Geology topics

Matthew A. Williamson

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew A. Williamson.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2025

Reconciling scale using the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) Framework to improve management of woody encroachment in grasslands

Implementing strategies to navigate large-scale ecological transitions in grasslands is one of this century's greatest conservation challenges. In the US Great Plains, managing areas impacted by woody transitions have been reactive, short-lived, costly, and ineffective. Along with current technological innovation in rangeland monitoring, the promise of early warning science is to provide managers with sufficient time to be better prepared for novel signals of ecological change. Combining the science of early warning signals and frameworks such as the Resist – Accept – Direct (RAD) can provide land managers with guidelines to identify proactive strategies when facing ecological change. Using this approach, we found that opportunities to resist woody transitions decreased from 84 % to 60 % between 1990 and 2020 over the entire biome but remained highest in the northern and western Great Plains, which contributes to large scale conservation targets. These are key areas to prioritize resist opportunities. In contrast, 11 % of the biome exhibited early warning transition signals across all hierarchical scales by 2020, a fourfold increase since 1990. Lastly by 2020, 30 % of the biome exhibited early warning signals across multiple but not all scales. Here, efforts may be more effective when management is directed to conserve fragmented grassland legacies within a woody-dominated matrix and avoid large-scale monocultures of problematic encroaching woody species. Our multi-scale study indicates that 1) anchoring to the last remaining grassland core areas with no early warning of transitions and 2) strategically investing in these intact grasslands may provide the best results for grassland conservation.

Great Plains↗

USGS2022

The use of boundary-spanning organizations to bridge the knowledge-action gap in North America

The goals of boundary-spanning organizations include communicating among researchers, stakeholders, and resource managers to improve decision-making. These efforts span public agencies, environmental non-governmental organizations, and private stakeholders and occur throughout Canada, the USA, and Mexico. We describe how the core philosophy of boundary-spanning organizations may help address conservation challenges in these countries. We profile a subset of the more than 100 boundary-spanning organizations, identifying some of their core accomplishments and the challenges they face. Scientific information generally is acknowledged as useful to resource management by recipients of the information. It is more difficult to infer whether the information transmitted by boundary-spanning organizations contributed to conservation decisions or whether the outcomes of those decisions differed from the potential outcomes in the absence of such information. Several examples of sustained enthusiasm for boundary-spanning efforts indicate that the organizations help to bridge the knowledge to action gap in North America.

Book chapter↗

USGS2021

Improving inferences about private land conservation by accounting for incomplete reporting

Private lands provide key habitat for imperiled species and are core components of function protected area networks; yet, their incorporation into national and regional conservation planning has been challenging. Identifying locations where private landowners are likely to participate in conservation initiatives can help avoid conflict and clarify trade-offs between ecological benefits and sociopolitical costs. Empirical, spatially explicit assessment of the factors associated with conservation on private land is an emerging tool for identifying future conservation opportunities. However, most data on private land conservation are voluntarily reported and incomplete, which complicates these assessments. We used a novel application of occupancy models to analyze the occurrence of conservation easements on private land. We compared multiple formulations of occupancy models with a logistic regression model to predict the locations of conservation easements based on a spatially explicit social-ecological systems framework. We combined a simulation experiment with a case study of easement data in Idaho and Montana (United States) to illustrate the utility of the occupancy framework for modeling conservation on private land. Occupancy models that explicitly accounted for variation in reporting produced estimates of predictors that were substantially less biased than estimates produced by logistic regression under all simulated conditions. Occupancy models produced estimates for the 6 predictors we evaluated in our case study that were larger in magnitude, but less certain than those produced by logistic regression. These results suggest that occupancy models result in qualitatively different inferences regarding the effects of predictors on conservation easement occurrence than logistic regression and highlight the importance of integrating variable and incomplete reporting of participation in empirical analysis of conservation initiatives. Failure to do so can lead to emphasizing the wrong social, institutional, and environmental factors that enable conservation and underestimating conservation opportunities in landscapes where social norms or institutional constraints inhibit reporting.

Idaho, Montana↗

USGS2017

Decision support frameworks and tools for conservation

The practice of conservation occurs within complex socioecological systems fraught with challenges that require transparent, defensible, and often socially engaged project planning and management. Planning and decision support frameworks are designed to help conservation practitioners increase planning rigor, project accountability, stakeholder participation, transparency in decisions, and learning. We describe and contrast five common frameworks within the context of six fundamental questions (why, who, what, where, when, how) at each of three planning stages of adaptive management (project scoping, operational planning, learning). We demonstrate that decision support frameworks provide varied and extensive tools for conservation planning and management. However, using any framework in isolation risks diminishing potential benefits since no one framework covers the full spectrum of potential conservation planning and decision challenges. We describe two case studies that have effectively deployed tools from across conservation frameworks to improve conservation actions and outcomes. Attention to the critical questions for conservation project planning should allow practitioners to operate within any framework and adapt tools to suit their specific management context. We call on conservation researchers and practitioners to regularly use decision support tools as standard practice for framing both practice and research.

Conservation Letters↗

USGS2017

Navigating translational ecology: Creating opportunities for scientist participation

Interest in translational ecology (TE) – a research approach that yields useful scientific outcomes through ongoing collaboration between scientists and stakeholders – is growing among both of these groups. Translational ecology brings together participants from different cultures and with different professional incentives. We address ways to cultivate a culture of TE, such as investing time in understanding one another's decision context and incentives, and outline common entry points to translational research, such as working through boundary organizations, building place-based research programs, and being open to opportunities as they arise. We also highlight common institutional constraints on scientists and practitioners, and ways in which collaborative research can overcome these limitations, emphasizing considerations for navigating TE within current institutional frameworks, but also pointing out ways in which institutions are evolving to facilitate translational research approaches.

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment↗