Search

Phosphorus (P) is an essential macronutrient required for the survival and reproduction of all living organisms. Its inorganic form (Pi) is taken up by the roots to support plant growth and development, and its availability directly determines agricultural productivity. The primary source of P replenishment in agriculture is chemical phosphate (Pi) fertilizers. While application of Pi-fertilizers to croplands ensures high yield agriculture, its intensive use leads to several environmental implications, including loss of soil fertility and pollution of water bodies with runoff fertilizer. Global non-renewable P-reserves are finite and would last for only a few hundred years. Therefore, a holistic approach is needed to combine Pi-use efficient germplasm with the targeted fertilization, agronomically superior fertilizer formulations for better P-management. The latest technologies to reclaim Pi from alternative sources need to be explored. In the present review, we first outline the challenges and environmental consequences of Pi-intensive fertilization, followed by plants' response and adaptive strategies to Pi starvation. Next, we discuss the role of microbes and Pi-nanofertilizer to plant Pi nutrition. Finally, a few cutting-edge technologies and innovative solutions available for reclaiming Pi from waste are argued.

International audience; The eutrophication of aquatic systems resulting from human activities frequently leads to phytoplankton blooms, which decrease water transparency and therefore limit light availability for aquatic plants. However, several submerged macrophytes are able to grow despite the light competition pressure exerted by phytoplankton. Photosynthetic performance and plant morphology may be key traits allowing plant species to tolerate phytoplankton-induced light limitation in eutrophic systems. The aim of this study was to explore how morphological and photosynthetic traits allow submerged macrophytes to withstand the stress induced by decreased light in eutrophic systems. Morphological and photosynthetic traits were measured in 7 species of submerged macrophytes collected from mesotrophic to hypertrophic shallow lakes (Dombes, Ain, France). Then, we determined whether these traits were related to species occurrence in lakes according to depth and water turbidity. This study highlighted 2 strategies potentially resulting in a trade-off between morphological and photosynthetic traits. The first strategy was tolerance to reduced light and was characterized by a higher investment in leaf area and photosynthetic efficiency (initial slope of photosynthetic activity measured at low light intensities), allowing plants to use low amounts of light energy. The second strategy was to avoid the regions of reduced light and was characterized by a greater investment in vertical growth and maximum photosynthesis at high light intensities. The morphological and physiological traits favoured in turbid lakes corresponded to the avoidance strategy with a low compensation point, allowing plants to grow to the photic zone to reach the water areas where light is at a maximum. Small species exhibiting a light stress tolerance strategy may be maintained in turbid lakes subjected to disturbances, offering a window of opportunity for successful recruitment and reproduction.

Pastoral people in rangelands worldwide are experiencing uncertainty due to a combination of climatic, economic, and political stressors. Our study seeks to create a full view of the drivers, impacts, and adaptations to change for livestock herders in rural Mongolia, making use of herder traditional knowledge and select instrumental data. Interview respondents described undesirable trends in livestock herds, pasture, wildlife, and their livelihoods in three sites in northern, central, and eastern Mongolia from 1995 to 2015, including decreased lake levels. There was more agreement for precipitation trends than for temperature. We developed a systems model based on herder descriptions of the sequence and prominence of interacting drivers of change. Finally, we describe measures herders are taking to adapt to these changes, such as more frequent livestock movement. We present a transdisciplinary view of social-ecological change and applications for more regionally focused governance in an era of climate uncertainty.

In automatic negotiation, intelligent agents try to reach the best deal possible on behalf of their owners. In previous studies, opponent modeling of a negotiator agent has been used to tune the final bid out of a group of bids chosen by the agent’s strategy. In this research, a time-based bidding strategy has been introduced, which uses the opponent model to concede more adaptively to the opponents, thereby achieving an improved utility, social welfare, and fairness for the agent. By modeling the preference profile of the opponent during the negotiation session, this strategy sets its concession factor proportional to the model. Experiments show that in comparison to state-of-the-art agents, this agent makes better agreements in terms of individual utility and social welfare in small and medium-sized domains and can, in some cases, increase the performance up to 10%. The proposed agent successfully gets the deal up to 37% closer to best social bids in terms of distance to the Pareto frontier and the Nash point. An implementation based on the proposed strategy was used in an agent called AgreeableAgent, which participated in the international ANAC 2018 and won first place in individual utility rankings.

The EU plant health legislation enforces the implementation of intensive surveillance programs for quarantine pests. After an outbreak, surveys are implemented to delimit the extent of the infested zone and to manage disease control. Surveillance in agricultural and natural environments can be enhanced by increasing the survey efforts. Budget constraints often limit inspection and sampling intensities, thus making it necessary to adapt and optimize surveillance strategies. A sequential adaptive delimiting survey involving a three-phase and a two-phase design with increasing spatial resolution was developed and implemented for the Xylella fastidiosa demarcated area in Alicante, Spain. Inspection and sampling intensities were optimized using simulation-based methods. Sampling intensity thresholds were evaluated by quantifying their effect on the estimation of X. fastidiosa incidence. This strategy made it possible to sequence inspection and sampling taking into account increasing spatial resolutions, and to adapt the inspection and sampling intensities according to the information obtained in the previous, coarser, spatial resolution. The proposed strategy was able to efficiently delimit the extent of Xylella fastidiosa, while improving on the efficiency and maintaining the efficacy of the official survey campaign. From a methodological perspective, our approach provides new insights into alternative delimiting designs and new reference sampling intensity values

Climate-induced floods are increasing in Africa. The need to evolve framework for adaptation to climate change impact (CCI) among flood-prone fish farmers necessitated this study. Based on availability, 60 farming active flood-experienced fish farmers were purposively selected from flood-prone (Gulu and Kibuku) regions in climate hotspot Uganda. These were assessed for CCI adaptation tendencies in their socioeconomics and farming operation/techniques (FOI) indices, CCI awareness, CCI adaptation strategies, and perceived required interventions (RIs) using structured questionnaire. Data were analyzed through descriptive and multivariate regression tools. Respondents were mostly male, adults, educated, Christian, married, medium-sized family, social group members, 1–5 years’ experience, medium-sized farms, and government trained. Income was 1.0–6.0 million Ugx/year. In FOI, semi-intensive culture system, use of rainwater plus groundwater, small-sized (R = 0.802, R2 = 0.64, P

The global and seemingly unstoppable spread of invasive alien plants emerges as one of the main topics of current science. This is due to the multiple repercussions of invasive plants on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, plus huge consequences on human existence. In freshwaters, lots of invaders are extremely competitive by virtue of their idiosyncratic reproductive and adaptive strategies. As “inland islands”, freshwaters seem particularly prone to changes when invaded, such as reorganisation of food webs and biotic interactions. Together, these events are self-reinforcing, implying hardly reversible hysteric phenomena. The intention of this paper is to point out: invasion pathways, driving factors, invasion mechanisms, and noticeable effects mediated by plant invaders in freshwaters through an extensive knowledge review. The growing evidence suggests the dawn of a new epochal phase: a globally alien-dominated “bio-historical horizon”, tentatively called “Exocene”, where invaders play predominant roles that drive freshwaters functioning and successional unexpected stages. In the context of invasion science, Exocene reinforces the need for an ecosystem-based perspective to properly understand the implications of plant invaders in freshwaters. Seven challenging issues emerge to be addressed to better outline the global paths of biodiversity and functioning between biomes when faced with biological invasion.

Purpose of Review: Defining the mechanisms behind and the leaf economic consequences of the development of sclerophylly in woody plants will allow us to understand its ecological implications, anticipate the potential for adaptation of different tree species to global change, and define new woody plant ideotypes for stress tolerance. Recent Findings: Sclerophylly has evolved independently in different woody plant genera and has been traditionally considered as a stress-tolerance trait. However, the underlying drivers for this functional trait are still a matter of debate; it has been proposed as an adaptive response to miscellaneous stress factors, such as nutrient scarcity, drought stress, herbivory, and cold tolerance, and due to the large investment costs of sclerophylly, it is generally associated with a longer leaf life span. Summary: The genus Quercus constitutes a unique living laboratory to understand global adaptive patterns along the leaf economic spectrum in forest trees. With more than 400 species, oaks are distributed along six zonobiomes and its versatility has resulted in a wide range of variations in leaf functional traits and contrasting adaptive strategies. However, although this wide variability cannot be explained alone by any of the ecological factors considered, such as drought, nutrient scarcity, low temperatures during vegetative period, and physical damage, neither any of them could be fully discarded. Noteworthy, our study also suggests that these constraints may have a synergistic effect, and from a functional point of view, we can conclude that in oaks leaf habit largely modulates the physiological implications of sclerophylly.

Climate change is one of the multiple challenges facing all categories of farmers globally. However, African farmers are the most sensitive in respect of climate variability and change. Climate change impacted negatively on crop production and the livelihoods of the local farmers. In black township South Africa, agricultural activities are highly dominated by small-scale farmers, whose farming system is highly vulnerable to changes in climate. This paper presents the analysis of how small-scale farmers employed adaptation strategies in response to climate change and determinants of small-scale households’ choices of coping and adaptation approach to climate variability and change in Vhembe District, South Africa. Multi nominal logit model was used on a surveyed of 224 local farmers. Farmers’ socio-economic attributes, was used in response to climate changes and further, households have adaptation strategies both on-farm and off-farm approach. Such approaches were; drought-tolerant seeds, shorter cycle crops, diversification of crops, changing planting dates, small-scale irrigation, migrating to urban areas and involvement in petty business. The results of the findings reveals that the significant drivers affecting choice of adaptation approach include climate information, gender, farm size, education level, farmer experience, decreasing rainfall and increases in temperature as farmers’ determinant choices of adaptation to climate change. While, on the other hand, off-farm resources, headed households and age had no significant impact on the choice of coping and adaptation approach to climate change. Therefore, policy makers in the local municipality should play a significant role by enhancing adaptation strategies appropriate for particular climatic shock on the study area.

This systematic review of research on adaptive learning used a strategic search process to synthesize research on adaptive learning based on publication trends, instructional context, research methodology components, research focus, adaptive strategies, and technologies. A total of 61 articles on adaptive learning were analyzed to describe the current state of research and identify gaps in the literature. Descriptive characteristics were recorded, including publication patterns, instructional context, and research methodology components. The count of adaptive learning articles published fluctuated across the decade and peaked in 2015. During this time, the largest concentration of adaptive learning articles appeared in Computers and Education. The majority of the studies occurred in higher education in Taiwan and the United States, with the highest concentration in the computer science discipline. The research focus, adaptive strategies, and adaptive technologies used in these studies were also reviewed. The research was aligned with various instructional design phases, with more studies examining design and development, and implementation and evaluation. For examining adaptive strategies, the authors examined both adaptive sources based on learner model and adaptive targets based on content and instructional model. Learning style was the most observed learner characteristic, while adaptive feedback and adaptive navigation were the most investigated adaptive targets. This study has implications for adaptive learning designers and future researchers regarding the gaps in adaptive learning research. Future studies might focus on the increasing availability and capacities of adaptive learning as a learning technology to assist individual learning and personalized growth.

Antarctica holds a great number of inland lakes whose characteristics vary from ultra-oligotrophic to hypereutrophic, and from freshwater to hypersaline. The harsh conditions in these ecosystems (extremely low temperatures, large annual variation in solar radiation, light limitation below the ice) account for adaptive strategies of the selected phytoplankton species; some of them are mixotrophy, formation of resistant cysts, starch accumulation, pigment adaptation and motility. Algal richness is comparatively lower than in other parts of the world, although molecular studies are now revealing a biodiversity much higher than that previously based on morphological identifications. Many lakes are permanently stratified, such as perennially ice-covered or saline meromictic, whereas shallow lakes in coastal regions are usually ice-free in summer, accounting for contrasting patterns in their phytoplankton temporal dynamics. Simple and short food webs are characteristic of Antarctic lakes, where phytoplankton fraction > 2 μm is usually dominated by nanoflagellates. In this review, we provide an overview of the current knowledge about phytoplankton of Antarctic lakes, including information on biodiversity (morphological-based, functional and molecular), and the main ecological aspects (colonization, endemism, ecological strategies, temporal dynamics, biotic interactions). We compared ecosystems of different trophic status and from Continental and Maritime Antarctica, including own data from manipulative experiments.

Drylands under pastoral land use are considered one of the most vulnerable social-ecological systems to global climate change, but the abilities of different adaptive strategies to adapt to the impacts of different extreme weather events on herders’ livelihood have received little attention in the drylands. Herders on the Mongolian Plateau (MP; including Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China and Mongolia), have had a long history of adapting climatic variability and extreme weather events. However, it is unclear how changes such as increased levels of infrastructure and market integration affect the ability of herders to achieve the two key livelihood objectives: the minimisation of the death and abortion rates of livestock in the winter. Here, we used remotely sensed and household survey data to map, model and explore the climate exposure and sensitivity of herders in the settled area (Inner Mongolia of China) and nomadic area (Mongolia) in the winter of 2012–2013. We aimed to quantify the multi-scaled characteristics of both climate exposure and sensitivity through the lens of key adaptive strategies utilized by herders. Our results showed that the higher levels of infrastructure and market integration, and the lower levels of remoteness on the MP did not increase the herders' ability to achieve the two key livelihood objectives. Our results also suggested that exposure to the snow that is comparatively greater than the long-term average (cumulative exposure) may be more important in determining the social-ecological vulnerability than absolute exposure. We suggested that neither the risk management strategies available to these herders, nor the demographic variables, could compensate for the mode of production governing the pastoral systems. Our study could provide further evidence for the complex and scaled nature of climate exposure and sensitivity, and the results imply that any analysis of the relationship between exposure, sensitivity and vulnerability of pastoral households to climate change in the drylands will require a multi-scaled and interdisciplinary approach.

Rural coastal fishery systems in tropical island nations are undergoing rapid change. Using a case study from eastern Sri Lanka, this paper examines the ways in which indigenous Coastal- Vedda fishers experience and respond to such change. We conducted semi-structured interviews (n = 74), focus group discussions (n = 17, 98 participants), and key informant interviews (n = 38) over a 2-year period (2016–2019). The changes that most Coastal-Vedda fishers experience are disturbance from Sri Lankan ethnic war, changes in climate and the frequency and severity of natural disasters, increased frequency of human-elephant conflicts, increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, and transformation of the Coastal-Vedda due to social modernisation. We used a resilience-based conceptual framework focusing on place, human agency, collective action and collaboration, institutions, indigenous and local knowledge systems, and learning to examine fishers’ responses to rapid changes. We identified three community-level adaptive strategies used by the Coastal-Vedda: adaptive institutions with a multi-level institutional structure that facilitates collective action and collaboration, the use of culture-based fisheries (CBF), and diversification of livelihoods. We also recognized four place-specific attributes that shaped community adaptations: cultural identity and worldviews, co-management of CBF, flexibility in choosing adaptive options, and indigenous and local knowledge systems and learning. These adaptive strategies and place-specific attributes provide new insights for scientists, policymakers, and communities in the region, enabling them to more effectively work together to support community adaptation. Accepted version

Climate change is a reality in Africa’s drylands. Pastoralists are engaging and embracing a range of adaptive strategies to adjust to these changes. The socioeconomic factors driving them to engage in a portfolio of multiple adaptation strategies have not been adequately addressed in the existing literature. A multivariate probit model was used to analyze them as determinants of adaptive capacity that promotes or hinders adaptation to climate change. Adaptation is represented by uptake of multiple strategies (irrigation, livestock migration, fodder production, and improved livestock breeds) by households, a demonstration of a household’s ability to diversify and adapt to the effects of climate change. The household asset base, particularly social capital represented by government assistance, stands out as it positively influenced by the uptake of four out of five adaptation strategies; that is, irrigation, livestock manure, fodder production, and improved breeds. Information heavily supports the adaptation process as it influenced all the five adaptation strategies analyzed but has a heterogeneous effect, supporting households to either adopt or reject a strategy. Crop-based information positively determines uptake of yield-enhancing strategies while relevant information for livestock activities contributes to the uptake of livestock-based strategies. These findings suggest that mainstreaming agricultural innovations, building a household asset base, and facilitating access to agronomic and climatic information will enable dryland communities to better adapt to climate change.

Determining an effective strategy for intelligent agents in multilateral negotiations is a more complicated problem than in bilateral negotiations. In order to achieve an optimal and beneficial agreement the agent needs to consider the behavior and desired utility of more than one opponent, determine a concession tactic based on a smaller agreement space, and use a computationally efficient mechanism for generating optimal offers. However, a mere extension of bilateral negotiation strategies cannot be effective in multilateral negotiations because the nature of most bilateral negotiation strategies is based on interaction with only one opponent and tracking a single behavior during the negotiation process. In this paper, we propose an adaptive approach based on a multi-party perspective to determine multilateral negotiation strategy. The proposed approach applies the BOA framework (Bidding, Opponent model, and Acceptance) and dynamically models the opponents’ preference profiles. In order to estimate the obtainable utility from opponents and help find a good offer, the agent uses an ensemble model made by individual frequency-based opponent models and a different level of attention to each party’s behavior. The proposed approach also implements a bidding strategy which applies the opponents’ desirable utility to adapt the agent’s concession tactic and produce appropriate offers. The results of experimental evaluations on various negotiation scenarios against the state of the art multilateral negotiation strategies show that our proposed strategy can provide superior performance in both individual utility and social welfare and lead to more optimal and fairer agreements.

Adaptation is an emerging issue to control the threatening consequences of climate change in the agricultural sector particularly. The present study aimed to identify the adopted strategies by the farmers and contributing factors that affected the adaptation strategies in the northern region of Bangladesh. The quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted to analyze the collected data through an authoritative purposive sampling technique and finally interpreted and discussed. The results of adaption strategies showed different variations on pesticides usage. The probit model indicated that age, education, the cultivated area in an acre, housing pattern, perception on climate change and meal per day influence the farmers to triggers an adaptive strategy. The results of the binary logit model are also consistent with the probit model findings. The multi-nominal logit model indicated that age, sex, total cultivated area, and perception of climate change have negatively influenced to adopt strategy 2 (use pesticides), while age, family size and perception of climate change have positively influenced the farmers to adopt strategy 5 (use pesticides + take financial loan). As the farmers in these regions are highly dependent on traditional farming practices, thus, this study suggests that the combinations of the farmers’ indigenous knowledge with well-developed methodical adaptive measures are required to improve the socioeconomic livelihood of the farmers in the northern part of Bangladesh.

The Iberomaurusian lithic industries in the Maghreb are known for their microlithization characteristics beginning ca. 25 ka cal BP. The analyses of the Iberomaurusian lithic assemblages in Algeria have mostly focused on typological and stylistic issues. These are good for distinguishing the various archaeological entities encountered in the region but inadequate for understanding the techno-economic behaviors that these industries supported. A technological approach to analysis allows for the recognition of the choices made by the knappers throughout the core reduction processes, the blank production, the transformation of blanks into tools, and the debitage methods and techniques. It has proven useful for understanding not only lithic production process but also the roles that lithic tools played in various subsistence economies. Hence, this paper uses a technological approach to reanalyze the lithic assemblages from Tamar Hat, Rassel, and Columnata. The lithic industries of these three sites are characterized by the tendency toward microlithization as attested by the presence of small chipped stone artifacts on diminutive blanks. The results suggest that the hunter-gatherer populations of the Maghreb produced microliths using a wide range of technological options during the Late Pleistocene. The study also reveals diachronic changes in the production modalities of the microliths. These changes are likely related to variations in hunting strategies in different ecological niches and as adaptive strategies to various paleoclimatic events of the Late Pleistocene.

Water resource availability is the major limiting factor for sustainable development in drylands. Climate change intensifies the conflicting water demands between people and the environment and highlights the importance of effective water resource management for achieving a balance between economic development and environmental protection. In 2008, Inner Mongolia, typical dryland in northern China, proposed strict regulations on water exploitation and utilization aimed at achieving sustainable development. Our study is the first to investigate the effectiveness and performance of these long-standing water conservation regulations. Our analyses found that the regulations drove industrial transformation, evidenced by the decreasing proportion of environmentally harmful industries such as coal and steel, and the increasing proportion of tertiary industries (especially tourism). Following industrial transformation, economic development decoupled from industrial water consumption and subsequently led to reduced negative environmental impacts. Based on these results, adaptive strategies were developed for 12 cities by revealing and integrating their development pathways and relative status in achieving sustainable development. Integration and cooperation between cities were proposed, e.g., a water trade agreement between eastern Inner Mongolia (an economically underdeveloped region with relatively abundant water resources) and central Inner Mongolia (an economically developed region with high water stress). Such an agreement may enable the holistic achievement of sustainable development across regions. By integrating the findings of our research, our study presents a reproducible framework for water-management-based sustainable development strategies in drylands.

Temporary pools in semiarid regions are influenced by climatic seasonality and the extremes of moisture/desiccation effects influence mechanisms for plant survival, which should be analyzed based on competitor (C), ruderal (R), or stress tolerator (S) strategies. The aim of the present study was to evaluate how aridity exerts an influence on CSR functional groups of aquatic plants in temporary pools. Aquatic plants were sampled from 27 temporary pools in areas with a climatic gradient of evaporation, precipitation, and temperature. The distribution of functional groups along the environmental gradient was analyzed through redundancy analysis and patterns of CSR strategies were analyzed using linear correlation. We found that assemblages of macrophyte ponds were composed mainly of intermediate R/CR strategies. Evaporation exerted a positive influence on the occurrence of species with larger specific leaf area and a negative influence on the occurrence of taller species. Moreover, ponds in regions with greater evaporation had greater species richness (r 2 = 0.2, P \0.01). The same was found for competitors (r 2 = 0.2, P\ 0.01) but not for ruderal or tolerant classes. In conclusion, climatic conditions influence CSR classes and exert a specific influence on the specific functional traits of species in temporary pools of semiarid regions.

Although climate change is a universal phenomenon, its indicators and manifestations are entirely local, as are adaptation choices, strategies, and practices. Based on face-to-face interview data from 427 randomly selected pastoral households of the Hulun Buir grassland in northern China, this study investigated perceptions and impacts of historical climate change and the associations of these perceptions with observed climate change. Meanwhile, we identified pastoralists’ responses to climate change, as well as barriers to the adaptation process. We used binary logistic regression models to determine the factors that influence climate change adaptation strategies. The results show that pastoralists’ perception of the inter-annual variability in climate variables is relatively consistent with the observed meteorological data. Pastoralists’ adaptive strategies for climate variability comprise primarily livestock and pasture management interventions, such as “purchasing fodder”, “reducing livestock”, “part-time grazing”, and “renting pasture”. In addition, pastoralists identified several barriers that are allied with adaptation practices, such as limited grassland tenure, an absence of credit, and limited access to agricultural markets. Furthermore, the sex, age, and education level of the head of household and the household livelihood capital and location were found to be the key factors determining the choice of adaptation strategies. This knowledge helps to assess the needs for action and information and to improve the credibility of policies that shape collective actions based on a unified plan or goal. Combined, these efforts aid in adaptation to reduce the vulnerability of the livestock sector, especially the livelihood security of smallholder pastoralists in grassland ecosystems.

The vulnerability of the agriculture sector to climate change in developing countries and it’s risks to Brazilian Northeast farmers are very discussed issues on environmental agenda. In this sense, this paper put forward an understanding of the factors that drive individuals to adopt adaptive strategies to cope changing environments as a fundamental issue for the direction and effective formulation of well-targeted public policies. Mediation models were estimated considering two distinct specifications, based in two different groups of variables: (1) adoption of adaptive practices by farmers based only on the impact of climate perception, mediated by belief in the occurrence of climate change; (2) the socioeconomic conditions of the farmers and their properties were additionally included. The main results demonstrated that the Rio das Contas basin farmers’ perceptions about the negative effects of climate change, despite being the main driver, will only affect adaptation behavior when the farmers have believe in the occurrence of climate change. Socioeconomic conditions are overshadowed in predictive power of adaptation by belief on climate change. This outcome may be directly related to the farmers’ cultural aspects, nevertheless, the importance of technical assistance or rural extension services should be also emphasized as an impressive part of farmers is no longer adapted due to lack of knowledge of suitable techniques.

Despite increased research characterizing the adaptive capacity of households and communities, there are few empirical studies that test why farmers adopt costly climate-related adaptive strategies, which strategies are implemented, and farmers' perceptions of climate changes. In this study, we analyzed determinants for smallholder farmer adoption of adaptation strategies in Chiapas, Mexico. We conducted 291 surveys with landowners in eight coffee farming communities. Farmers were asked which of 21 adaptation strategies they had engaged in, within five categories: migration, storage, land use diversification, community investment, and market exchange. We found the most frequent strategies included planting shade coffee, diversifying crop varieties, shifting sow date, building living walls, reforesting, or engaging in soil conservation. Although many farmers have experienced natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, they were most concerned by long-term threats to crops like coffee rust and higher temperatures, that require costly adaptive investments. We find farmers adapt to climate events because of their vulnerability context (i.e., experience with disasters and distance to markets). Land holdings (i.e., natural capital), farm equipment (i.e., physical capital), and group membership (i.e., social capital), were also key factors influencing adaptation. Finally, farmers with strong perceptions of drought and temperature change were most likely to adapt. These results suggest policy makers should have a multi-pronged approach to: improve farmers' resource base through explicitly promoting adaptation strategies like crop and income diversification; inform climate perceptions through workshops on climate and weather; and strengthen participation in community and producer organizations to increase smallholder adaptation.

As the world’s largest land use sector, livestock farming is vulnerable to climate change. This study adds to existing literature by investigating the impacts of herders’ climate change perceptions on adaptive strategies and distinguishing between the short-run and long-run effects. We use double-hurdle models and an unbalanced panel dataset of 1514 household observations collected from the pastoral areas of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet for the period of 2016–2018. We find that perceptions of long-term temperature and rainfall changes lead farmers to adopt various adaptive strategies, whereas perceptions of short-term weather hazards mainly trigger production management strategies such as forage supplementation and herd destocking, without affecting long-term strategic planning such as engaging in non-agricultural jobs to diversify income sources. The findings that livestock farmers tend to adopt temporary strategies under short-term perceptions while seeking more resilient adaptations under long-term perceptions are robust, based on alternative measures for adaptation intensity and under different production scales. An understanding of these strategies provides a means of influencing the adaptive responses of vulnerable groups.

International audience; In the irrigated plains of North Africa, the sustainability of productive resources is subject to multiple threats linked to the prevailing productivist model of irrigated agriculture. These threats, such as soil degradation and unequal access to resources, markets, and information, prompt farmers to mobilize depleting natural resources, including soil and water, in an often environmentally unsustainable way. In order to sustain their farming systems and consequent incomes, farmers sometimes update their strategies by setting-up alternative farming practices. This study aims at mapping and analyzing such existing local farming practices with agroecological potentials. Our approach is based on direct observations combined with 150 interviews of farmers in three major irrigated plains in North Africa, namely, the Merguellil, Upper Cheliff, and Saiss plains, respectively, in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. This study shows that a wide range of alternative practices with agroecological potential are emerging (or exist) locally, against the flow of the dominant agricultural model which is rather in favor of intensive practices. The most common practices are developed to improve soil fertility management (production of manure tea, integration of legumes in crop successions), increase per surface agricultural production (relay intercropping, intercropping, agroforestry), or provide multiple ecosystem services (diversification, livestock integration). These practices are jointly used, mostly to (i) increase land-use efficiency, and hence face land fragmentation; (ii) diversify their cropping strategy, and spread out market-related risks; and (iii) reduce expensive production costs related to irrigation and chemical fertilization. The gradient of adoption observed according to national contexts suggests a strong influence of contrasting socio-political and historical factors at the regional to national levels. The analysis of logics in implementing such practices by farmers indicates that economic reasons take precedence over environmental concerns. As such, these practices can be seen as (i) an access to low-cost strategies for small farmers or (ii) a pathway to international markets for agribusiness farmers. Taming the extensive local knowledge related to ecological intensification strategies, as identified in this study, can help to pave the way for a more sustainable agriculture, in this intensively cultivated region of the world.

Lithic miniaturization is a multivariate and evolutionarily significant technological phenomenon involving backed tools, bladelets, small retouched tools, flakes, and small cores. This paper investigates the proximate causes for variability in lithic miniaturization processes during Marine Isotope Stage 2 (c. 29–12 ka) in southern Africa. We test the hypothesis that lithic miniaturization represents a form of adaptive behavior by examining its relationship to site occupation intensity and rainfall seasonality at Boomplaas Cave in South Africa. These are two widely cited explanations for shifts in the organization of hunter-gatherer technologies and the data required for testing them are also readily available. We combine several lithic variables, macrofauna and microfauna indicators, and other archeological data to test the hypotheses. We find evidence that demographic processes impacted choices of technology within contexts of shifting rainfall seasonality, aridity, and rapidly rising Late Glacial sea-levels. In this context, Late Glacial humans converged on a small number of high payoff strategies including technological efficiency through bipolar bladelet production, greater production of ostrich eggshell ornaments and water containers, and a reorganized subsistence strategy targeting lower yield small mammals. The results demonstrate that lithic miniaturization was a strategic choice rather than an inevitable technological outcome. The outcomes have implications for understanding global instances of lithic miniaturization and their relationship to rapidly shifting paleoenvironments.

The ecological and risk -management rationales for livestock mobility are well established. Yet, few studies evaluate the economic benefits and costs of maintaining or resuming mobile, extensive livestock production compared to sedentary or semi-extensive production. Here, we empirically evaluate pastoralists’ claims that transhumance, a specific type of long-distance herd mobility, is a more profitable system compared to semi-extensive production in the Central Spanish Pyrenees. Specifically, we use enterprise budget data from transhumant and semi-extensive operations to develop a baseline typical sheep operation budget. We then use partial budget analysis coupled with economic simulations to determine the conditions under which transhumance by truck or on foot becomes profitable relative to semi-extensive production. We find that transhumance by foot is more profitable than transhumance by truck and that relative profitability compared to semi-extensive production depends on operational scale, feed prices, and the lambing rates (productivity) of each system. Over all simulated scenarios, transhumance is more profitable 64–78% of the time. This analysis thus provides initial evidence of the economic rationality of transhumance under contemporary environmental and economic conditions, filling a notable gap in research on the economics of transhumance. Future research could expand the analysis to cattle operations and to other regions of Spain, assess the full social and environmental benefits and costs of transhumance, and evaluate the effects of exogenous factors like drought on production costs and profitability to determine if transhumance is an adaptive strategy under a changing climate. The analysis we present could be used as a basis to develop and pilot test interactive budgeting tools that support herder decision-making and planning under economic and environmental uncertainty.

The study of lithic raw material plays an important role in developing archeologists’ understanding of the different adaptive strategies and behaviors of prehistoric people. In this paper, we present new evidence from the Huayang site that reveals lithic raw material procurement and exploitation strategies dating to around 14 ka cal. BP. The Huayang site is located in the southern portion of the Lesser Khingan Mountains in Northeast China, a key region for examining migration, diffusion, and interaction among hunter-gatherers in East and Northeast Asia. Our results indicate that diversified lithic raw materials were found and procured from local riverbeds and reduced at the site. Each raw material was reduced with distinctive knapping strategies and, as a result, there is a strong discrete spatial pattern for each of the different raw material types. Intra- and inter-site comparative analyses suggest a uniform trend towards localization and diversification of lithic raw materials in the southern Lesser Khingan Mountains, Northeast China during the Late Glacial, which seems to be associated with the paleoclimatic amelioration and the demographic expansion during this period. Introduction - The Huayang site Materials and methods - Raw material identification and geological survey - Lithic raw material economy, spatial distribution, and refitting Results - Raw material types - Raw material sources - Procurement patterns and reduction sequences of raw materials - Spatial distribution and raw material exploitation Discussion and conclusions - Lithic raw material economy of Huayang - Lithic resource localization and diversification as adaptive strategies

This paper proposes a new nonmonotone adaptive trust region line search method for solving unconstrained optimization problems, and presents a modified trust region ratio, which obtained more reasonable consistency between the accurate model and the approximate model. The approximation of Hessian matrix is updated by the modified BFGS formula. Trust region radius adopts a new adaptive strategy to overcome additional computational costs at each iteration. The global convergence and superlinear convergence of the method are preserved under suitable conditions. Finally, the numerical results show that the proposed method is very efficient.

Pulses, defined as legumes which produce dry seed used for human consumption, are plants of great agronomic value, at the food system level as much as the field level but their diversity has been largely underused. This study aimed at analyzing existing data on cultivated pulse species in the literature to provide a broad and structured description of pulses’ interspecific functional diversity. We used a functional trait-based approach to evaluate how pulse diversity could support food production in agroecosystems constrained by low water and nutrient availability and exposed to high weed pressure. We gathered data for 17 functional traits and six agroecosystem properties for 43 pulse species. Our analytical framework highlights the correlations and combinations of functional traits that best predict values of six agroecosystem properties defined as ecosystem services estimates. We show that pulse diversity has been structured both by breeding and by an environmental gradient. The covariance space corresponding to agroecosystem properties was structured by three properties: producers, competitors, stress-tolerant species. The distribution of crop species in this functional space reflected ecological adaptive strategies described in wild species, where the size-related axis of variation is separated from variation of leaf morpho-physiological traits. Six agroecosystem properties were predicted by different combinations of traits. However, we identified ubiquitous plant traits such as leaflet length, days to maturity, seed weight, and leaf nitrogen content, that discriminated agroecosystem properties and allowed us to gather individual species into three clusters, representative of the three strategies highlighted earlier. Implications for pulses provisioning of services in agroecosystems are discussed.

In this work, an adaptive element free Galerkin (EFG) technique is proposed for solving convection diffusion equation. A post-processed gradient is used as a posteriori error estimation to find locations with large contribution of the error. Also, to avoid instabilities, the EFG method is applied on a modified equation instead of the original equation. In the modified equation diffusion coefficient (known as artificial diffusion) depends to the distance between nodal points. The numerical results reveal efficiency of the adaptive technique.

Collecting statistics is a time- and resource-consuming operation in database systems. It is even more challenging to efficiently collect statistics without affecting system performance, meanwhile keeping correctness in distributed database. Traditional strategies usually consider one dimension during collecting statistics, which is lack of adaptiveness. In this paper, we propose an adaptive strategy for statistics collecting(ASC), which well balances collecting efficiency, correctness of statistics and effect to system performance. We formally define the procedure of collecting statistics and abstract the relationships among collecting efficiency, correctness of statistics and effect to system performance, and introduce an elastic structure(ESI) storing necessary information generated during proceeding our strategy. ASC can pick appropriate time to trigger collecting action and filter unnecessary tasks, meanwhile reasonably allocating collecting tasks to appropriate executing locations with right executing models through the information stored at ESI. We implement and evaluate our strategy in a distributed database. Experiments show that our solutions generally improve the efficiency and correctness of collecting statistics, moreover, reduce the negative effect to system performance comparing with other strategies.

Changing social and economic practices had an important role for human adaptive strategies in colonial contexts and sometimes had profound consequences for emerging societies. This study uses insights from stable-isotope analyses, as well as other historical and archaeological evidence, to investigate the social and economic roles of French animal husbandry as an adaptive strategy for the settlers taking part in La Salle’s famous expedition (1684–1688) to colonize the mouth of the Mississippi River. Stable carbon- and nitrogen-isotope analyses of pig bones and other faunal remains from the shipwreck, La Belle, and associated Fort Saint Louis on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico are used to evaluate specific historical accounts of colonists’ animal-husbandry practices and show that a large swine population was sustained primarily on meat from local hunting activities. In this context it is argued that, although the substantial efforts involved in raising pigs mainly on other animal products seemingly makes little economic sense, there are social explanations for what initially appears to be irrational behavior. This study provides an example of how stable-isotope analyses of animal-husbandry practices can contribute to understanding social processes through historical archaeology.

Designing conservation strategies in human-dominated landscapes is challenging, owing to complex human-natural systems and evolving societal values. To meet this challenge, a robust, adaptive strategy should have a process for flexible implementation of incremental actions. We describe a hypothetical example for the Rio Grande de Arecibo watershed and coastal wetlands in Puerto Rico to address the first component. The process begins by identifying shared stakeholder objectives. This process benefits from a review of foundational research and knowledge base that includes global forcings and vulnerability of resources of interest. Forcings include climate change and pervasive urban sprawl. We focus on two taxonomic groups with differing life histories but strong dependence on water resource dynamics, another resource valued by humans. We stipulate objectives and multiple actions, but focus on those pertaining to hydro-management as the common thread in our example. We advanced two decision contexts of contrasting complexity, illustrated links between objectives and actions, and highlighted trade-offs triggered by varying resource valuation. Our focus was to highlight various components necessary to frame a resilience-based strategy, but we cannot overemphasize the importance of accommodating institutional and stakeholder changing priorities and values to ensure its successful implementation.

Mobility, nomadic pastoralists’ main adaptive strategy, has been compromised by agricultural expansion and rangeland fragmentation, among other factors, in many pastoral contexts. Among nomads’ coping strategies, is re-shaping mobility in shrinking grazing grounds. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine adaptation and resilience to the effects of increasingly intensive land use and marginalization focusing on Alpine nomadic pastoralists in Piedmont, Northwest Italy. Our results show that Alpine nomads access a wide variety of grazing grounds through a web of social relations with multiple stakeholders, acting in the interstices of mainstream society and navigating marginal contexts: geographically, they use fallow, abandoned, and post-harvest plots; economically and socially, they interact with other marginal groups (e.g., migrants) and are stigmatized by diverse sectors of society. This use of interstitial spaces is in itself a form of adaptation that is taking place in diverse geographical contexts as nomads reconfigure their mobility and social relations to access the scattered pieces of land left unused by industrial, agricultural, and conservation land uses.

We consider the repeated minimum-effort coordination game where each player follows an adaptive strategy in each period and his choice is made via the logit probability distribution. We find that there exists a stable probability distribution of the minimum effort levels (called the equilibrium of the game), and the expected value of the minimum effort levels at the equilibrium has the same comparative-statics properties as in the experimental outcomes of Van Huyck et al. (Am Econ Rev 80(1):234–248 1990): it decreases with the effort cost and the number of players. We also find that the expected value at the equilibrium responds differently to the noise parameter, contingent on the effort-cost structure. This provides us with an implication about how we could increase the coordination among the players.

Considering future consequences predicts many self-regulatory behaviors. Moreover, emotion regulation choices often involve trade-offs between immediate hedonic benefits and future well-being and mental health. We propose that focusing on future consequences may also predict emotion regulation choices. We examined whether people who consider future consequences of their actions are more likely to choose adaptive strategies and less likely to choose maladaptive strategies (Study 1) and whether people believe that adaptive and maladaptive strategies have differential short- and long-term consequences (Study 2). In Study 1, consideration of future consequences was related to choosing more adaptive and fewer maladaptive strategies for regulating negative emotions. In Study 2, participants believed that adaptive strategies are more effective in the short-term than in the long-term and that maladaptive strategies are more effective in the long-term than in the short-term. Moreover, commonalities in favored strategies were observed across the two studies. Taken together, the findings suggest that trait future time focus plays a significant role in emotion regulation preferences and that people have some knowledge about the varied temporal consequences of different strategies.

Recently, recommender systems are getting popular in the e-commerce industry for retrieving and recommending most relevant information about items for users from large amounts of data. Different stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based adaptive strategies have been proposed to make recommendations more precise and efficient. In this paper, we propose a fractional variant of the standard SGD, named as fractional stochastic gradient descent (FSGD), for recommender systems. We compare its convergence and estimated accuracy with standard SGD against a number of features with different learning rates and fractional orders. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated using the root mean square error (RMSE) as a quantitative evaluation measure. We examine that the proposed strategy is more accurate in terms of RMSE than the standard SGD for all values of fractional orders and different numbers of features. The contribution of fractional calculus has not been explored yet to solve the recommender systems problem; therefore, we exploit FSGD for solving this problem. The results show that our proposed method performs significantly well in terms of estimated accuracy and convergence as compared to the standard SGD.

Social robots are increasingly being used to encourage social, emotional and cognitive growth in children. However, in order to establish social and bonding interactions, social robots need to be able to exhibit adaptive strategies to keep children engaged and interested. Adaptive strategies of a social robot based on children’s age and gender are motivated by the comprehensive theory on gender development. Given the strong influence of gender in children’s cognitive development, the experiment first examined the responses of 107 children, ages 5–12, whether synthesized voice evokes gender associations in children. The results suggest that young children (ages 5–8) are not able to successfully attribute gender to the robot in correspondence with the synthesized voice. In addition, we explicitly investigated children’s preferences for the robot’s gender, and the results were contrary to our expectations: young children indicated their preference for a robot with a matching gender while there was no difference in preferences for a robot’s gender by older children (ages 9–12).

The associations between emotion regulation (ER) and positive and negative affectivity have been well investigated. However, previous studies have examined these associations using a variety of individual ER scales with little integration across measurement approaches. The current study thus aimed to explore a joint ER structural model across three widely-used ER scales (the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, the Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire) using 1852 participants from four Middle Eastern Arabic speaking countries (Egypt, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar) and a Western country (USA). The results showed cross-culture differences with regard to mean-level differences and patterns of correlations among positive and negative affectivity and the individual subscales of the three ER scales. In addition, a two-factor integrative model that was robust across all five countries emerged across scales which included a more adaptive strategies factor and a less adaptive strategies factor. Further, the more adaptive strategies factor, but not the less adaptive strategies factor, yielded highly consistent associations with positive and negative affectivity across all countries. Accordingly, culture may play a more important role in shaping the less adaptive ER strategies and their associations with negative and positive affectivity, but less so for more positive strategies. ? 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Scopus

Resilience is a rehashed concept in natural hazard management - resilience of cities to earthquakes, to floods, to fire, etc. In a word, a system is said to be resilient if there exists a strategy that can drive the system state back to "normal" after any perturbation. What formal flesh can we put on such a malleable notion? We propose to frame the concept of resilience in the mathematical garbs of control theory under uncertainty. Our setting covers dynamical systems both in discrete or continuous time, deterministic or subject to uncertainties. We will say that a system state is resilient if there exists an adaptive strategy such that the generated state and control paths, contingent on uncertainties, lay within an acceptable domain of random processes, called recovery regimes. We point out how such recovery regimes can be delineated thanks to so called risk measures, making the connection with resilience indicators. Our definition of resilience extends others, be they "` a la Holling" or rooted in viability theory. Indeed, our definition of resilience is a form of controlability for whole random processes (regimes), whereas others require that the state values must belong to an acceptable subset of the state set., arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1709.01389

The loss of shattering of rice has long been acknowledged as a crucial step sweeping the path of domestication. Here, we collated evidence from genetics, and anthropology to challenge this long-held view. Our discussion dwelt on arguments that (1) undermined the effect of a mutation in the key locus (sh4) which does not always confer non-shattering, (2) identified the involvement of other loci, (3) uncovered natural variation in shatterability still existing in domesticated landraces, and (4) relatively recent fixation of the mutation. Similarly, cultural attributes asserted a long tradition of naturally shattering wild rice cultivation and adaptive strategies of gathering which is still widely exercised in many parts of South and South-East Asia, Africa, and Australia. Altogether, it strongly suggests that primitive agriculture thrived largely relying on wild rice or semi-domesticated shattering phenotype but non-shattering emerged into conspicuity much later in the history.

Many studies have been conducted on climate change vulnerability assessments to develop adaptive strategies for climate change on a national or global scale. The development of an assessment tool for climate change on a process-level is necessary for evaluating vulnerability and to suggest an effective adaptive strategy in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). Therefore, we proposed a vulnerability assessment index at the process-level in a WWTP to evaluate adaptive strategies for climate change in this study. The suggested process-level vulnerability assessment index is based on three performance WWTP indices: the effluent quality index (EQI), global warming potential (GWP), and operational cost index (OCI). Four different advanced WWTP processes were evaluated using the suggested vulnerability assessment index based on the A2 scenario, which is one of the carbon emission scenarios making predictions out to 2100 developed by the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC). The adaptive strategies were evaluated at four conventional treatment processes to see the improvement of vulnerability of their processes, where the changes of their vulnerabilities are compared together. Suggested adaptive strategies in case studies showed that the process-level vulnerabilities were significantly decreased in the anaerobic/anoxic/aerobic (A2O) and Virginia initiative project (VIP) processes, especially during the flood and winter seasons. Therefore, it is expected that the proposed vulnerability assessment index can be useful as a decision-supporting tool for selecting the appropriate adaptive strategy for each process.

Trust region method is a robust method for optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive nonmonotone technique based on trust region methods for solving unconstrained optimization. In order to accelerate the convergence of trust region methods, an adaptive trust region is generated according to the Hessian of the iterate point. Both the nonmonotone techniques and this adaptive strategies can improve the trust region methods in the sense of convergence. We prove that the proposed method is locally superlinear convergence under some standard assumptions. Numerical results show that the new method is effective and has a high speed of convergence in practice.

In this paper, the problem of global synchronization for complex directed dynamical networks via adaptive aperiodically intermittent pinning control is studied. By constructing a piecewise Lyapunov function, some sufficient conditions to guarantee global synchronization are derived based on the analytical technique and theory of series with nonnegative terms. Different from previous works, the adaptive intermittent pinning control is aperiodic with non-fixed both control period and control width, and moreover, the adaptive approach is decentralized relying only on the state information of the controlled node. Hence, the adaptive intermittent pinning control strategy proposed in this paper is more practically applicable than those in previous works. Additionally, it is noted that the derived synchronization criteria are dependent on the control rates, but not the control widths or the control periods, which makes the theoretical results are less conservative than the corresponding results given in the existing works. A numerical example is finally provided to illustrate the validity of our theoretical results.

This case study investigates peri-urban land-use conflicts and changes, in a typical African setting, for a village located on the outskirts of the capital city of Gaborone-Botswana, in order to explore policy implications for sustainable core-region development. The year 1982 provided the baseline situation that was compared with other dates, namely: 1996; 2006 and 2012 in order to analyze land-use conflicts, competition, and succession. The study tracked the landuse changes using: Geographic Information System (GIS), with 1:50 000 air photos taken in 1982; Landsat images from 1996 and 2006 as well as 2012 Google images of medium resolution. The investigation also relied on a social survey, historical landscape reconstruction approaches, field interviews and direct observations. An analysis of 1982 aerial photographs revealed that Gabane Village had experienced little urban influence from the city of Gaborone at that time. Subsequently, stakeholders with different socio-economic demand emerged. This caused extensive land-use changes over the study period. The residents of Gabane nonetheless employed diverse adaptive strategies to sustain their livelihoods. An analysis of the proposed 2001-2025 Development Plan for Gabane Village, identifies possible future land-use changes and conflicts and proposes tentative policy solutions for the emerging sustainable development challenges.

A number of forests in agroforestry environments are at risk due to urban development or agricultural expansion. These forests often consist of patches of wooded areas scattered in the agricultural and urban grid, and often constitute green corridors that enable a flow between animal and plant species (migration corridors). This study evaluates the composition and structure of riparian forests in agroforestry areas that are subject to various natural and anthropogenic disturbances. This study aims to understand the dynamics of these riparian forest populations and evaluate the effects of the disturbances on the tree stands (e.g. floods, partial cutting), while taking into account their development over space and time based on a diachronic assessment from 1945 to 2010. Although these woodlands are subject to various disturbances, a fairly large diversity of tree species can be noted, and the regeneration of the saplings and small trees follows a normal growth curve (asymmetric) with a high contingency of young tree population comparable to a typical reverse-J distribution. However, lower densities are observed for riparian stands subject to frequent flooding, which could over time compromise recruitment and forest regeneration for some tree species (e.g. woody plants with weak adaptive strategies). The multivariate analyses (Redundancy Analysis and Canonical Correspondence Analysis) conducted over all the soil, environmental and forest data reveal that some variables are more strongly related to the composition of the forest populations, including pH, ground litter and soil drainage. However, these variables must still be considered as being part of a set of interacting soil conditions. Lastly, the future of these woodlands may appear uncertain because there are no government policies or measures to ensure their protection and preservation.

Foraging theory has been widely used to understand patterns associated with obtaining resources and the optimal cost-benefit relationship between forager and resource. However, many analytical theoretical models do not consider the influence of social groups on forager strategy. We analyzed strategies for obtaining resources from two perspectives: individual and social. For the first, we tested hypotheses that addressed whether individual strategies followed the predictions of classic models of foraging theory. In the second approach, we investigated potential social influences on resource-obtaining strategies. Our results suggest that regardless of the strategy adopted by the forager (specialist or generalist), environmental factors, such as abundance, regulated success in obtaining resources. However, we observed that specialists had a greater advantage relative to generalists when resources were abundant. We also observed that forager decision-making was related to the social context of the individual forager, which influenced their strategies.

The architecture of international aid to developing and emerging economies is undergoing significant change. Post-aid world conditions will reshape relationships between international aid actors including donors, civil society organizations (CSOs), governments, and other institutions. These trends draw attention to South–South Development Cooperation (SSDC) as a promising direction in regions like Latin America. CSOs’ participation in SSDC might challenge and divert the dependency and power asymmetries in traditional North–South aid. As potential adaptive strategy for CSOs, SSDC diversifies the actors involved in aid and the resources exchanged, and produces different development discourses. The article outlines SSDC as an alternative development model and specifically considers the participation of CSOs. It provides a case of CSOs’ participation in SSDC in the region of Latin America. As research on CSOs in SSDC is limited, the article contributes to its further understanding and provides further avenues of research.

Paleoecological and paleosocial synthesis, meaning the examination of data and patterns derived from past social and ecological systems, provides an important long-term perspective on adaptive strategies and their consequences. Data and analyses from extended timescales (centuries, millennia) have yet to be routinely incorporated into adaptive capacity studies; this has limited our ability to adequately consider adaptation and sustainability from a long-term perspective. In this study, we examine three cases of successful adaptation in the past drawn from various regions of northern North America and from various times spanning the last 13,000 years. These cases involve different degrees and kinds of environmental and social conditions, changes and triggers. Exploring their specific circumstances provides insights into the role of ecological, technological and social change in producing adaptive capacity and confronting sustainability challenges. Two implications of these case studies are explored. First, we outline how paleoecological and paleosocial approaches can be used to refine measures of adaptive capacity. Second, we argue that community-based observing networks are a deep time-vetted strategy for managing resources sustainably and that implementing similarly local and decentralized practices in modern contexts will aid in achieving sustainable resource management into the future.

The multicomponent White Springs site (NYSM 1952; RMSC Plp-018) in Geneva, New York, contributes to the archaeological study of historical farm sites and presents an opportunity for the diachronic study of elite maneuvering to maintain affluence. Though a neoclassical-style mansion presently sits on the property as a visible symbol of solidity and stability, documentary and archaeological evidence reveals a varied history with considerable ties to local and regional trends and economies. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the manor and associated property played differing roles in the economic and social strategies of a string of wealthy owners. Historical records reveal changing practices, from piedmont-style plantation agriculture to orcharding and dairying, as well as varied land-use practices with materially unique manifestations in the archaeological record. Through archaeological excavations, documentary research, surface survey, and archaeogeophysical investigations, this paper takes a multiscalar approach to revealing the diverse adaptive strategies elites used throughout White Springs Manor’s history, encompassing the multi-sited endeavors owners used to generate wealth both at and beyond the manor. These processes are attested to by datable landscape modifications and the changing use of the property over time.