| 1. |
- Gei, Maga, et al.
(författare)
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Legume abundance along successional and rainfall gradients in Neotropical forests
- 2018
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Ingår i: Nature Ecology & Evolution. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2397-334X. ; 2:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The nutrient demands of regrowing tropical forests are partly satisfied by nitrogen-fixing legume trees, but our understanding of the abundance of those species is biased towards wet tropical regions. Here we show how the abundance of Leguminosae is affected by both recovery from disturbance and large-scale rainfall gradients through a synthesis of forest inventory plots from a network of 42 Neotropical forest chronosequences. During the first three decades of natural forest regeneration, legume basal area is twice as high in dry compared with wet secondary forests. The tremendous ecological success of legumes in recently disturbed, water-limited forests is likely to be related to both their reduced leaflet size and ability to fix N2, which together enhance legume drought tolerance and water-use efficiency. Earth system models should incorporate these large-scale successional and climatic patterns of legume dominance to provide more accurate estimates of the maximum potential for natural nitrogen fixation across tropical forests.
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| 2. |
- Gifford, Robert, et al.
(författare)
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Temporal pessimism and spatial optimism in environmental assessments: An 18-nation study
- 2009
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Psychology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0272-4944. ; 29, s. 1-12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The personal assessments of the current and expected future state of the environment by 3232 community respondents in 18 nations were investigated at the local, national, and global spatial levels. These assessments were compared to a ranking of each country's environmental quality by an expert panel. Temporal pessimism (“things will get worse”) was found in the assessments at all three spatial levels. Spatial optimism bias (“things are better here than there”) was found in the assessments of current environmental conditions in 15 of 18 countries, but not in the assessments of the future. All countries except one exhibited temporal pessimism, but significant differences between them were common. Evaluations of current environmental conditions also differed by country. Citizens' assessments of current conditions, and the degree of comparative optimism, were strongly correlated with the expert panel's assessments of national environmental quality. Aside from the value of understanding global trends in environmental assessments, the results have important implications for environmental policy and risk management strategies.
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| 3. |
- Uzzell, David, et al.
(författare)
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Global Challenges for Environmental Psychology : The Place of Labor and Production
- 2017
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Ingår i: Handbook of Environmental Psychology and Quality of Life Research. - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 9783319314143 - 9783319314167 ; , s. 559-574
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While we can find much evidence to suggest that environmental psychology has strengthened itself as a social institution, as Proshansky advocated some 30 years ago, this concluding chapter critically reviews continued shortcomings and strategies to overcome these.In one of the most rapidly expanding fields of environmental psychology, i.e., research concerning climate change and how to avoid it, there has been a concentration on internal individual factors like knowledge, worldviews, and values. Since people live, work, and act in cooperation with others and since this cooperation is shaped by and shapes individual and collective identities and actions there is also a need for environmental psychology to focus on these collective activities and the conditions under which they can become transformative. Workplaces constitute one of the most important ‘communities of practices’, not least because the majority of people spend a large amount of their lifetime at work.To exemplify the possibilities of research on collective action at and around work, two case studies are presented. The first employed backcasting scenarios to explore employees’ visions for an alternative, sustainable future and involved scenario development by creating visions for the future, defining strategic pathways to reach them, providing feedback on how policy measures would function in a simulated environment and asking participants to suggest corrections to their initial proposals and the model design. The second case study reports on an international study of trade union environmental policies which aim to curb the damaging effects of climate change, the causes and consequences of which develop in a global context. This research found that while action at the local level and collaboration at a global level are both critical, the divide between unions of the global South and unions of the global North is one of the main impediments to a common global trade union strategy against climate change.This leads back to environmental psychology as a discipline, raising important issues about the ‘production’ of environmental psychology and connecting individual practices and identities to the environments, (i.e., the spaces) in which they develop. The chapter closes by suggesting that since the actions of individuals and groups are context specific, and since these contexts are connected globally, environmental psychology needs to find ways to communicate across the power geometries of the North and South, not least by finding ways to include scholars from the global South into its discourses and scientific practices.
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