CIPEC - CIPEC Outreach

On November 10, 2004, landowners, government officials, and scholars from Purdue University and CIPEC met to discuss the possibility of collaborative management on private lands. Several institutions were discussed including: conservation easements, contracts, property owners’ associations, and conservancy districts. The November 10 meeting was sponsored by CIPEC, Purdue University Department of Natural Resources, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resource Division of Forestry. Several experts were brought in to discuss results of collaborative efforts in Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and generally in the United States.

Donnelly, Ostrom, and Welch, along with two collaborators, Lauren Persha (Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University) and Amy Poteete (University of New Orleans), authored a manuscript on five intentional communities in south-central Indiana for a workshop entitled "Forest Land Conservation: An Indiana Portfolio." This manuscript covers institutional aspects of forest management as well as the biophysical and social context in which these intentional communities exist. Donnelly outlined this work in a short presentation and fielded questions from workshop participants. Copies of the manuscript have been sent to the five intentional communities.

After analyzing the forest field data, Welch provided individualized reports to 18 private landowners who had participated in the study and had requested a report on their forests. These reports featured analyses of the tree diversity, forest structure, and general health of the landowners’ forests. Additionally, each report included an analysis of the potential for wildlife, the amount of invasive exotic species, and a discussion on how the past land use may have had an impact on the current forest conditions. The information contained in these reports can help landowners understand the resources they own and thus make better decisions about their property.

Moran and Brondízio held workshops in Santarém and Altamira sites in Brazil to give back to farmer households information obtained in our research and to ensure that they felt the results were both useful to them and reasonably representative of their experiences. The farmers found the results to be representative, and they eagerly participated in the discussions. They also installed rain gauges on their properties to better monitor changes in precipitation.

Collaborative Outreach with Other Universities and Government and Non-Government Organizations

Evans and Meretsky represented CIPEC/Biocomplexity at a meeting with teams from Purdue’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) on November 4, 2003. The meeting was called at the request of Dr. Burney Fisher, Director of the Division of Forestry for Indiana Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). The goal of this meeting was for each group to learn about the different land-cover models being developed at each institution and explore funding possibilities in the context of the research objectives of each group.

Welch and Meretsky directed an internship program involving two master’s students and two undergraduates for the Sycamore Land Trust (SLT), a local land conservation organization. This program involved training in the use of a global positioning system (GPS), database creation, and biodiversity surveys. Welch authored management plans that include spatial and ecological information for two properties that SLT owns. These plans establish policy and valuable information for monitoring of these sites.

A CIPEC team including Meretsky, Evans, Ostrom, and York has been working on several projects with Drs. William Hoover, Linda Prokopy, and Shorna Broussard of Purdue University. York and Broussard are working on a comparison government program participation in northern Indiana and Monroe County, Indiana. Ostrom, York, and, Hoover are evaluating the potential use of institutions for collaborative management of private lands in the United States.

International Outreach

At the request of local agencies, Moran presented a 32-year retrospective overview of his research in the Amazon region, first at the research site of Altamira, where he began work in 1972, and then at the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Embrapa) Research Center in Belem. The meeting in Altamira was attended by a mix of farmers, government agency representatives, NGOs, and some students from the university. The overview was covered by all three local TV channels during their Good Morning Altamira segment.

In June, Moran also conducted two workshops directed at local farmers to give back some of the results of research in the last couple of years, and to invite comments from them on the appropriateness of findings and what it might mean in terms of future regional development. Farmers participated eagerly, and at their own expense, came to the two workshops, despite inclement weather during that week. At the end of the workshops, rain gauges were distributed to encourage farmers to begin to monitor precipitation changes. The area suffers from a lack of spatially distributed weather stations, making almost all forecasts quite useless for farmers. The team plans to collect these data each year and to provide feedback on patterns emerging from the more than 35 gauges distributed.

Nagendra has participated in several international training sessions and given the following lectures:

During the past year, the LUCC Focus 1 Office continued with ongoing work, including the completion of its series of regional synthesis workshops, "Trajectories of Land Change in the Tropics," with a meeting hosted by the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Participants included two dozen experts on land-use/land-cover change in Southeast Asia, and the meeting was timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the International Society for Remote Sensing of the Environment in Waikiki. The organizers of the workshop series later met over two days in Madison, Wisconsin, to prepare a synthesis of the workshop series. The Focus 1 Office also continued to work to disseminate the FAO’s tool for harmonizing land-cover descriptions, and began collaboration with the LUCC Focus 2 Office, and the newly established International GOFC-GOLD Project Office to design a complementary system for the description of land use.

A major new activity during the year was the development of a consolidated "library" of LUCC data. This activity is designed to foster the synthesis and comparative analysis of LUCC case studies. As a first step, more than 300 cases reviewed in the three meta-analyses completed by the LUCC project were combined in a spatially referenced database to enable graphical browsing of this literature on the web. This required the installation of specialized software in the ACT computer laboratory. The next step will involve the preparation of spatially explicit datasets of land use, land cover, and related variables from a small number of cases, whose metadata will likewise be available to users over the web. CIPEC data will figure prominently in this collection.

Another new activity involved participation in a LUCC model validation exercise organized by colleagues at Clark University (USA) and Wageningen University (Netherlands). Data prepared for an upcoming CIPEC publication on Eastern Madagascar (McConnell and Sweeney, "Challenges of Forest Governance in Madagascar," to be published in The Geographical Journal 171[2]) were revised and submitted for comparison against 17 other LUCC models to ascertain which were capable of predicting land change better than a null model of no change. The results were presented at a workshop entitled "The Future of Land Use," which was organized by the LUCC Focus 3 Office and held in Amsterdam, October 26–28, 2004. The CIPEC model, explaining deforestation over 43 years as a function of topography and settlement pattern, was found to be the only one that clearly predicted change better than the null model.

Finally, the Focus 1 Office devoted considerable energy over the past year in synthesis activities in preparation for the scheduled completion of the LUCC Project in October 2005. In particular, the annual meeting of the Scientific Steering Committee in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, April 8–10, 2004, was devoted to developing a prospectus and outline of the LUCC Synthesis Volume. This will appear in the series of syntheses published by each of the IGBP Core Projects by Springer-Verlag. In subsequent months, the Focus 1 Office has been carrying out its assigned responsibility for leading and contributing authorship of several chapters.

GLP Open Science Conference, Morelia, December 2–5, 2003 An effort was made in Morelia to get input from the social sciences to the Science Plan, which at that point still showed signs of heavier input from the physical sciences than from the social sciences. This was relatively successful, and major changes were made in the Science Plan. Moran and McConnell attended the following three meetings and gave presentations on the Science Plan and responded to questions raised.

IGBP Steering Committee & Executive Officers’ Meeting, Moscow, March 1&ndash:6, 2004 At this meeting, the modified Science Plan for GLP was presented. It was decided that the Plan was now too detailed and that the key questions were not easily found in the very long document. It was suggested that a rewriting team be appointed consisting of IGBP, IHDP and LUCC representatives.

IHDP Steering Committee & GLP Planning Workshop, Bonn, March 22–25, 2004 At this meeting, the Steering Committee of IHDP agreed with IGBP and found the document to also be lacking in focus and needing a stronger human sciences set of guiding questions. They charged some of their members to be part of the rewriting team. At the Workshop following the meeting, Moran, McConnell, and Gregor Laumann of IHDP gave presentations and led discussion with German scientists engaged in land-centric research, asking for their input into the Science Plan and how best to articulate to ongoing efforts there.

Global Land Use Modeling Workshop, Kassel, July 12–13, 2004 The Center for Environmental Systems Research organized a small LUCC workshop in Kassel, Germany, inviting LUCC-affiliated scientists of Focus 1 and Focus 3 to discuss the following LUCC modeling topics:

Ostrom, member of the Science Board of the International Human Dimensions Program (IHDP), is chairing a committee to analyze the cross-cutting themes of “resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation.” This committee is analyzing the developments of various IHDP teams with respect to human dimensions of global change and identifying the contributions of IHDP. Janssen is leading a literature analysis of the fields of resilience, vulnerability, and adaptation in cooperation with scholars from the School of Library and Information Science at the IU-Bloomington campus. A meeting of IHDP scholars will focus on these cross-cutting themes at a meeting to be held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona during February of 2005.

CIPEC participates in the development of a conceptual framework of robustness from an institutional perspective. First results have been published in Ecology and Society (http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art18). The Resilience Alliance is developing a Reserves and Regions (R&R) program in which CIPEC may play an important role. The R&R program will include both terrestrial and marine reserves. Janssen also gave lectures and seminars at the Fairbanks and Anchorage campuses of the University of Alaska, which have an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program on Resilience and Adaptive Management.

Nagendra has further strengthened links with the international biodiversity program DIVERSITAS. DIVERSITAS held their first international conference on biodiversity in November 2005, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Nagendra organized a panel titled "Remote Sensing for Biodiversity Assessment," at the conference. This panel brought together researchers from the tropics to examine cutting-edge approaches to the use of remote sensing for biodiversity assessment. DIVERSITAS has also endorsed a proposal by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in India, and co-sponsored by CIPEC, that is currently in review by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research. This research builds on CIPEC protocols to establish a research network in South/Southeast Asia and, if funded, will feed into the DIVERSITAS core project on bioSUSTAINABILTY.

"Historical Depth, Temporal Patterns, and Trajectories of Land Change: Analytical Challenges for the Next Decade" was a well-attended session at the 6th Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community, 9–13 October 2005, University of Bonn, Germany. Co-organizers were Eduardo S. Brondízio and William McConnell.

Ostrom organized a panel on "Migration and Its Impact on Forest Governance and Management." Papers were presented by Jane Njuguna, Paul Ongugo, and Emily Obonyo, of the Kenya Forestry Research Institute on "The Impacts of Internal Displacements on Forest Conditions of Three IFRI Sites in Kenya,"; by Amy Poteete of the University of New Orleans, on "Migration, Demographic Changes and Prospects for Collective Action in Natural Resource Management"; by Edwin Castellanos, Centro de Estudios Ambientales, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, on "Deforestation and Preservation of Forest Cover due to Migration: Lessons from Guatemala"; and by Leticia Merino, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM, Mexico City, on "Impacts of Migration on Communities’ Stewardship of the Forests in Sierra Norte de Oaxaca: Tendencies and Perspectives Seen from Local Views."

Ostrom chaired a second panel that reviewed the research done by the IHDP research community on the cross-cutting themes of Resilience, Adaptability, and Vulnerability drawing on the work presented at the Tempe workshop in February of 2004. The papers will be published in a special issue of Global Environmental Change in 2006.

Brondízio has actively participated on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) since 2002, bringing CIPEC’s experience to discussions and preparation meetings, and particularly as the coordinating lead author for chapter 14 from the Responses Working Group titled "Cultural Services" and one of the contributing authors for the chapter on "Ecosystem Services, Poverty, and Human Well-Being" (chapter 17 of the Responses Working Group). CIPEC’s long-term experience in comparative analysis and multi-site research has been fundamental in providing cross-cultural perspectives to human-environment interaction, as well as examples of different political and institutional arrangements representing different forms of resource management. Brondízio has also served as a reviewer for several chapters from other MEA working groups. After two rounds of external peer review, MEA has completed its work and is in the process of book preparation and publication. Island Press will be publishing a series of MEA books in 2005.

Andersson is participating with the FAO Forestry Department and the International Union of Forest Research Organizations in the development of the online Knowledge Reference on National Forest Assessment. "The reference is intended to serve as a worldwide knowledge resource for national forest assessments among foresters, scientists, teachers and other stakeholders, . . . aiming at needs of developing countries. Since informed decisions about forest resources at [the] national level have to be based on systematic inventory and monitoring, the reference will be a useful tool to support sustainable management of forest resources in the countries. The Knowledge Reference contents will continue to be developed. It is currently published in English, but will in the near future be translated into French and Spanish. The reference is coordinated by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences"
(http://www.fao.org/forestry/newsroom/en/news/2004/highlight_51706en.html).

CIPEC had a strong presence at the 2004 LBA conference. A major session was "Research Highlights: Land Use and Human Dimensions," chaired by Diogenes Alves (a 1998 CIPEC Summer Institute participant) and CIPEC Co-Director Moran. Mateus Batistella, a CIPEC research associate, participated in another session, "Human Dimensions in LBA," which was organized by him and colleagues Bertha Becker, Diogenes Alves, Eustaquio Reis, and Ima Vieira. Several CIPEC papers were also presented at the conference:

The German International Development Agency (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit [GTZ] GmbH) has taken a number of publications written by colleagues associated with CIPEC very seriously. In their manual entitled Natural Resources and Governance: Incentives for Sustainable Resource Use, they focus on the problem of overuse of resources and cite a number of CIPEC publications as well as our earlier work. They stress the importance of institutional incentives—a major focus of CIPEC research.

Through Nagendra’s association with the "Society in Science: Branco Weiss fellowship," she has presented CIPEC research linking social and ecological perspectives on conservation based on case studies in Nepal and Honduras to a cross-section of academic groups in India and Europe. These include presentations to the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies.

Past Outreach Activities

CIPEC has developed the "Summary Report" series to distribute the results of its interdisciplinary research to colleagues, study participants, and the interested public. In March 2000, CIPEC distributed its first two reports in this series, "Monroe County Land Use Study," and "Groups Affecting Policy in Southern Indiana: Forests, Wildlife, and Roads." These and other CIPEC publications are available for distribution upon request, and our web page (www.cipec.org) can be consulted for additional information.

Film maker John Dennis (of John Dennis Productions) filmed a sample of CIPEC's work in Rondônia and in Indiana in order to produce two eight-minute stream-video products that are available on our web site (see the links above). This was done with assistance from a separate grant from the NSF in order to share some of the results of our work with the public. Filming took place in Rondônia in August 1999, and in Indiana in October 1999. In October we previewed the footage from Rondônia with the film maker. A return visit from the film maker took place early in 2000 to complete the filming in Indiana, and to work together closely on the production of the video content. We then had a preliminary version of the video, which was circulated for comment among CIPEC researchers in 2002. Music and voice were modified, as well as some matters of script. We hope that this product will assist in informing the public of the results of their support for scientific work funded by NSF. Click to View the Stream-Video Project

In Spring 2001, CIPEC will initiate a cooperative internship program with the Mathers Museum and will offer the internship every semester. The intern(s) will be responsible for developing educational "discovery" kits for use in regional elementary and secondary schools. After a competitive application process this fall, an outstanding graduate student in anthropology was selected to serve as the first CIPEC/Mathers Intern. This intern will be responsible for developing a discovery kit addressing the environmental and social processes of change influencing Griffy Lake, a reservoir and forest reserve located within Bloomington. The intern will draw on existing CIPEC and Mathers Museum data, and the results will also be incorporated into CIPEC’s annual fieldwork at Griffy Lake as part of the Summer Institute’s training activities. Moreover, the intern will share her work with the Griffy Lake staff and explore the possibility of developing an exhibit for their children’s museum.

Through GSS and other presentation requests, faculty and students from CIPEC and its related centers have begun to give presentations about their research to primary and secondary schools and organizations in central Indiana. Speakers use multimedia presentations to focus on comparative perspectives or specific places, drawing on their research and data. For example, a CIPEC speaker (C. Tucker) presented a slide show and lecture on mountain environments to the third grade class of Bloomington Montessori School in April 2000.

High school students and teachers of grades 7-12 have the opportunity to attend annual two-week summer institutes at the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. The institutes explore themes of major importance for the world, including global environmental change, populations at risk, conflict resolution, and /or international trade. During the past two summers, representatives from CIPEC (Gibson in 1999 and Andersson in 2000) have given presentations on institutions for common-pool resources and their potential for sustainable resource management as part of this program.

Through collaboration with the Bloomington high schools, CIPEC arranged a pilot program with high school interns in summer 2000. CIPEC employed four high school students to assist with computer-related tasks and summer research projects in central Indiana. The experience was mutually beneficial; several of these students plan to pursue environmental sciences in college.

CIPEC is considering how its research may serve to create materials and presentations useful to these educators, who are members of the Indiana Geographic Alliance.

Indiana University has a contract to assist in educating FFA members in global economic issues; CIPEC is exploring with the outreach supervisor of this project how best to translate the extensive empirical work into valuable experiences for FFA in international aspects of land use and agriculture relevant to these young leaders.

CIPEC hosted its first Open Science Forum in January 2000 and held its second Open Science Forum in November 2000. The January Forum focused on our research in the Amazon Basin, with Emilio Moran, Eduardo Brondízio, and Gary Libecap speaking on their recent work. Despite cold weather, this Forum attracted approximately 60 people from the Indiana University and Bloomington community. The first Open Forum was held during the January 2000 visit of the External Board, after which they encouraged us to do the Open Forum on a regular basis. With that in mind, and not wishing to wait until the next meeting of the Board, we held our second one in November. This one featured J. C. Randolph, Glen Green, and Tom Evans as presenters discussing CIPEC’s research on Indiana’s forest ecology, institutions, and public perceptions of forest management. This Forum also offered poster sessions that presented information on each of CIPEC’s current and pending research activities, including the biocomplexity project. A reception concluded the program and provided opportunities for discussion between CIPEC presenters and people in attendance. Non-University groups and respondents who had participated in the Indiana research projects were invited, as well as Indiana University students and faculty. This Forum drew approximately 80 people.

In Fall 2000, CIPEC arranged several video conference meetings with Dr. James Proctor and his "Theory in Environmental Science" (Geography 205) class at UCSB. Participants discussed CIPEC’s work as it relates to theories on human-environment relationships, the contributions of different disciplines in the natural and social sciences to investigating environmental issues, and the research methods that CIPEC uses to test hypotheses. In the future, this experience may contribute to collaborative efforts with Dr. Proctor and others at UCSB.

The course "Seminar in Regional Analysis" (Geography 220) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has adopted A Review and Assessment of Land-Use Change Models: Dynamics of Space, Time, and Human Choice (Agarwal et al. in press) as its principal reading. The paper is a joint effort of CIPEC and USDA Forest Service colleagues and presents a systematic review and comparison of 19 models of land-use change. CIPEC and the USDA Forest Service published this work jointly in 2001.

The Biennial Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) was held May 31-June 4, 2000, in Bloomington, Indiana, with support from CIPEC. The conference addressed "Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millennium" and attracted participants from around the world. The conference resulted in two volumes that compile the very best papers presented at the Conference. The first volume is a selection of invited papers from leaders of the field of common property regime (CPR) studies. This volume reviews the theoretical advances of the past 15 years. It is a theoretical review that constitutes a state-of-the-art assessment and research agenda for the coming decade in the study of common-property theory. The second volume is focused on new challenges to traditional CPRs and the adaptation strategies crafted in governing these resources; it is targeted for policy makers, resource managers and donor agencies.

The first volume, The Drama of the Commons: Institutions for Managing the Commons, reviews theoretical advances in the study of common-pool resources in the past 15 years, since the last state-of-the-art assessment. The first section of the book reviews the lessons policy makers and researchers have drawn on case studies, multivariate analyses, controlled experiments, and formal modeling efforts. The second section of the book examines emerging issues in commons research, such as the dynamic effects of institutional emergence and sustenance and multiple-level institutional arrangements, linkages across levels of analysis, and the scalability of the lessons from one level to the other. This volume was published by the National Academy Press, in collaboration with the Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change at the National Research Council (NRC), and can be accessed at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309082501/html. CIPEC Co-Director Elinor Ostrom took the lead in organizing this set of panels at IASCP and working with authors and other members of the NRC in ensuring the highest quality for this state-of-the-art assessment.

The second volume, The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptation, was published by The MIT Press. This book analyses the new challenges that owners, managers, policy makers, and analysts face in managing natural commons such as forests, water resources, and fisheries. It also examines the challenges in managing commons caused by new findings about the physical characteristics of the commons, their complexity and interconnectedness, and the role of culture.

408 North Indiana Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408-3799
Phone: (812) 855-2230
TDD: (812) 855-7654
Fax: (812) 855-2634

Last Updated: November 8, 2005
Comments: cipec@indiana.edu
Copyright 2005, The Trustees of Indiana University.

CIPEC Education and Outreach Activities

Local Community Outreach

Collaborative Outreach with Other Universities and Government and Non-Government Organizations

International Outreach

Past Outreach Activities