LENS holds its first workshop

The Landscape Exchange Network for Socio-environmental systems (LENS) held its first workshop in Annapolis, Maryland from May 4th–6th, 2022 at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). 

Since 2013, pilots of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) have been flying  planes equipped with state-of-the-art instruments known as the Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) across 81 freshwater and terrestrial NEON sites throughout the U.S. Once over their target site, the plane flies up and down the site’s area to gather data that allows researchers to learn more about environmental conditions such as land cover, vegetation structure, topography and invasive species within each site.  A primary goal of LENS and our first workshop was to characterize the socio-environmental systems (SES) represented in the landscapes surveyed by the NEON AOP by leveraging the high quality ecological data that the NEON AOP provides. SES are characterized by the relationships, interactions, and feedbacks between biophysical (natural) and social (human) system components.  

Day 1 

The workshop officially kicked off with participants hiking the trails of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) NEON AOP site in Maryland. First, Ty Lindberg, manager of NEON’s Mid-Atlantic domain, led participants to an eddy flux tower where mounted sensors collect information on temperature, humidity, and gas exchange. 

Participants also heard about current research at the site that leverages both the flux tower data and NEON AOP imagery. Workshop attendee Dr. Brenden McNeil, from West Virginia University, and his graduate student Yiting Fan spoke about using cameras mounted atop the tower to measure variation of canopy leaf angle in different species. 

Ty Lindberg explaining the different sensors mounted on the flux tower.

On the second stop of the field trip, Erik Michelsen and Brenda Morgan from the Anne Arundel County Department of Public Works, showed the results of a stream restoration project. While images from the different stages of the restoration project were passed around, attendees discussed how NEON AOP data could track nutrient flows through the area, specifically nitrogen runoff from surrounding agricultural land use.

The trip ended with the group hearing from Joel, a farmer leasing land from SERC to grow soybean, about the current and future challenges he faces in agriculture. 

This visit to SERC gave our workshop participants the opportunity to see first-hand the complexity of SES interactions stakeholders experience across diverse spatial and temporal scales within the SERC NEON AOP site.  

Thank you to our partners at NEON, the Anne Arundel County Department of Public Works, and Joel for hosting us! 

A farmer in the SERC footprint talking to LENS workshop participants.

Back at SESYNC, participants explored the advantages of using the translational ecology (TE) approach from a talk with USGS Research Ecologist Dr. Toni Lyn Morelli. While discussing the importance of working with partners with different incentives, strengths, and challenges, Morelli shared some common approaches to advance environmental goals such as resilience of native communities to invasive species and climate change. For their work, she and her team won the Climate Adaptation Leadership Award for Natural Resources in 2021. 

Example attitudes useful for engaging science in natural resource decision making. Adapted from Dr. Toni Lyn Morelli’s presentation at the LENS workshop. 

Participants then engaged in breakout sessions to brainstorm benefits and challenges of using the translational approach in SES research. At the end of the workshop, they ranked the most important challenges and benefits of using the translational approach. Building stronger relationships between scientists and community members and promoting a culture shift in mainstream science were the top two benefits of using the TE approach while ensuring inclusivity and building trust were amongst the main challenges. 

Workshop participants then heard from professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte, Dr. Lisa Rasmussen on the ethical challenges of doing transdisciplinary research. To illustrate the critical role of careful listening, Rasmussen shared lessons learned during the development of a toolkit for data ethics in citizen science. She highlighted the importance of understanding that academics and stakeholders will have different priorities when addressing complex problems. 

As an end-of-the-day challenge, participants worked in teams to build a tower. 

Day 2 

Dr. Sydne Record from Bryn Mawr College opened the second day of the workshop making a case to build a NEON land use database arguing that providing historic context of ecological legacies, land tenure, and land use change can help elucidate current socio-environmental relationships. Record touched on empirical work she and an army of students have embarked on to trace land use histories in several sites of the Harvard Forest. 

Dr. Record (left) and Dr. Steele (right) during their presentations at the LENS workshop

Next, Dr. Meredith Steele from Virginia Tech and Dr. Jason Julian from Texas State University gave an overview of complex systems and SES frameworks. 

Complex systems are a collection of numerous nodes with multiple interactions that cannot be predicted with simple math. Social media interactions are a good example of a complex system and so are SES – highly connected organizations of biophysical and social actors that interact and adapt across multiple scales and share resources. 

Using the San Marcos River in Texas as an SES case study, Julian explained the growing demand for the use of the river both from locals and visitors. In his research, he analyzes whether this growth is sustainable by looking at the ecological and social components while paying attention to the local, regional, and continental feedback loops. 

After their presentation, Steele and Julian asked participants to divide in three teams to apply an SES framework to analyze challenges associated with climate change occurring at local, regional, and continental scales. Focusing on the SERC NEON site as the local scale and Maryland as the regional, participants were challenged to identify social and biophysical processes and their interactions. At the end, teams came together to identify how the processes at the three scales could potentially be influencing each other and identify how NEON and other types of data could be used. 

Workshop participants analyzing SES interactions at a local, regional, and continental scale.

Next, Dr. Matt Williamson from Boise State University explained the use of archetypes to classify and compare AOP landscapes using a suite of socio-environmental traits. An archetype is a synthetic way to use various types of data, explanations, and methods to identify and describe patterns of components and processes that shape SES to solve a particular problem. Archetypes work by 1) generalizing findings beyond a specific case study, 2) synthesizing various data sources, and 3) applying conditions under which generalizations hold true. 

After his presentation, Williams assigned participants to three groups to interpret a cluster of a principal components analysis built using land cover, biophysical, demographic, and NEON’s leaf area index and canopy height model data of NEON AOP sites. Participants focused on identifying system components, sustainability objectives, and related human activities in five NEON AOP sites: Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge in North Dakota, North Sterling and Arikaree River in Colorado, Marvin Klemme Range Research Station in Oklahoma, and Lyndon B. Johnson National Grassland in Texas. Participants identified ancillary data sources that would allow them to better understand the human dimensions in the landscapes surveyed by the NEON AOP, such as crop and livestock production or energy generation. 

Participants in breakout sessions discussing sustainability objectives of five NEON sites.

Day 3

On the last day of the workshop, Dr. Thomas Evans, NSF Program Director of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate, shared with participants funding opportunities from the HEGS program, which offers solicitations for various career stages. 

Other programs offering funding are DISES, SAI, HNDS, CoPE, Signals in the Soil, NNA, S&CC, HDBE. All solicitations consider socio-environmental interactions. Questions about proposals can be found in the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) and the solicitation document itself. 

What’s Next?

LENS will continue working on projects that connect environmental and socio-economic data to better understand the interactions between them. Over the next several months, participants will work on identifying relevant datasets for doing SES research, collaborate on research projects, and continue the conversation at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference. If you’re interested in joining the network and learning more visit our website, join our mailing list, or meet us in Montréal for ESA. The next LENS workshop will be held in 2023. Stay tuned!