Sunday, September 25, 2016

Sneak preview of (hopefully) upcoming publications

From August 2016 through the end of this year, I hope to have submitted 10 peer-reviewed articles / chapters for publication! In the meantime I'm hard at work writing as much as I can.
Science writing outside at briar patch b&b

They are as follows (let me know if you want any abstracts):
1. A remote sensing paper where we detected agricultural ditches and ridge-tillage, and show how important those practices are for erosion control in our study area in Kenya (submitted, second author).
UPDATE: published at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01431161.2017.1327125
2. A book chapter for a Oxford University Press book about scientific findings that go against expectations. It's about the analysis I did for another book chapter (Cambridge University Press, not published yet) which I reported on here: http://blog.nature.org/science/2014/06/18/global-agriculture-land-sustainability-deforestation-foodsecurity/ (Reviewed / Accepted, sole author).
UPDATE: publishedhttps://global.oup.com/academic/product/effective-conservation-science-9780198808985?cc=se&lang=en& and an ugly unformatted version is available at http://fish.freeshell.org/publications/DataNotDogma-Chapter11-preformatted.pdf

3. A paper outlining how we tied traditional detailed household surveys to spatial data by having farmers outline their actual plots on tablets with high resolution imagery (should be submitted in a few weeks, second author)
UPDATE: Has been submitted and rejected twice, both times after a 4-month review with only one reviewer. Submitted a third time.

4. A paper that was part of a water fund project in Brazil; a water treatment company is going to pay for conservation to reduce the costs of treating the water. So the paper asks how much of a difference it makes if we use high resolution data (expensive and time consuming) vs low resolution (free and faster) on our water quality estimates (hopefully submitted in a month or two, first author). UPDATEpublished at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rse2.61/full

5.-8. There is a series of four papers on knowledge diffusion (spread and uptake of new ideas); I'm leading one and I believe I'll be on the other three as an author since we've been working together on the research as a team for 2 years. The one I'm leading uses a rich array of data to examine both internal and external diffusion at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) from a few different angles, one uses an experiment to show how "boundary spanners" (people with social networks that connect to a variety of other groups) play a critical role in spreading knowledge, one looks at how people actually change what they do in response to new methods becoming available, and one compares two groups within TNC and examines how their response to and alignment with the new methods differs. Read more about the overall project here: http://blog.nature.org/science/2015/07/29/tracking-how-new-science-spreads/ (will all be submitted by end of October, one as first author and the rest as a minor author)
UPDATE: 1 published (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0193716), 1 accepted, 1 submitted, 1 more being revised for resubmission

9. We are working on a remote sensing analysis in high altitude grasslands of Peru, seeking to remotely estimate the amount of forage (grass etc) available for grazers, as part of a model that will support another water fund. I did much of the research design, but colleagues collected the field data and my intern Trisha is now beginning the remote sensing analysis. (should be submitted by end of December, maybe 3rd/4th author).
UPDATE: We scrapped this one given too many competing papers and projects.

10. A peer-reviewed version of a report we wrote on the U.S. beef supply chain (impacts across different phases of production like grazing and feed production and feedlots) should also be submitted. The report was just released to stay tuned for a post about that.
UPDATE: Rejected twice, and we don't plan to submit again.

Also I have a completed / reviewed / accepted CUP book chapter that has been in limbo for a few years (the one mentioned in #2 above) and should come out next year, and there are 1-2 more articles that may happen probably submitted early next year (led by others but on which I'd be a co-author). Stay tuned! Unless they're all rejected outright 2017 should be a good year for my publications...
UPDATE: the book chapter is now supposed to be out late in 2018. One other paper was submitted on the Camboriu Water Fund and is under review.

Friday, September 9, 2016

New journal article: "Examining the relationship between environmental factors and conflict in pastoralist areas of East Africa"

A research fellow of mine (Essayas Ayana) recently published an analysis (which I'm also an author on) of the degree to which environmental factors like drought drive conflict between pastoralists. The idea was that as the lands where they graze their animals dry up, they may be forced to graze in areas used by others, which could drive conflict. However, we found that environmental variables had very little predictive power for where conflict occurred. The paper is officially hosted here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969716305265

You can read the full text of the paper here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Essayas_Ayana2/publication/299520493_Examining_the_relationship_between_environmental_factors_and_conflict_in_pastoralist_areas_of_East_Africa/links/572b8f9708aef7c7e2c6b569.pdf

Here's the citation:
Ayana, Essayas K., Pietro Ceccato, Jonathan RB Fisher, and Ruth DeFries. "Examining the relationship between environmental factors and conflict in pastoralist areas of East Africa." Science of The Total Environment 557 (2016): 601-611.


20150611_124650

New journal article: "Advancing Conservation by Understanding and Influencing Human Behavior"

Interested in what works when it comes to getting people to change their behavior and start acting in support of conservation? This paper (which I'm a minor author on) outlines different approaches to behavior change, and includes some relevant questions to determine which approach will be most successful:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12252/epdf

Here's the citation:
Reddy, Sheila MW, Jensen Montambault, Yuta J. Masuda, Ayelet Gneezy, Elizabeth Keenan, William Butler, Jonathan RB Fisher, and Stanley T. Asah. "Advancing Conservation by Understanding and Influencing Human Behavior." Conservation Letters (2016).