3 results
1 - Infrastructure for observing local human–environment interactions
- from Part I
- Edited by Brent Yarnal, Pennsylvania State University, Colin Polsky, Clark University, Massachusetts, James O'Brien, Kingston University, London
-
- Book:
- Sustainable Communities on a Sustainable Planet
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2009, pp 1-12
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The vision: sustainable communities on a sustainable planet
Imagine a world where nature and society coexist in a healthy symbiosis, where human impacts on the environment are minimal, and where communities are safe from natural and technological hazards. Imagine a time when scientists can monitor such sustainable human–environment interactions, when they can interactively share and compare data, analyses, and ideas about those interactions from their homes and offices, and when they can collaborate with local, regional, and international colleagues and stakeholders in a global network devoted to the environmental sustainability of their communities and of the planet.
We contend that to build the sustainable world portrayed above, it is necessary to develop an infrastructure that will support such an edifice. Consequently, this chapter introduces our ideas about the infrastructure needed to realize this vision and how the Human–Environment Regional Observatory project (HERO) attempted to take the initial steps to develop that infrastructure. The chapter also demonstrates that HERO addressed several major growth areas of twenty-first-century science – complex systems, interdisciplinary research, usable knowledge/usable science, and transdisciplinarity – as integral parts of its infrastructure development. The chapter ends by laying out the rationale behind and structure of this book.
Achieving the vision: infrastructure development and HERO
Infrastructure for monitoring global change in local places
To paraphrase the American politician Tip O'Neill, “all global change is local.” On the one hand, anthropogenic global environmental change is the accumulated result of billions of individual actions occurring at billions of specific locations.
4 - Representing and reasoning with conceptual understanding
- from Part II
- Edited by Brent Yarnal, Pennsylvania State University, Colin Polsky, Clark University, Massachusetts, James O'Brien, Kingston University, London
-
- Book:
- Sustainable Communities on a Sustainable Planet
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2009, pp 59-82
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
One of the primary goals for HERO was to provide a knowledge management system for interdisciplinary research that also provides a link between human understanding and formal systems, for example databases, analyses, and models. Chapter 2 elaborated extensively on how concepts that people create and use in their attempts to understand and manage Earth's dynamic systems are defined differently depending on place and situation. It was specifically pointed out that it is of particular importance for multidisciplinary research such as HERO to articulate how concepts and understanding change with context. While Chapter 3 demonstrated progress made in developing support for the process of collaboratory research this chapter addresses representational issues involved in linking human understanding with formal systems. We present two ways of modeling knowledge about both the conceptual understanding of human–environment interaction and the process of decision-making.
A parameterized representation of uncertain conceptual spaces
The collaboratory Web portal (Chapter 2) embodies the idea of a customizable window onto distributed resources and ways to make these accessible to a group of users. For a portal to be able to filter and customize the content to a specific user community, one of the critical components to any such solution is a metadata structure that describes and represents available resources. The goal is to enable users to exchange methods, data, ideas, and results. Most results presented in this book were achieved by negotiating a common understanding, adhering to a shared vocabulary, and using a common set of methods.
15 - Lessons learned from the HERO project
- from Part VI
- Edited by Brent Yarnal, Pennsylvania State University, Colin Polsky, Clark University, Massachusetts, James O'Brien, Kingston University, London
-
- Book:
- Sustainable Communities on a Sustainable Planet
- Published online:
- 06 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2009, pp 317-338
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The HERO vision revisited
This book started with the premise that to develop sustainable communities on a sustainable planet, an infrastructure should exist that enables scientists to monitor local human–environment interactions, to share and compare data, analyses, and ideas with scientists at other locales, and to participate with colleagues and stakeholders in a global network dedicated to community-level sustainability.
The book recounted the Human–Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) project's attempt to take first steps in developing such an infrastructure and the concepts and research behind that infrastructure. As such, the project did not produce – and never intended to produce – definitive research results about, for example, vulnerability or the causes and consequences of land-use and land-cover change. Consequently, this book has concentrated on conceptualizing the elements needed to make human–environment infrastructure work, and on exploring those elements by proof-of-concept testing.
This chapter summarizes HERO's efforts (and therefore the book) by revisiting a set of questions posed in Chapter 1. The most important part of the chapter is the discussion of lessons learned during the HERO team's attempts to answer those questions. The chapter concludes by trying to support the project's (and book's) claim that there is a need for HEROs.
Answers to and lessons learned from HERO's guiding questions
Chapter 1 reported two fundamental questions that were central to the HERO effort. One overarching question guided the research and addressed infrastructure development via three less-encompassing questions (Table 15.1).