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.
Tag: salt marsh

View of the North Onslow dyke realignment and tidal wetland restoration project site, first big tide after dyke breach, Nov 8, 2021.
As in October, I have been too busy to blog this month but plenty has been happening. Gillian Kerr started working for ResNet L1 part time as a research associate to help with data stewardship and knowledge exchange. ResNet HQP Emily Wells and partner CMM’s Kara Pictou did a pilot interview for their shared work on Traditional Knowledge and climate change and the interviews are coming next. We had the first committee meeting for Keahna Margeson’s OGEN IDPhD about coastal adaptation, which includes an interdisciplinary team across SRES, Information Management, Planning, Kings, and the National Research Council. I made it up to see the Truro Onslow dyke realignment and tidal wetland restoration project (the one covered in this OECD report and this paper) during the last set of ‘high’ high tides, after the dyke was finally breached. The above photo was taken then, around 4:30 pm, and the bird life in the flooded former dykeland was cacophonous! A good sign for the biodiversity benefits of this ambitious project as well as the climate resilience benefits.
Former postdoc, HM Tuihedur Rahman, who led the paper linked above about the Truro case study, also led another recent paper in Climate Risk Management that features among the three other authors two of my lab alumni, former postdoc Wesley Tourangeau and PhD alum Bernard Soubry. Great to see such synthesis work emerging from trainees working directly together: A framework for using autonomous adaptation as a leverage point in sustainable climate adaptation.
Finally, I had fun participating in the book launch for the recent volume co-edited by Susana Batel and David Rudolph, A critical approach to the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures, published this year by Palgrave McMillin and available free online. Frequent collaborator John Parkins and I wrote a chapter in that volume with MES alum Ellen Chappell about the value of quantitative methods in critical social acceptance work on energy. The event was fascinating, and to my surprise the critical perspective of some presenters about renewable energy was in tension with the fast transition discourse coming from COP26.

Conceptual diagram of believed ecosystem service flows, Figure 3 in Sherren et al. 2021.
The first output of the Landscape 1 case study of ResNet, the Bay of Fundy dykelands, is out this week in Facets, Canada’s open access science journal: Understanding multifunctional Bay of Fundy dykelands and tidal wetlands using ecosystem services—a baseline. We set out to understand ecosystem service flows from tidal wetlands and drained agricultural dykeland (former tidal wetland), as climate change forces a rethink of the dykeland system. This review covered papers, theses, reports, and drew in some cases on other jurisdictions where there was a dearth of local data. We uncovered some key gaps but also potential synergies in balancing the system for sustainability. Filling some of the gaps to inform decisionmaking is the undertaking that faces us in ResNet.
Excited that my episode has been released of the In the Reeds podcast, run by Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC). In this ~45 minute podcast I talk about the unique setting of the Bay of Fundy Dykelands, the challenges they face with sea level rise, and how we can work together to negotiate a shared future for them. I dig a little into climax thinking and its application in that task. Proud to be a part of DUC’s sea level rise campaign.