by: Ronica Stromberg, NRT & EPSCoR Program Coordinator
The Nebraska-Montana EPSCoR project is racking up scientific discoveries even while collaborating at a distance in the pandemic.
Early in the project, the team developed resilience informatics, a technology showing where harmful changes in vegetation, like the spread of red cedar trees, are occurring in the United States. Ranchers and farmers can use the Rangeland Analysis Platform to see what may be coming their way and take action to prevent it.
More recently, the team moved to researching how U.S. ranchers and farmers may adopt and use the resilience informatics technology.
While Covid-19 stopped most of the team’s in-person meetings and case studies, the team completed a survey of ranchers and farmers in Nebraska about environmental change and their ability to adapt to change. The team also reviewed 287 articles about adaptive capacity and discovered gaps in the science and areas to research further.
The team will use findings from these efforts and other data to create a model of the social and ecological factors driving ranchers’ behavior. Model results will help researchers recommend the best strategies for working with ranchers on managing red cedars.
Besides developing and carrying out the Nebraska rancher survey, the team has developed a survey of conservation professionals for use in Montana.
Doctoral students Sabrina Gulab at Nebraska and Holly Nesbitt at Montana collaborated across states and disciplines to lead efforts on both surveys. Gulab, an agricultural economics major, and Nesbitt, a resource management major, recently received results of the Nebraska rancher survey and are writing about their findings.
“From herding the cats of academia, to designing the survey questions, to managing the budget, to printing multiple rounds of surveys and getting them all mailed, the logistical piece of that was pretty complicated,” Nesbitt said.
A Canadian who has worked remotely before, Nesbitt said the pandemic did not stop her from collaborating and may have helped the team in some ways.
“The pandemic, I think, actually helped us learn how to collaborate across distances better because, regardless of whether you were nearby or far away, everybody was on Zoom,” she said.
Still, the fact that the project crossed states posed challenges to collaborating.
“It was challenging to get people’s schedules on the same page and have everybody's different ideas come together, but it was great at the same time,” she said. “It was worth the effort to work through because we came up with something that was a better, more original idea.”
Gulab said she and Nesbitt worked well together, dividing up tasks and using a project management app to keep track of their work.
“Holly had a professional experience before studying her Ph.D., so I really learned a lot from her expertise,” Gulab said. “She also had good experience in designing the questions when it came to human dimensions, because of her work on the social sciences part. She was very good in sharing the literature with me and then helping me out with those questions.”
Gulab said she also benefited from the cross-state EPSCoR project by having the opportunity to take a class from Theresa Floyd, an early-career researcher in management and marketing at the University of Montana-Missoula.
“It was a really, really great experience for me, taking a class from somewhere else and learning something that's not offered here at UNL,” she said. “Now I have decided to take social network economics and game theory economics as my career path.”
Her advisor, Simanti Banerjee, noted her growth as a professional in the project.
“I have had the opportunity to witness Sabrina's development as a researcher, and in my mind, she's done really well in terms of taking leadership roles in project development and implementation, which is something that you would hope for any student that you are mentoring,” Banerjee said. “Seeing her take on that role and do very well at it has been really, really gratifying.”
As an early-career researcher and the only economist on the project, Banerjee said she herself has benefited from the cross-disciplinary collaboration.
“We are currently working on a professional survey where we are working on questions to ask conservation professionals. This is a group that's usually not necessarily studied by economists. Economists either study consumers or producers, so that's a whole new different perspective, providing a lot of opportunity for growth and learning,” she said.
The project members from Nebraska work mostly in physical science fields while those from Montana work mostly in the social sciences. Banerjee said differences between the two groups have added dimension to the collaboration.
“Collaborating across states has been really fruitful because the Montana folks bring a whole new different perspective to the table than do the Nebraska folks just because of how lands get managed and the nature of the land itself,” she said. “In Nebraska, most of it is privately owned while in Montana, that’s not the case. That difference in background and perspectives drives a lot of the conversations.”
Dan Uden, another early-career researcher on the team and an ecologist at Nebraska, has been working with others on the team to use resilience informatics to detect and forecast changes in vegetation. Now they are seeking answers to questions like how ranchers respond to vegetation change and how ready and able landowners might be to change how they manage their land.
“To answer these questions, we need social scientists, who study human behavior,” he said. “As a broader social-ecological team, we are using maps of vegetation change to strategically survey landowners about their perceptions of and responses to vegetation change.”
The Montana social scientists bring to the project the tools needed to understand landowners’ capacity to adapt and willingness to respond to harmful changes in vegetation.
“Early detection of change is important, but where the rubber meets the road is in understanding the ability and willingness of people to work individually or collectively to stop that change, slow it down, or even prevent it from occurring in the first place,” Uden said. “As ecologists, our cross-disciplinary
collaborations with EPSCoR team members continue to yield insights into the social and economic underpinnings of individual and collective responses.”
Sechindra Vallury, the Montana postdoctoral scholar who led the team’s literature review on adaptive capacity, said the science of adaptive capacity has made limited progress in the past 20 years but he thinks this team can move it forward.
“I think we are positioned fairly well enough to be able to do that,” he said. “I think we are deliberate in the way we contribute to pursue our research such that we are integrating these different scholarship traditions that resilience folks like Craig Allen and Dan Uden have and that Brian Chaffin and these other social scientists at the University of Montana have. I think we are positioned well enough to integrate these traditions.”
The National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR program operates in 25 states, building the capacity of early-career researchers, postdoctoral scholars and doctoral students to perform research. The $4-million Nebraska-Montana project, “Resilience Informatics for the Convergence of Critical Capacities to Address Regional-Scale Environmental Change,” started in August 2019 and is expected to conclude in July 2023.