2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

The presentations in this panel will examine the rapid expansion of marine national monuments in American maritime jurisdiction, the role of nongovernmental organizations in marine conservation in Papua New Guinea, the application of geographic information systems in coastal conservation, and sustainability in the cultured pearl industry.  The panel will also consider the relationship between terrestrial and marine conservation efforts.

Presidential Nature Conservation and the American National Monuments

George Busenberg

The protection of natural areas in the United States has been fundamentally shaped by the 1906 Antiquities Act, a federal law that grants the President unilateral authority to proclaim protected national monuments on federal lands.  The Antiquities Act has been widely used to protect a vast collection of natural areas within the land and sea jurisdictions of America.  A critical question that surrounds the national monuments power is the durability of the protections initially established under that power, since successful nature conservation requires perpetual protection.  The purpose of this study is to examine the durability of the Antiquities Act, and the durability of the protections initially proclaimed under the authority of that Act.  To what extent has the Antiquities Act remained intact in the face of attempts to restrict or repeal its delegation of unilateral conservation power to the President, and to what extent have the protections initially established under the Act been sustained, diminished, or reinforced over time?  This study examines these two research questions by examining the history of the Antiquities Act and a comprehensive quantitative dataset on the evolving status and acreages of protected natural areas originally proclaimed as national monuments in the period 1906 through 2014.  This study finds a prevailing pattern of durability in both the Antiquities Act and in the protections initially proclaimed under its authority.  While some national monuments have been diminished in acreage and a few have been revoked, the vast majority of the total area originally protected by national monument proclamations is still protected in some form today.  Furthermore, many national monuments have been given additional protections by Congress over time through national park and wilderness designations.  Therefore, the dominant pattern in this policy domain is the perpetuation and reinforcement of federal protections for natural areas initially protected as national monuments.

Marine versus terrestrial conservation in Papua New Guinea: The effects of issue characteristics on NGO organizing

Simone Pulver

Issue characteristics are central to explanations of outcomes in environmental politics.  Characteristics such as complexity, difficulty in monitoring, and long timescales are used to explain failure in addressing certain environmental challenges.  Conversely, certainty, emotivity, and short causal linkages between harm and victims are issue characteristics argued to facilitate solutions to environmental problems.  These lists, though informative, vary from case to case and lack a systematic analysis of the causal mechanisms linking particular issue characteristics with particular outcomes in environmental politics. Focusing on the case of conservation advocacy in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a framework is presented to explain how the different characteristics of terrestrial versus marine ecosystems explain the lag in marine conservation advocacy relative to advocacy centered on terrestrial conservation.  Despite parallel threats to terrestrial and marine resources, the majority of the forty-two conservation NGOs in PNG focus on terrestrial conservation efforts.  NGOs targeting marine issues are more recent entrants into the environmental advocacy community in PNG and tend to be local subsidiaries of international NGOs.  The framework uses four social movement theories about the rise of environmental mobilization—theories based on harm, resource mobilization, political opportunity, and identity—to connect particular issue characteristics to mobilization outcomes. 

Mobile GIS Applications for Coastal Planning

Diana Mitsova, PhD

This study reports on a cross-college collaborative teaching effort focusing on development of prototype mobile GIS applications to address coastal issues. Three faculty concurrently taught courses in urban planning, computer engineering and multimedia studies which resulted in seven GIS-based prototypes of smartphone mobile applications for coastal conservation and planning. Instructors and students examined the applicability of these modules in the context of coastal conservation, climate change, disaster management and sustainability. The modules included developing mapping applications, interacting with layers, features and attributes, and running analysis tasks. Some examples of the prototypes that were developed as a result of the cross-college collaboration include: “Sea Turtle Watch” application  for conservation and  protection of  sea turtles urban habitat; “Lion Fish Catcher” to report on an invasive  predatory reef fish threatening Florida reefs; “Water Safe” to report on the environmental health of beaches and rivers in South Florida; “Shark Migration” for  data collection on migrating shark species; and “Marine Debris,”  and app that brings awareness of the negative impacts of marine debris/ trash on the oceans and marine life. Furthermore, faculty and students explored ways to strengthen the app content basis through “rigorous citizen science” and collaborations with local community and government agencies. The collaborative teaching effort involved both discipline-specific and interactive face-to-face class sessions. The students in urban planning developed the conceptual framework and provided content for the mobile GIS applications. The computer engineering students wrote the programming code while the multimedia students designed the graphical interface. A learning outcomes rubric was designed to conduct pre- and post- testing of knowledge gains for all the 50 students from 3 different disciplines. The results indicate increase in both discipline-specific and synergistic knowledge. The prototypes are available through Bitbucket [https://bitbucket.org/shankarfau/profile/teams].

Fostering Environmental Collaborations in the Marine Cultured-Pearl Industry

Dr. Julie Nash

Marine ecosystems face threats as a result of overfishing, watershed based pollution, marine pollution, and unregulated coastal development. Coral reefs are at the forefront, with more than sixty percent under immediate and direct threat from local, man-made, sources. It is imperative that these ecosystems be protected in a manner that engages local stakeholders and provides tangible economic benefits for local communities. If managed responsibly, marine cultured-pearl farming can have a positive environmental footprint on marine ecosystems. The sensitivity of oysters to pollution creates an inherent incentive for pearl farmers to maintain water quality. In addition, research on coral reefs and pearl farms demonstrate that fish are more abundant in areas with pearl farms, positively linking responsible farming to healthy coral reef environments. The Sustainable Pearls research project was formed to enhance understanding of the industry’s positive environmental impacts and to explore alternative private governance collaborations.

This paper focuses on the Sustainable Pearls action research project and the boundary spanning collaboration that designed marine cultured-pearl sustainability principles. Between 2011 and 2014, the Sustainable Pearls partners connected marine cultured-pearl producers and key industry stakeholders from over dozen countries throughout Asia, North America, and Europe. The international boundary spanning enabled the design of sustainability principles that accommodated differences in ecosystems, geographies, and business models.  The academic boundary spanning fostered the development of principles that displayed both environmental and social aspects of sustainability in consumer friendly language.  These marine cultured-pearl sustainability principles were presented at the first marine cultured-pearl industry roundtable in June 2014.