Non-governmental organizations and multi-sited marine conservation science: A case study

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now major players in the realm of environmental conservation. While many environmental NGOs started as national organizations focused around single-species protection, governmental advocacy, and preservation of wilderness, the largest now produce applied conservation science and work with national and international stakeholders to develop conservation solutions that work in tandem with local aspirations. Marine managed areas (MMAs) are increasingly being used as a tool to manage anthropogenic stressors on marine resources and protect marine biodiversity. However, the science of MMA is far from complete. Conservation International (CI) is concluding a 5 year, $12.5 million dollar Marine Management Area Science (MMAS) initiative. There are 45 scientific projects recently completed, with four main “nodes” of research and conservation work: Panama, Fiji, Brazil, and Belize. Research projects have included MMA ecological monitoring, socioeconomic monitoring, cultural roles monitoring, economic valuation studies, and others. MMAS has the goals of conducting marine management area research, building local capacity, and using the results of the research to promote marine conservation policy outcomes at project sites. How science is translated into policy action is a major area of interest for science and technology scholars (Cash and Clark 2001; Haas 2004; Jasanoff et al. 2002). For science to move policy there must be work across “boundaries” (Jasanoff 1987). Boundaries are defined as the “socially constructed and negotiated borders between science and policy, between disciplines, across nations, and across multiple levels” (Cash et al. 2001). Working across the science-policy boundary requires boundary organizations (Guston 1999) with accountability to both sides of the boundary, among other attributes. (Guston 1999; Clark et al. 2002). This paper provides a unique case study illustrating how there are clear advantages to collaborative science. Through the MMAS initiative, CI built accountability into both sides of the science-policy boundary primarily through having scientific projects fed through strong in-country partners and being folded into the work of ongoing conservation processes. This collaborative, boundary-spanning approach led to many advantages, including cost sharing, increased local responsiveness and input, better local capacity building, and laying a foundation for future conservation outcomes. As such, MMAS can provide strong lessons for other organizations planning to get involved in multi-site conservation science. (PDF contains 3 pages

Stimulating Critical Literacy Consciousness

This story from the field recounts how, after being an educator for over ten years, I became aware that I had been responsible for misrepresenting information to my first-grade students. This difficult realization shook me to the core, but it also became the impetus for me to learn about critical pedagogy and critical literacy. Both of these educational practices align with my faith and have been transformational to my teaching. As a result, I am able to teach my pre-service and graduate students how to instruct in more socially-just ways

The Short Path Algorithm Applied to a Toy Model

We numerically investigate the performance of the short path optimization algorithm on a toy problem, with the potential chosen to depend only on the total Hamming weight to allow simulation of larger systems. We consider classes of potentials with multiple minima which cause the adiabatic algorithm to experience difficulties with small gaps. The numerical investigation allows us to consider a broader range of parameters than was studied in previous rigorous work on the short path algorithm, and to show that the algorithm can continue to lead to speedups for more general objective functions than those considered before. We find in many cases a polynomial speedup over Grover search. We present a heuristic analytic treatment of choices of these parameters and of scaling of phase transitions in this model.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures; v2 final version published in Quantu

Lieb-Robinson Bounds and the Exponential Clustering Theorem

We give a Lieb-Robinson bound for the group velocity of a large class of discrete quantum systems which can be used to prove that a non-vanishing spectral gap implies exponential clustering in the ground state of such systems.Comment: v2: corrected proof of Theorem 2. v3: slightly better bound in Theorem 2; updated proo