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Wisconsin's Driftless Area, an unglaciated region defined by steep river valley systems, has been plagued by chronic flooding in part due to Euro-American agricultural practices and anthropogenic climate change. The region, which has played a central role in environmental knowledge production, has a storied history of resilience practices and flood experience. To capture histories of Driftless Area flood experience and underlying socio-ecological dynamics, we performed a qualitative analysis of regional news archives from 1866 to present on flood trends, experiences, and responses. Our analysis identified hazard response trends mediated by socio-ecological factors including crisis-induced windows of opportunity for change, conflicts over structural and nonstructural responses to flooding, and psychological dimensions of environmental crises. Finally, our analysis noted the key role of community flood knowledge in producing shifts toward enhanced resilience, suggesting the need for empowering flood response planning at the community scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has been a dynamic one for biodiversity offsetting policy. Efforts to incorporate offsetting into the Convention on Biological Diversity as a compliance mechanism did not succeed. The expansion of offsetting outside of the Natura 2000 network in the European Union (EU), which looked all but inevitable in the early 2010s, was withdrawn in the face of unexpectedly strong opposition from environmental groups and the business sector. Highly publicised offsetting programmes in some EU countries have had mixed outcomes, and many observers describe offsetting as a failed policy. And yet four years of interviews and policy analysis in Brussels, Spain, and England suggest that reports of offsetting's death may be exaggerated. While the possibility of an overarching EU Directive aimed at harmonising offsetting policy and practice across the region's countries seems unlikely, in Spain, offsetting has returned to the national policy arena via adoption as an implementation tool within the national Green Infrastructure Strategy. Offsetting in England persists in a handful of counties as a locally situated development strategy, and seems to have returned at the national level despite its spectacular flame‐out in 2014. This is not, after all, a high‐profile failure of neoliberal environmental policy. Rather, we see offsetting's persistence as a result of policy refugia: the retreat to small but amenable jurisdictions where offsetting policies can wait out inclement policy conditions and then emerge to recolonise the policy landscape when conditions improve. Highly publicised offsetting programmes in some EU countries have had mixed outcomes, and many observers describe offsetting as a failed policy. However, our analysis of offset policy development in the EU, Spain, and England suggests that offsetting has not failed but persists as a result of policy refugia: it has retreated to small but amenable jurisdictions from which it can emerge to recolonise the policy landscape as conditions improve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a novel geospatial approach to reconstructing and analyzing environmental change over extensive spatial and temporal scales, even in systems such as rivers and streams that are comparatively difficult to digitize. We used a drawing tablet and stylus to digitize features found on historical Army Corps maps across the spatially extensive landscape of the Lower Wabash River's riparian zone, in Indiana and Illinois, USA. The methodology allows for an efficient reconstruction of sinuous and irregular environmental features, such as sloughs, and demonstrates the utility of digitizing historical maps to understand the evolution of surface water quantity and location across a landscape. We then compared these historical data to contemporary environmental datasets for the same study area to understand what changes have occurred over a 100 year period. This reveals that the hydroscape of the Lower Wabash River has been significantly altered by past human activity, notably through the reduction of swamps, wetlands, and sandbars, and the increase in drainage ditches and overall stream area. Notably, many of these historical alterations are not captured within current environmental datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trump administration's antienvironmental policies and its proclivity to dismiss evidence-based claims creates challenges for environmental politics in a warming world. This article offers the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) as a case study of one way to respond to this political moment. EDGI was started by a small group of Science and Technology Studies and environmental justice researchers and activists in the United States and Canada immediately after the November 2016 elections. Since then, EDGI has engaged in four primary activities: archiving Web pages and online scientific data from federal environmental agencies; monitoring changes to these agencies' Web sites; interviewing career staff at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a means of tracking changes within those agencies; and analyzing shifts in environmental policy. Through these projects and practices, EDGI members developed the concept of environmental data justice. Environmental data justice is deeply informed by feminist approaches to the politics of knowledge, especially in relation to critical data and archival studies. In this article we establish the theoretical basis for environmental data justice and demonstrate how EDGI enacts this framework in practice. Key Words: critical data studies, environmental data justice, feminist science studies, the politics of knowledge, social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Compensatory mitigation (also known as offsetting) is the practice of allowing harm to one ecosystem as long as a comparable ecosystem elsewhere is restored. This common practice is intended to balance the competing demands of economic development and environmental protection. Here, I explore compensatory mitigation through a focus on one particular type: stream mitigation banking in the United States under the Clean Water Act, a market‐based form of environmental management. I explain the motivations for compensating for rather than preventing environmental damage more broadly, the practice of stream mitigation banking, and what we know about its environmental and social impacts. I conclude by calling out the stakes in offsetting more generally, and in stream mitigation banking in particular, arguing that neither market‐based environmental management nor offsetting more generally may be serving us well. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Value of Water Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including critical physical geography (CPG), political economic origins of science perception of fencing, transition models for social science data collection, and mycology.

Whether (and how) physical and human geography should be integrated is a longstanding debate in our field. I return here to two entries in this debate from the early years of Progress in Physical Geography. While John Thornes’ 1981 progress report on atmospheric science reads like an early call for critical physical geography, the focus of this special issue, Ron Johnston’s 1983 article emphatically asserts that no such synthesis is intellectually or practically necessary. I argue, however, that Johnston’s article, perhaps inadvertently, lays the groundwork for integrated research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have observed the decline of scientific authority over the last three decades, for reasons ranging from the toxic legacies of Cold War science (Beck 1992), to the current commercialization and privatization of knowledge production (Mirowski 2011), to the success of social constructivist critique (Latour 2004). Whatever the cause(s), it seems clear that the relationship among academia, the military, and state and economic elites is shifting once again. A new regime of knowledge production is emerging (Pestre 2003) in which academia carries significantly less clout than it has over the previous half-century, and broadly legitimate knowledge claims are increasingly developed outside of the academy. These changes carry obvious implications for the future of academic legitimacy and institutions. The implications for environmental and social justice are less obvious, although perhaps even more important, as the ways in which knowledge is vetted and the questions investigated (or ignored) shift. In this article, I use exploration of the changing relationship between academic and extramural knowledge producers to lay out potential futures for the production of environmental knowledge. I argue that although academics have been notably unsuccessful in challenging private-sector, commercialized environmental knowledge claims, we are increasingly successful in leveraging our remaining authority to enable the democratization of knowledge production to intellectually and politically progressive ends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the usefulness of the political ecology and the connectivity between environmental physical and social science. Topics discussed includes role of political ecologists in developing natural resource logics, policies and plans, role and importance of critical physical geography and similarity in the intellectual opinion of political ecologists and physical geographers which makes their working together easier.

Taking a critical physical geography approach, this article provides the first side-by-side review of the physical and social literature on hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking' as it is frequently referred to. We note the striking disparities between the physical science literature's description of the relatively manageable impacts of fracking and the almost apocalyptic tone taken in some popular press and critical social science literature. We argue that these disparities may be a result of the dramatic shift in the geography of energy production in the US. The rise of fracking has redistributed environmental injustices beyond traditional national sacrifice zones, such as Appalachia, and towards regions that in many cases are wealthier than Appalachia and have not recently borne the brunt of energy production, causing profound social, cultural, and economic shocks. Reviewing the physical and social science literature together suggests that we reconsider the fracking research agenda. Studies of the physical impacts of hydraulic fracturing should be expanded to address communities' concerns about habitat fragmentation and the impacts of the myriad truck trips required to service fracking wells, neither of which currently are given much attention. Social science research on fracking could benefit from an increase in comparative work, assessing the relative economic and social impacts in regions where energy production is ramping up in relation to regions where it is declining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foundational premise of the Anthropocene, constant across the range of proposed definitions, is that the biophysical world is now profoundly social. This carries substantive methodological implications: If the environment is ecosocial, surely the way it is studied must be, too. Yet, as our bibliometric analysis demonstrates, the bulk of academic articles on the Anthropocene published between 2002 and 2019 focus on its conceptual implications rather than embracing its analytical consequences. Further, of the subset of articles that engage the Anthropocene empirically, fewer than a quarter employ interdisciplinary methods at even a cursory level. In response, we outline an alternative approach, critical physical geography (CPG), which enables researchers to pick up the methodological and conceptual gauntlet thrown down by the Anthropocene. Work in CPG begins from the premise that all biophysical questions are also social, but it goes beyond a simple mixed methods approach to emphasize the politics both of how knowledge is produced and of how it is taken up outside academia. We illustrate the utility of a CPG approach for analysis of the Anthropocene via succinct examples of research in critical dendrochronology, geomorphology, and remote sensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The science‐practice gap is often cited as a limitation to successful restoration outcomes; however, the existence of such a gap in information exchange is rarely measured. Here, we quantify the gap by focusing on common recommendations from both scientists (i.e. researchers) and managers (i.e. practitioners, land managers) on what is needed for successful restoration. We surveyed 45 managers associated with 244 invasive species (Tamarix spp.) removal projects across the southwestern U.S. to determine the degree to which they have utilized four strategies advocated by scientists: (1) collaborate widely, (2) monitor beyond cursory visual methods, (3) use a variety of information sources, and (4) consider project goals beyond invasive species removal. Half of these managers were also interviewed to assess managers' perceptions of the role of science in restoration. Twenty‐three scientists specializing in Tamarix‐related research in this region were also surveyed to assess how much they understood and/or shared the concerns of land managers. We found that managers were following scientists' recommendations and that managers' perceptions of the role of science in land management did not have any bearing on the management actions taken. Scientists reported being influenced by managers, and the concerns of scientists and managers were more overlapping than expected. Boundary organizations and river‐wide partnerships were often cited as important in facilitating effective communication between land managers and scientists. A lack of funding for monitoring and for longer‐term projects was cited by both groups as a limitation to incorporating scientists' recommendations into restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human activities and climate change threaten coldwater organisms in freshwater ecosystems by causing rivers and streams to warm, increasing the intensity and frequency of warm temperature events, and reducing thermal heterogeneity. Cold‐water refuges are discrete patches of relatively cool water that are used by coldwater organisms for thermal relief and short‐term survival. Globally, cohesive management approaches are needed that consider interlinked physical, biological, and social factors of cold‐water refuges. We review current understanding of cold‐water refuges, identify gaps between science and management, and evaluate policies aimed at protecting thermally sensitive species. Existing policies include designating cold‐water habitats, restricting fishing during warm periods, and implementing threshold temperature standards or guidelines. However, these policies are rare and uncoordinated across spatial scales and often do not consider input from Indigenous peoples. We propose that cold‐water refuges be managed as distinct operational landscape units, which provide a social and ecological context that is relevant at the watershed scale. These operational landscape units provide the foundation for an integrated framework that links science and management by (1) mapping and characterizing cold‐water refuges to prioritize management and conservation actions, (2) leveraging existing and new policies, (3) improving coordination across jurisdictions, and (4) implementing adaptive management practices across scales. Our findings show that while there are many opportunities for scientific advancement, the current state of the sciences is sufficient to inform policy and management. Our proposed framework provides a path forward for managing and protecting cold‐water refuges using existing and new policies to protect coldwater organisms in the face of global change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, an intervention paper was published in I The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien i , calling for greater integration of physical and critical human geography, through an intellectual practice termed I critical physical geography i (Lave et al., [16]). Bruce Rhoads, one of the authors of the original CPG Intervention piece (Lave et al., [16]), phrased this critique clearly in a recent paper: [T]he extent to which CPG differs fundamentally from political ecology ... remains unclear. In doing so, the authors advance CPG scholarship by (1) creating new trading zones and creoles distinctive to CPG, and (2) developing and applying their own interactional expertise in ways that contribute to the fuller realization of CPG's three core tenets. Almost a decade after the publication of the initial CPG intervention piece, CPG is expanding into new topics (e.g., predator reintroduction, urban climatology), new methodologies (e.g., dendroprovenancing, network analysis), and new conversations with allied fields (e.g., Black Geographies, Indigenous Geographies, Queer Ecologies). [Extracted from the article]

Abstract Farmers' conservation decisions are central to addressing regional environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, water quality impairment, or climate change. However, three decades of substantial investment in agri-environmental programs has not yielded widespread adoption or improved environmental outcomes. It remains difficult to explain why farmers adopt despite an extensive body of research on the topic. One possible reason for this is that researchers are limiting the types of metrics they are analyzing to explain farmer decisions. We systematically and critically evaluated the social science adoption literature to address three important gaps: (1) How are adoption studies measuring adoption effectiveness? (2) How do studies integrate individual farmer perspectives into broader institutional (i.e., social and governance) contexts? (3) What are the most prevalent metrics that adoption research uses to characterize the human-natural system? We coded 174 studies and found that only 10% connect adoption decisions to conservation outcomes or undertake longitudinal research, while the dominant approach in adoption research excludes the institutional contexts in which farmers are situated. The most prevalent metrics focus on farmer demographics, financial and technical capacity to adopt, and economic motivations. The lack of attention to both conservation outcomes and longitudinal studies limits researchers' ability to analyze the effectiveness of CP adoption. To advance our understanding of adoption, we recommend that future research measure conservation outcomes and track how knowledge about adoption effectiveness feeds back into farmer perceptions and social norms towards adoption. Research should also consistently measure how agri-environmental programs mediate the social acceptability of adoption. Lastly, institutional metrics that can be widely incorporated into coupled human-natural systems research will advance synthesis efforts to better explain why farmers adoption conservation practices. Highlights • Only 10% of studies measure the effectiveness of adopted conservation practices. • Few studies situate farmer decisions in their broader institutional context. • The diversity of metrics characterizing adoption limits synthesis opportunities. • Future research should measure outcomes to identify system feedbacks. • Future research should address individual and institutional dynamics jointly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981-1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001-2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermining science-based policy. The current administration combines both these strategies and operates in a political context more favorable to its designs on the EPA. The Republican Party has shifted right and now controls the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. Wealthy donors, think tanks, and fossil fuel and chemical industries have become more influential in pushing deregulation. Among the public, political polarization has increased, the environment has become a partisan issue, and science and the mainstream media are distrusted. For these reasons, the effects of today's ongoing regulatory delays, rollbacks, and staff cuts may well surpass those of the administrations of Reagan and Bush, whose impacts on environmental health were considerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]