The socio-ecological resilience and sustainability implications of seafood supply chain disruption.

Remaining resilient under disruption, while also being sustainable, is essential for continued and equitable seafood supply in a changing world. However, despite the wide application of resilience thinking to sustainability research and the multiple dimensions of social-ecological sustainability, it can be difficult to ascertain how to make a supply chain both resilient and sustainable. In this review, we draw upon the socio-ecological resilience and sustainability literature to identify links and highlight concepts for managing and monitoring adaptive and equitable seafood supply chains. We then review documented responses of seafood supply networks to disruption and detail a case study to describe the attributes of a resilient seafood supply system. Finally, we outline the implications of these responses for social (including wellbeing and equity), economic and environmental sustainability. Disruptions to supply chains were categorised based on their frequency of occurrence (episodic, chronic, cumulative) and underlying themes were derived from supply chain responses for each type of disruption. We found that seafood supply chains were resilient when they were diverse (in either products, markets, consumers or processing), connected, supported by governments at all scales, and where supply chain actors were able to learn and collaborate through trust-based relationships. With planning, infrastructure and systematic mapping, these attributes also can help to build socio-ecological sustainability and move towards more adaptive and equitable seafood supply.

Global application of an unoccupied aerial vehicle photogrammetry protocol for predicting aboveground biomass in non-forest ecosystems.

Non-forest ecosystems, dominated by shrubs, grasses and herbaceous plants, provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and forage for grazing, and are highly sensitive to climatic changes. Yet these ecosystems are poorly represented in remotely sensed biomass products and are undersampled by in situ monitoring. Current global change threats emphasize the need for new tools to capture biomass change in non-forest ecosystems at appropriate scales. Here we developed and deployed a new protocol for photogrammetric height using unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) images to test its capability for delivering standardized measurements of biomass across a globally distributed field experiment. We assessed whether canopy height inferred from UAV photogrammetry allows the prediction of aboveground biomass (AGB) across low-stature plant species by conducting 38 photogrammetric surveys over 741 harvested plots to sample 50 species. We found mean canopy height was strongly predictive of AGB across species, with a median adjusted R 2 of 0.87 (ranging from 0.46 to 0.99) and median prediction error from leave-one-out cross-validation of 3.9%. Biomass per-unit-of-height was similar within but different among, plant functional types. We found that photogrammetric reconstructions of canopy height were sensitive to wind speed but not sun elevation during surveys. We demonstrated that our photogrammetric approach produced generalizable measurements across growth forms and environmental settings and yielded accuracies as good as those obtained from in situ approaches. We demonstrate that using a standardized approach for UAV photogrammetry can deliver accurate AGB estimates across a wide range of dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystems. Many academic and land management institutions have the technical capacity to deploy these approaches over extents of 1-10 ha-1. Photogrammetric approaches could provide much-needed information required to calibrate and validate the vegetation models and satellite-derived biomass products that are essential to understand vulnerable and understudied non-forested ecosystems around the globe.

Influence of offshore oil and gas structures on seascape ecological connectivity.

Offshore platforms, subsea pipelines, wells and related fixed structures supporting the oil and gas (O&G) industry are prevalent in oceans across the globe, with many approaching the end of their operational life and requiring decommissioning. Although structures can possess high ecological diversity and productivity, information on how they interact with broader ecological processes remains unclear. Here, we review the current state of knowledge on the role of O&G infrastructure in maintaining, altering or enhancing ecological connectivity with natural marine habitats. There is a paucity of studies on the subject with only 33 papers specifically targeting connectivity and O&G structures, although other studies provide important related information. Evidence for O&G structures facilitating vertical and horizontal seascape connectivity exists for larvae and mobile adult invertebrates, fish and megafauna; including threatened and commercially important species. The degree to which these structures represent a beneficial or detrimental net impact remains unclear, is complex and ultimately needs more research to determine the extent to which natural connectivity networks are conserved, enhanced or disrupted. We discuss the potential impacts of different decommissioning approaches on seascape connectivity and identify, through expert elicitation, critical knowledge gaps that, if addressed, may further inform decision making for the life cycle of O&G infrastructure, with relevance for other industries (e.g. renewables). The most highly ranked critical knowledge gap was a need to understand how O&G structures modify and influence the movement patterns of mobile species and dispersal stages of sessile marine species. Understanding how different decommissioning options affect species survival and movement was also highly ranked, as was understanding the extent to which O&G structures contribute to extending species distributions by providing rest stops, foraging habitat, and stepping stones. These questions could be addressed with further dedicated studies of animal movement in relation to structures using telemetry, molecular techniques and movement models. Our review and these priority questions provide a roadmap for advancing research needed to support evidence-based decision making for decommissioning O&G infrastructure.

The future of ocean governance.

Ocean governance is complex and influenced by multiple drivers and actors with different worldviews and goals. While governance encompasses many elements, in this paper we focus on the processes that operate within and between states, civil society and local communities, and the market, including industry. Specifically, in this paper, we address the question of how to move towards more sustainable ocean governance aligning with the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the UN Ocean Decade. We address three major risks to oceans that arise from governance-related issues: (1) the impacts of the overexploitation of marine resources; (2) inequitable distribution of access to and benefits from marine ecosystem services, and (3) inadequate or inappropriate adaptation to changing ocean conditions. The SDGs have been used as an underlying framework to develop these risks. We identify five drivers that may determine how ocean governance evolves, namely formal rules and institutions, evidence and knowledge-based decision-making, legitimacy of decision-making institutions, stakeholder engagement and participation, and empowering communities. These drivers were used to define two alternative futures by 2030: (a) 'Business as Usual'-a continuation of current trajectories and (b) 'More Sustainable Future'-optimistic, transformational, but technically achievable. We then identify what actions, as structured processes, can reduce the three major governance-related risks and lead to the More Sustainable Future. These actions relate to the process of co-creation and implementation of improved, comprehensive, and integrated management plans, enhancement of decision-making processes, and better anticipation and consideration of ambiguity and uncertainty. Supplementary information: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11160-020-09631-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Deep aspirations: towards a sustainable offshore Blue Economy.

Abstract: The ocean economy is experiencing rapid growth that will provide benefits but will also pose environmental and social risks. With limited space and degraded resources in coastal areas, offshore waters will be a particular focus of Blue Economy expansion over the next decade. When emerging and established economic sectors expand in offshore waters (within national Exclusive Economic Zones), different potential Blue Economy opportunities and challenges will arise. Following a series of interdisciplinary workshops, we imagine two technically possible futures for the offshore Blue Economy and we identify the actions required to achieve the more sustainable outcome. Under a business as usual scenario the focus will remain on economic growth, the commodification of nature, the dominance of private over public and cultural interests, and prioritisation of the interests of current over future generations. A more sustainable scenario would meet multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals and ensure inclusive economic developments, environmental sustainability, and fair and equitable access to resources and technologies across users, nations, and generations. Challenges to this more sustainable future are a lack of infrastructure and technology to support emerging offshore sectors, limited understanding of environmental impacts, inequitable outcomes, and a lack of planning and governmental oversight. Addressing these challenges will require a shift in societal values, a more balanced allocation of funding to offshore activities, transparency in information sharing between industries and across nations, and adjustment of international legal and institutional mechanisms. The sustainable and equitable offshore Blue Economy we envisage is achievable and provides a unique opportunity to build global capacity and partnership.

Zone specific trends in coral cover, genera and growth-forms in the World-Heritage listed Ningaloo Reef.

On coral reefs, changes in the cover and relative abundance of hard coral taxa often follow disturbance. Although the ecological responses of common coral taxa have been well documented, little is known about the ecological responses of uncommon coral taxa or of coral morphological groups across multiple adjacent reef zones. We used Multivariate Auto-Regressive State-Space modelling to assess the rate and direction of change of hard coral cover across a variety of coral genera, growth forms, and susceptibility to bleaching and physical damage covering multiple reef zones at northern Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. Trends were assessed between 2007 and 2016, during which multiple episodic disturbances occurred including cyclones and a heatwave. We provide evidence of zone specific trends, not only in total hard coral cover, but also in taxonomic and morphological groups of corals at Ningaloo Reef. Declines in total coral cover on the reef flat corresponded with declines in fast growing corals, particularly Acropora. In contrast, total coral cover on the reef slope and inshore (lagoon) did not undergo significant change, despite divergent trajectories of individual genera. Importantly, we also show that changes in the composition of coral assemblages can be detected using a morphological based approach when changes are not evident using a taxonomic approach. Therefore, we recommend that future assessments of coral reef trends incorporate not just standard metrics such as total coral cover, but also metrics that provide for detailed descriptions of trends in common and uncommon taxa and morphological groups across multiple reef zones.

Allometric Relationships for Predicting Aboveground Biomass and Sapwood Area of Oneseed Juniper (Juniperus monosperma) Trees.

Across the semiarid ecosystems of the southwestern USA, there has been widespread encroachment of woody shrubs and trees including Juniperus species into former grasslands. Quantifying vegetation biomass in such ecosystems is important because semiarid ecosystems are thought to play an important role in the global land carbon (C) sink, and changes in plant biomass also have implications for primary consumers and potential bioenergy feedstock. Oneseed juniper (Juniperus monosperma) is common in desert grasslands and pinyon-juniper rangelands across the intermountain region of southwestern North America; however, there is limited information about the aboveground biomass (AGB) and sapwood area (SWA) for this species, causing uncertainties in estimates of C stock and transpiration fluxes. In this study, we report on canopy area (CA), stem diameter, maximum height, and biomass measurements from J. monosperma trees sampled from central New Mexico. Dry biomass ranged between 0.4 kg and 625 kg, and cross-sectional SWA was measured on n = 200 stems using image analysis. We found a strong linear relationship between CA and AGB (r2 = 0.96), with a similar slope to that observed in other juniper species, suggesting that this readily measured attribute is well suited for upscaling studies. There was a 9% bias between different approaches to measuring CA, indicating care should be taken to account for these differences to avoid systematic biases. We found equivalent stem diameter (ESD) was a strong predictor of biomass, but that existing allometric models underpredicted biomass in larger trees. We found SWA could be predicted from individual stem diameter with a power relationship, and that tree-level SWA should be estimated by summing the SWA predictions from individual stems rather than ESD. Our improved allometric models for J. monosperma support more accurate and robust measurements of C storage and transpiration fluxes in Juniperus-dominated ecosystems.

Modelling regional futures at decadal scale: application to the Kimberley region.

We address the question of how to provide meaningful scientific information to support environmental decision making at the regional scale and at the temporal scale of several decades in a network of marine parks in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Where environmental sustainability is affected by slow-dynamics climate change processes and one-off investments in large infrastructure which can affect a region for decades to come, both strategic and reactive planning is necessary and prediction becomes as urgent as standard adaptive management. At the interface between future studies, socio-economic modelling and environmental modelling, we define 18 scenarios of economic development and climate change impacts and five management strategies. We explore these potential futures using coupled models of terrestrial and marine ecosystem dynamics. We obtain a projection of the Kimberley marine system to the year 2050, conditional on the chosen scenarios and management strategies. Our results suggest that climate change, not economic development, is the largest factor affecting the future of marine ecosystems in the Kimberley region, with site-attached species such as reef fish at greatest risk. These same species also benefit most from more stringent management strategies, especially expansion of sanctuary zones and Marine Protected Areas.

Setting priorities for conservation at the interface between ocean circulation, connectivity, and population dynamics.

Population persistence in the marine environment is driven by patterns of ocean circulation, larval dispersal, ecological interactions, and demographic rates. For habitat-forming organisms in particular, understanding the relationship between larval connectivity and meta-population dynamics aids in planning for marine spatial management. Here, we estimate networks of connectivity between fringing coral reefs in the northwest shelf of Australia by combining a particle tracking model based on shelf circulation with models of subpopulation dynamics of individual reefs. Coral cover data were used as a proxy for overall habitat quality, which can change as a result of natural processes, human-driven impacts, and management initiatives. We obtain three major results of conservation significance. First, the dynamics of the ecological network result from the interplay between network connectivity and ecological processes on individual reefs. The maximum coral cover a zone can sustain imposes a significant nonlinearity on the role an individual reef plays within the dynamics of the network, and thus on the impact of conservation interventions on specific reefs. Second, the role of an individual reef within these network dynamics changes considerably depending on the overall state of the system: a reef's role in sustaining the system's state can be different from the same reef's role in helping the system recover following major disturbance. Third, patterns of network connectivity change significantly as a function of yearly shelf circulation trends, and nonlinearity in network dynamics make mean connectivity a poor representation of yearly variations. From a management perspective, the priority list of reefs that are targets for management interventions depends crucially on what type of stressors (system-wide vs. localized) need addressing. This choice also depends not only on the ultimate purpose of management, but also on future oceanographic, climate change, and development scenarios that will determine the network connectivity and habitat quality.

Declining abundance of coral reef fish in a World-Heritage-listed marine park.

One of the most robust metrics for assessing the effectiveness of protected areas is the temporal trend in the abundance of the species they are designed to protect. We surveyed coral-reef fish and living hard coral in and adjacent to a sanctuary zone (SZ: where all forms of fishing are prohibited) in the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Marine Park during a 10-year period. There were generally more individuals and greater biomass of many fish taxa (especially emperors and parrotfish) in the SZ than the adjacent recreation zone (RZ: where recreational fishing is allowed) - so log response ratios of abundance were usually positive in each year. However, despite this, there was an overall decrease in both SZ and RZ in absolute abundance of some taxa by up to 22% per year, including taxa that are explicitly targeted (emperors) by fishers and taxa that are neither targeted nor frequently captured (most wrasses and butterflyfish). A concomitant decline in the abundance (measured as percentage cover) of living hard coral of 1-7% per year is a plausible explanation for the declining abundance of butterflyfish, but declines in emperors might be more plausibly due to fishing. Our study highlights that information on temporal trends in absolute abundance is needed to assess whether the goals of protected areas are being met: in our study, patterns in absolute abundance across ten years of surveys revealed trends that simple ratios of abundance did not.

Analyzing social media data: A mixed-methods framework combining computational and qualitative text analysis.

To qualitative researchers, social media offers a novel opportunity to harvest a massive and diverse range of content without the need for intrusive or intensive data collection procedures. However, performing a qualitative analysis across a massive social media data set is cumbersome and impractical. Instead, researchers often extract a subset of content to analyze, but a framework to facilitate this process is currently lacking. We present a four-phased framework for improving this extraction process, which blends the capacities of data science techniques to compress large data sets into smaller spaces, with the capabilities of qualitative analysis to address research questions. We demonstrate this framework by investigating the topics of Australian Twitter commentary on climate change, using quantitative (non-negative matrix inter-joint factorization; topic alignment) and qualitative (thematic analysis) techniques. Our approach is useful for researchers seeking to perform qualitative analyses of social media, or researchers wanting to supplement their quantitative work with a qualitative analysis of broader social context and meaning.

Self-referential basis of undecidable dynamics: From the Liar paradox and the halting problem to the edge of chaos.

In this paper we explore several fundamental relations between formal systems, algorithms, and dynamical systems, focussing on the roles of undecidability, universality, diagonalization, and self-reference in each of these computational frameworks. Some of these interconnections are well-known, while some are clarified in this study as a result of a fine-grained comparison between recursive formal systems, Turing machines, and Cellular Automata (CAs). In particular, we elaborate on the diagonalization argument applied to distributed computation carried out by CAs, illustrating the key elements of Gödel's proof for CAs. The comparative analysis emphasizes three factors which underlie the capacity to generate undecidable dynamics within the examined computational frameworks: (i) the program-data duality; (ii) the potential to access an infinite computational medium; and (iii) the ability to implement negation. The considered adaptations of Gödel's proof distinguish between computational universality and undecidability, and show how the diagonalization argument exploits, on several levels, the self-referential basis of undecidability.

Knowledge that Acts: Evaluating the Outcomes of a Knowledge Brokering Intervention in Western Australia's Ningaloo Region.

Knowledge exchange involves a suite of strategies used to bridge the divides between research, policy and practice. The literature is increasingly focused on the notion that knowledge generated by research is more useful when there is significant interaction and knowledge sharing between researchers and research recipients (i.e., stakeholders). This is exemplified by increasing calls for the use of knowledge brokers to facilitate interaction and flow of information between scientists and stakeholder groups, and the integration of scientific and local knowledge. However, most of the environmental management literature focuses on explicit forms of knowledge, leaving unmeasured the tacit relational and reflective forms of knowledge that lead people to change their behaviour. In addition, despite the high transaction costs of knowledge brokering and related stakeholder engagement, there is little research on its effectiveness. We apply Park's Manag Learn 30(2), 141-157 (1999); Knowledge and Participatory Research, London: SAGE Publications (2006) tri-partite knowledge typology as a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of knowledge brokering in the context of a large multi-agency research programme in Australia's Ningaloo coastal region, and for testing the assumption that higher levels of interaction between scientists and stakeholders lead to improved knowledge exchange. While the knowledge brokering intervention substantively increased relational networks between scientists and stakeholders, it did not generate anticipated increases in stakeholder knowledge or research application, indicating that more prolonged stakeholder engagement was required, and/or that there was a flaw in the assumptions underpinning our conceptual framework.

Drivers influencing adaptive management: a retrospective evaluation of water quality decisions in South East Queensland (Australia).

This article analyzes interviews with natural resource managers in South East Queensland (SEQ), Australia. The objectives of the research are (i) to apply and test deductive/inductive text analysis methods for constructing a conceptual model of water quality decision-making in SEQ, (ii) to understand the role of information in the decision-making process, and (iii) to understand how to improve adaptive management in SEQ. Our methodology provided the means to quickly and objectively explore interview data and also reduce potential subjective bias normally associated with deductive text analysis methods. At a more practical level, our methodology indicates potential intervention points if one is to influence the decision-making process in the region. Results indicate that relevant information is often ignored in SEQ, with significant consequences for adaptive management. Contextual factors (political, social, and environmental) together with effective communication or lobbying strategies often prevent evidence-based decisions. We propose that in addition to generating information to support decisions, adaptive management also requires an appraisal of the true character of the decision-making process, which includes how stakeholders interact, what information is relevant and salient to management, and how the available information should be communicated to stakeholders and decision-making bodies.