The Nebraska-Montana EPSCoR team recently reviewed 287 scientific articles on adaptive capacity, the ability of a system to adapt to change, and discovered critical gaps in the literature, suggesting ways to advance related research.
The team studied the literature to answer the question, “How have scholars examined or studied adaptive capacity at levels that are larger than the individual?”
“This is not something that was done by anyone before,” said Sechindra Vallury, the University of Montana postdoctoral researcher who led the 13-member review team.
“Most of the adaptive capacity research is focused on the individual level, and when we are talking about the ability of a community or a county or a state to cope with the impacts of climate change or environmental change or wildfires, the capacities are obviously different from the capacity of an individual, so that was our motivating reason for specifically looking at that question,” he said.
Ada Smith, a University of Montana doctoral student also on the review team, noted a disconnect between the field of adaptive capacity and its evaluation.
“Adaptive capacity research is a practice-oriented field, but in this review, we found that the ways in which researchers often evaluate adaptive capacity isn’t as useful as it could be in terms of guiding practitioners and policymakers to better prepare for ongoing effects of environmental change,” she said.
The team found that when scholars looked at adaptive capacity, they failed to look not only beyond the individual but also at variables that crossed levels of decision making. For example, if they looked at a change in grassland to woodland and the capacity of cattle systems to adapt to that change, the scholars might look at how ranchers coped but not how county agencies were interacting with state agencies to manage the environmental change.
“The literature review found that--with the exception of very few studies--so far, people have not done a good job of thinking about what these cross-level variables are,” Vallury said. “And we know for a fact that these variables do impact the way in which decisions are made, the ways in which modern-day problems are addressed.”
Based upon this finding, Vallury said the EPSCoR team would now include cross-level decision-making variables in their design of a geospatial model. Through the model, they plan to look at social and ecological drivers of cattle prices in Nebraska from 2001 to 2019 and include data about changes in vegetation from grasslands to woodlands.
“The model will essentially have a bunch of technological labels like vegetation transition, precipitation and temperature, and then there would be a lot of socioeconomic variables as well, like number of cattle on rancher operations, are there nonprofit organizations, is there some sort of institutional infrastructure support for rangeland owners at the county level,” Vallury said.
Examples he gave of cross-level variables the team might include in the model were governmental attributes like collaboration, learning networks and legislation.
“This is going to be a truly social-ecological model, identifying both ecological as well as social drivers of ranchers’ behavior or rangeland behavior in Nebraska,” Vallury said.
The team made another major finding when they analyzed citations in the articles to see how past scholars have built upon one another’s work.
“What we found is the literature is really fragmented,” Vallury said.
Scholars worked in isolated clusters with little communication between groups even though they studied the same problem.
“Scholars were not sufficiently building off existing literature to study adaptive capacity,” Vallury said. “It’s this problem of they were trying to reinvent the wheel every time with new types of methods, models and indicators, and that has resulted in very little practical action or translation of academic research to practical or actionable solutions for practitioners.”
Two other findings along this line were that scholars stuck to their own preferred methods in their research and that most of the literature on adaptive capacity focused solely on developed nations.
“We needed more research to focus on the developing or, essentially, middle-income or low-income countries,” Vallury said.
The scholars sticking to a preferred research method chose either a quantitative method, such as remote sensing, or a qualitative method, such as interviews, to research adaptive capacity. Few used a mixed-methods approach.
Since these scholars did not have multiple sources of data, many of them tried to gauge adaptive capacity at levels higher than the individual by taking the adaptive capacity of an individual and using a quantitative technique to aggregate it to the higher level they were studying.
“What we are saying is you cannot just take it at the individual and aggregate it to the city,” Vallury said. “What you need to do is think of variables specifically at that city level in order to capture adaptive capacity at the city.”
Scientists could strengthen their research by using a mixed-methods approach and multiple data sources, he said.
“If you are using both qualitative and quantitative methods for analysis, you are able to get a better narrative because you are able to use the data in different ways and make your arguments stronger,” he said.
Prior to the Nebraska-Montana EPSCoR award, the Nebraska biophysical scientists studied the concept of adaptive capacity as part of larger studies on resilience and the Montana social scientists studied it as part of vulnerability studies. On the EPSCoR award, the two scientist groups are using mixed methods and integrating their work to develop resilience informatics and study its adoption in the field.
Resilience informatics is a way to screen landscapes with technology to detect harmful changes in vegetation before they become widespread. It uses a landcover dataset and the Rangeland Analysis Platform at https://rangelands.app/.
Craig Allen, the University of Nebraska professor who directs the EPSCoR project, said the literature review was one of many products of this collaboration and noted its importance.
“This review addressed social adaptive capacity, a core component of understanding how humans respond to sudden change,” he said. “Adaptive capacity describes the latent potential for adaptation and is critical to resilience.”
— Ronica Stromberg, Nebraska-Montana EPSCoR Program Coordinator