Landscapes - People - Global change

Category: Methods (Page 1 of 18)

Ask Canada – a new RSC College Interdisciplinary Research Group

When nominated into the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, one is asked to say how they will contribute to the College. During my nomination I pitched an idea for a new Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) on quantitative social science research policy and data infrastructure (including survey and social media methods). With the support of a few fellow members (Mark Stoddart, Karen Foster and Elizabeth Dubois) that IRG has just been provisionally approved. Now we are looking for additional members, and writing a funding application to staff some empirical work to support it. Please get in touch with me if you are an RSC College member who is interested to hear more.  A brief description follows:

Ask Canada: Toward robust data infrastructure and policy settings for quantitative social science in Canada

The landscape of quantitative social science research methods in Canada is a chaotic mix of practices and proxies both poorly understood at a system level and poorly equipped to support replicable research. This includes inadequate social science data infrastructure, inattention to policy settings to support empirical methods, and typically (bar a few fee-for-service labs) small, atomized academic teams that experience significant transaction costs in using them. Declining survey response rates drive many to work with polling firms or online modes of distribution that may compromise data quality and generalizability of insight. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science highlights the need to “[invest] in open science infrastructures and services”, but there is an ongoing tension globally—recognized by SDG 16 in relation to strong institutions—between high-quality, inclusive and representative data to inform decision-making and adequate protection of privacy. Open government initiatives are improving in line with global initiatives for default-open practices but Canada has thus far been focused on data repositories and access to government data and research, rather than supporting academic-led research. In fact, academic research is explicitly prohibited from accessing some resources (e.g. electoral rolls) that in comparable jurisdictions are available to their social scientists upon application. A piecemeal set of alliances and networks exist in Canada to support various aspects of social science but leave gaps in the support of quantitative social methods. This IRG will undertake literature review, expert methods, workshops and/or public surveys. By its end we will synthesize the state of quantitative social science in Canada, widely mobilize knowledge about best practices and trade-offs, and make recommendations for social science data infrastructure and public policy to foster quantitative social science research for the public interest.

Two papers out on Bay of Fundy by Elson

Figure 4 in Galang et al (2025) in Sustainability Science, showing increases in empathy measures.

Figure 4 in Galang et al (2025) in Sustainability Science, showing increases in empathy measures.

Kudos to McGill Bennett-lab NSERC ResNet PhD student Elson Galang whose first two PhD papers came out this past week, both based (at least in part) on the workshops that he led at SMU about the Bay of Fundy NSERC ResNet case study in November 2022. The first one came out in Sustainability Science on January 16th, Co-imagining future scenarios can enhance environmental actors’ empathy toward future generations and non-human life-forms, that found measurable impacts on participants’ empathy towards future people and other life forms, the latter even lasting 3 months after the event. This is tantalizing evidence of the value of participating in the development of environmental scenarios. The second paper came out in Environmental Science & Policy on Jan 21st, Participatory scenario planning: A social learning approach to build systems thinking and trust for sustainable environmental governance. This shares more good news about participation in such processes in relation to the cognitive, relational and normative dimensions of social learning. Both papers also describe innovative methodological tools for assessing these complex ideas. Congratulations, Elson!

 

New ResNet paper feat. Bay of Fundy

A quick note today to celebrate a new paper out in People and Nature, led by ResNet McGill PhD student Yiyi Zhang. The paper, Servicesheds connect people to the landscapes upon which they depend, uses two landscape case studies to demonstrate a new framework (see below) for delineating servicesheds. In the Bay of Fundy she explored “fisheries benefitting fishers, and flood protection benefitting flood-prone communities”. The Monteregie of Quebec is the other case study, with a focus on agriculture. Her study explicitly explores the impacts of tidal wetlands on coastal protection compared with the dykes that substitute that service. An ambitious study, conceptually and practically. Congratulations Yiyi and her team at McGill, including Brian Robinson and Hugo Thierry.

Zhang et al. figure 2 outlining the serviceshed framework

Australia fieldwork

I have been in Australia for just over two weeks now, revisiting livestock producers I worked with during my postdoctoral fellowship in 2008-2010. I was able to reach just over a third of the original participants, and I have been visiting them on their properties to identify the sites of the photos they took back in 2008, and recapture the same photos. It is fun work, like a treasure hunt. Some landscape changes are subtle in that 15+ years, and some are not (like the 66-turbine Rye Park wind farm; see below – you’ll need to zoom in). Thanks to the ANU Sustainable Farms team for the use of their field vehicle, and to these wonderful farmers for offering so much of their time and good humour.

The Rye Park wind farm at sunset

New research note on understanding sense of place

Figure 1 in Cotton et al. 2024, explaining the process

Visiting PhD student Isabel Cotton joined my team and the ResNet project for 3 months last year,  from her home unit at the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia, and recently published a methods-oriented research note on that work in Journal of Environmental Psychology. The paper, Comparing thematic and search term-based coding in understanding sense of place in survey research, shows the result of exploratory work we did with Bangor University linguistic scholar Thora Tenbrink that took a qualitative approach by contrast with most survey-based assessments of sense of place. We compared the results of inductive and search-term-based coding of a free-text survey question on a survey of Minas Basin house residents asking them to, “Please describe [their] local area, in terms of what it means to [them] personally and how [they] use it”. The two sets of categories varied in their correlation, with more tangible themes like recreation/experience, relational/family and cultural heritage/history the strongest across the methods, compared with less comparable themes about restorative environments and small-town identity. What was particularly interesting, however, was that it was possible using word clouds to identify new terms to allow the search-term approach to improve its performance significantly (for instance recreation went from 0.75 to 0.96 correlation by adding only one term, exercise; see above).

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