalized and powerless communities to contend with powerful assemblages of state and capital. I argue that thinking in terms of assemblages can provide a strategic depth to social and environmental justice movements, which totalizing discourses of capital, power and revolution often foreclose.
Both short-term tourism rentals and the digital platforms that manage and mediate them have expanded enormously in recent years, against a backdrop of increasing platform urbanism and platform ...capitalism. This expansion triggers transformations that are contributing to acute negative externalities never envisaged within the original ethos and sustainability promises of the sharing economy. The severe knock-on effects of the unanticipated reconfiguration of economic and everyday life have met with a strong civic response, leading to a growing politicisation of platform-mediated rentals increasingly performed in the digital sphere. Numerous social movements have arisen in opposition to platforms such as Airbnb, while lobbyists and user collectives have also mobilised to defend their respective rights to 'home-share' and generate extra income, as the business becomes increasingly professionalised in large cities. Through the lens of the increasingly politicised and polemical impacts of the platform economy, this article analyses Twitter narratives and counter-narratives surrounding Airbnb-mediated rentals and their impact on Madrid and Barcelona. Findings show how narratives are choreographed by a range of actors and that narrative ecosystems emerge in the form of interconnected virtual relationship networks, often embedded in translocal assemblages.
Some rebel groups abuse noncombatant populations, while others exhibit restraint. Insurgent leaders in some countries transform local structures of government, while others simply extract resources ...for their own benefit. In some contexts, groups kill their victims selectively, while in other environments violence appears indiscriminate, even random. This book presents a theory that accounts for the different strategies pursued by rebel groups in civil war, explaining why patterns of insurgent violence vary so much across conflicts. It does so by examining the membership, structure, and behavior of four insurgent movements in Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru. Drawing on interviews with nearly two hundred combatants and civilians who experienced violence firsthand, it shows that rebels' strategies depend in important ways on how difficult it is to launch a rebellion. The book thus demonstrates how characteristics of the environment in which rebellions emerge constrain rebel organization and shape the patterns of violence that civilians experience.
Recent major changes to the Israel Defense Forces that reduced infantry, armor, and artillery elements in response to the rise of nonstate adversaries mean that in any future multifront war it will ...be much more difficult for IDF ground forces to capture areas in the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere.
Predicting population-level effects of landscape change depends on identifying factors that influence population connectivity in complex landscapes. However, most putative movement corridors and ...barriers have not been based on empirical data. In this study, we identify factors that influence connectivity by comparing patterns of genetic similarity among 146 black bears (Ursus americanus), sampled across a 3,000-km2 study area in northern Idaho, with 110 landscape-resistance hypotheses. Genetic similarities were based on the pairwise percentage dissimilarity among all individuals based on nine microsatellite loci (average expected heterozygosity = 0.79). Landscape-resistance hypotheses describe a range of potential relationships between movement cost and land cover, slope, elevation, roads, Euclidean distance, and a putative movement barrier. These hypotheses were divided into seven organizational models in which the influences of barriers, distance, and landscape features were statistically separated using partial Mantel tests. Only one of the competing organizational models was fully supported: patterns of genetic structure are primarily related to landscape gradients of land cover and elevation. The alternative landscape models, isolation by barriers and isolation by distance, are not supported. In this black bear population, gene flow is facilitated by contiguous forest cover at middle elevations.
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