Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: coastal wetlands

New culturomics paper mapping CES using Instagram

Figure 2 process flowchart of the new Zhao et al. paper in Marine Policy

Another nice lab output this week in Marine Policy led by Qiqi Zhao, a China Scholarship Council visiting PhD student in my lab last year, including a bunch of other lab-affiliated students as co-authors: Modelling cultural ecosystem services in agricultural dykelands and tidal wetlands to inform coastal infrastructure decisions: a social media data approach. It is a bit of a companion piece to the Chen et al (2020) piece in Ocean and Coastal Management, as it uses the same Instagram dataset collected for every dykeland area in Nova Scotia back in 2018, but in a very different way. Chen et al. took a very qualitative ‘small data’ approach to the dataset, analyzing the photographs (and accounts) only of posts that included the words dyke*/dike*/wetland/marsh in the captions. Zhao et al. used a ‘big data’ text mining approach, extracting and associating bi-grams (two-word strings) from geolocated post captions to particular cultural ecosystem services (CES), modelling those CES using SolVES and comparing (as with Chen et al.) dykeland and wetland services. Whereas Chen et al. only found direct mentions of freshwater marshes (specifically Miner’s Marsh), in Zhao et al. we leveraged the coordinates to locate those geolocated to tidal wetland sites.  This will help us better understand the tradeoffs associated with climate change-driven adaptations of the dykeland system in the Bay of Fundy, the focus of NSERC ResNet Landscape 1.

Dykeland fieldtrip

Danika with Guelph students and professor Robin Davidson-Arnott, at the Windsor causeway tidegate.

Danika with Guelph students and professor Robin Davidson-Arnott, at the Windsor causeway tidegate.

Had a great day in the field with a group of undergraduates from Guelph on a field course to Nova Scotia led by human geographer and new collaborator Kirby Calvert, and physical geographer Robin Davidson-Arnott. We visited the Windsor causeway site, under discussion for the return of tidal flow, as well as the Grand Pre dykelands, Evangeline Beach to view migrating semi-palmated sandpipers, and finally to the lovely new Lightfoot and Wolfville vineyard for pizza and wine tasting. Especially great to get postdoc Tuihedur and incoming project MES student Krysta Sutton up to the dykelands before the term starts.

Postdoc Dr Tuihedur Rahman and new MES Krysta Sutton at the Windsor causeway.

Postdoc Dr Tuihedur Rahman and new MES Krysta Sutton at the Windsor causeway.

Blast from my Southern past

Me with Mark Kulp, UNO geologist and oil spill expert, near Herring Cove, NS.

Me with Mark Kulp, UNO geologist and oil spill expert, near Herring Cove, NS.

Thrilled to spend half of my day with my old friend and colleague from New Orleans, geologist Mark Kulp. Mark has been bringing his expertise to the front lines of coastal disasters over the last few decades: first, the steep trajectory of Louisiana coastal wetland loss and the subsequent devastation of Hurricane Katrina; and then the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, where he ran one of the SCAT triage teams to assess damage and plan response and is still tied up with expert opinion around the subsequent litigation. It is the oil spill work that brings him north, on a trip to discuss remediation options around oil spills, including a field trip to the Arrow, wrecked in 1970 off Isle Madame with a payload of Bunker C crude oil (only recently removed). Great to hear news of shared friends and learn about the online Coastal Processes, Hazards and Society course he has been developing with colleagues at UNO, Penn State and Shippensburg. We hit the Armview and Pavia at Herring Cove, both highlights on the fringe of the Halifax Peninsula.

Waterland

The cover of my copy of Waterland, picked up by someone who knows me well at a secondhand book sale.

The cover of my copy of Waterland, picked up by someone who knows me well at a secondhand book sale.

I recently re-read Waterland, by Graham Swift, which won the Booker Prize in 1983. It’s a remarkable combination of fenland geography, biographical mythology, environmental/industrial history, and thriller. I think you may need to be into wetlands to get through some of his passages, and certainly be comfortable with a fragmented temporal axis, but it is my kind of storytelling. It is funny – there’s this wonderful bit where he discusses how flat landscapes like the fenlands encourage lustiness – and the main characters are solid. As with much of what I record here, I also see parallels between my recreational reading and my research. This is a book about place, cultural landscapes, and adaptation. In the wake of my more recent research on dykelands, for instance, a late passage seemed particularly interesting upon this second read:

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires. (p. 291)

 

New paper on dykeland futures

Graphical abstract for a new paper in Land Use Policy on dykeland futures in Nova Scotia.

Graphical abstract for a new paper in Land Use Policy on dykeland futures in Nova Scotia.

Pleased to have a new paper out in Land Use Policy with former MREM intern Logan Loik on how Nova Scotians perceive agricultural dykelands in the face of climate change. Bay of Fundy dykelands are Canada’s only UNESCO-listed agricultural landscapes because of their origins in the 1600s with French settlers.  These structures protect little active farmland today, but governance is still in the hands of the farming sector. They are more often used for recreation, or to protect residential, commercial or transportation infrastructure. Climate projections suggest considerable effort and expense will be required to raise all dykes to the levels necessary to withstand sea level rise and storm surges, but it may be that decommissioning some dykes and restoring coastal wetlands may be more resilient. We asked 183 Nova Scotians to sort statements about dykelands, wetlands and coastal governance. The dominant discourse from this Q-method study was supportive of maintaining dykelands for recreational, cultural and flood protection reasons; the next most prevalent was pragmatically supportive of wetland restoration for efficiency purposes. Results suggest challenges for the process of managed realignment, as well as climate adaptation in cultural landscapes more generally, but also some new analytical opportunities for large-n Q-method research.

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