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Managing social-ecological systems toward desirable regimes requires learning about the system being managed while preparing for many possible futures. Adaptive management (AM) and scenario planning (SP) are two systems management approaches that separately use learning to reduce uncertainties and employ planning to manage irreducible uncertainties, respectively. However, each of these approaches have limitations that confound management of social-ecological systems. Here, we introduce iterative scenarios (IS), a systems management approach that is a hybrid of the scopes and relationships to uncertainty and controllability of AM and SP that combines the "iterativeness" of AM and futures planning of SP. Iterative scenarios is appropriate for situations with high uncertainty about whether a management action will lead to intended outcomes, the desired benefits are numerous and cross-scale, and it is difficult to account for the social implications around the natural resource management options. The value of iterative scenarios is demonstrated by applying the approach to green infrastructure futures for a neighborhood in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., that had experienced long-term, systemic disinvestment. The Cleveland green infrastructure project was particularly well suited to the IS approach given that learning about environmental factors was necessary and achievable, but what would be socially desirable and possible was unknown. However, iterative scenarios is appropriate for many social-ecological systems where uncertainty is high as IS accommodates real-world complexity faced by management.

Many cities are experiencing long-term declines in population and economic activity. As a result, frameworks for urban sustainability need to address the unique challenges and opportunities of such shrinking cities. Shrinking, particularly in the U.S., has led to extensive vacant land. The abundance of vacant land reflects a loss of traditional urban amenities, economic opportunity, neighbors, businesses, and even basic city services and often occurs in neighborhoods with socially and economically vulnerable or underserved populations. However, vacant land also provides opportunities, including the space to invest in green infrastructure that can provide ecosystem services and support urban sustainability. Achieving desirable amenities that provide ecosystem services from vacant land is the central tenet of a recent urban sustainability framework termed ecology for the shrinking city. An agroecological approach could operationalize ecology for the shrinking city to both manage vacancy and address ecosystem service goals. Developing an agroecology in shrinking cities not only secures provisioning services that use an active and participatory approach of vacant land management but also transforms and enhances regulating and supporting services. The human and cultural dimensions of agroecology create the potential for social-ecological innovations that can support sustainable transformations in shrinking cities. Overall, the strength of agroecological principles guiding a green infrastructure strategy stems from its explicit focus on how individuals and communities can shape their environment at multiple scales to produce outcomes that reflect their social and cultural context. Specifically, the shaping of the environment provides a pathway for communities to build agency and manage for resilience in urban social-ecological systems. Agroecology for the shrinking city can support desirable transformations, but to be meaningful, we recognize that it must be part of a greater strategy that addresses larger systemic issues facing shrinking cities and their residents.

Bats are important bio-indicators of ecosystem health and provide a number of ecosystem services. White-nose Syndrome and habitat loss have led to the decline of many bat species in eastern North America, including the federally threatened northern long-eared bat, Myotis seplenlrionalis. White-nose Syndrome was only recently found in Nebraska, which lies on the western extent of this species geographic range. To belter understand how this forest-dependent species persists in an agriculturally dominated landscape amid a growing number of pressures, we investigated the roosting habits of this bat at the Homestead National Monument of America, located in southeast Nebraska. We mist-netted bats on eight nights in 2019 (16 August-26 August) and caught 55 bats across five species, including five juvenile northern long-eared bats. We located five unique roosts between two juvenile radio-tracked bats; most of the female roosts were in anthropogenic structures and tree cavities within 0.23 km of capture, while most of the male roosts were in snags and tree cavities as far as 2.73 km from the capture site. Fence cavities were also used by other undocumented northern long-eared bats. We recorded three radio-tagged bats that commuted between roosting sites and capture sites within hours after sunset. Our results provide evidence that at the distributional edge for this species, wooded areas, riparian zones, and human-built structures in an intensively managed agricultural landscape are used by this imperiled species., INTRODUCTION Destruction of habitat is a primary cause for biodiversity loss (Tilman el al, 2001; Prescott et al, 2015). To feed increasing human populations, conversion of land to agriculture is [...]

Effective governance of social‐ecological systems (SES) is an enduring challenge, especially in coastal environments where accelerating impacts of climate change are increasing pressure on already stressed systems. While resilience is often proposed as a suitable framing to re‐orient governance and management, the literature includes many different, and sometimes conflicting, definitions and ideas that influence how the concept is applied, especially in coastal environments. This study combines discourse analysis of the coastal governance literature and key informant interviews in Tasmania, Australia, demonstrating inconsistencies and confusion in the way that resilience is framed in coastal governance research and practice. We find that resilience is most often framed as (1) a rate of recovery from disturbance or (2) the process of acting in response to, or anticipation of, a disturbance. A third framing considers resilience as an emergent property of SESs. This framing, social‐ecological resilience, accounts for multiple configurations of SES, which necessitates adaptation and transformation strategies to address changes across temporal and spatial scales. Coastal managers recognised the value of this third framing for governing coastal SESs, yet the confusion and inconsistency in the literature was also evident in how they understood and applied resilience in practice. Expanding the use of social‐ecological resilience is essential for more effective coastal governance, given the dynamics of coastal SESs and the intensity of social, economic, and environmental drivers of change these systems face. However, this requires addressing the unclear, confused, and superficial use of resilience‐oriented concepts in research and policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, eastern ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests were described as sparse patches of old-growth trees maintained by frequent, low-severity fires; however, in recent decades, there have been a number of large mixed-severity wildfires throughout the range of these forests. Wildlife responses to severe fire disturbance in eastern ponderosa pine forests are not well understood. Our study investigates how cavity-nesting bird species in an eastern ponderosa pine forest are impacted by burn severity. The objectives of our study were to: (1) identify the community composition of cavity-nesting birds in a 27 y old burn of mixed severity, (2) assess how habitat variables important to cavity-nesting birds differ in the mixedseverity fire, and (3) determine what habitat variables best predict bird occurrence 27 y after mixed-severity fire. We surveyed 56 sites across four burn severity classes, ranging from unburned to severely burned forest, in the Pine Ridge region of Nebraska. We measured multiple habitat characteristics (tree and snag diameter at breast height (DBH), coarse woody debris (CWD), tree and snag density, shrub height, and shrub cover) in May-August 2016 and conducted bird count surveys between 25 May and 8 June 201 (i. Cavity-nesting bird species' occurrence varied among the burn severity variables. Burn severity class (unburned, low severity, moderate severity, high severity) was a significant predictor of habitat characteristics for cavity-nesting birds, including tree density, snag density, mean snag DBH, variance in DBH, and (AVI), which also was the best indicator of cavity-nesting bird community composition. We report evidence that mixed-severity wildfires in eastern ponderosa pine forests create variation in habitat characteristics and cavity-nesting bird occurrence., INTRODUCTIONWildfire is a major ecological disturbance that can alter community composition and vegetation structure (Brown and Sieg, 1999; Hutto et al., 2016). Although ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests are believed [...]