Common Land Research Articles

Exploring Topography Downscaling Methods for Hyper‐Resolution Land Surface Modeling

AbstractHyper‐resolution land surface modeling provides an unprecedented opportunity to simulate locally relevant water and energy cycles. However, the available meteorological forcing data is often insufficient to fulfill the requirements of hyper‐resolution modeling. Here, we developed a comprehensive downscaling framework based on topography‐adjusted methods and automated machine learning (AutoML). With this framework, a 90 m and hourly atmospheric forcing data set was developed from ERA5 data at a 0.25° resolution, and the Common Land Model (CoLM) was then forced with the developed forcing data over two complex terrain regions (the Heihe River Basin and Upper Colorado River Basin). We systematically evaluated the downscaled forcing and the CoLM outputs against both in situ observations and gridded data. The ground‐based validation results suggested consistent improvements for all downscaled forcing variables with mean RMSE improved by 6.362%–95.86%. The downscaled forcings, which incorporated detailed topographic features, offered improved magnitude estimates, achieving a comparable level of performance to that of regional reanalysis forcing data. The downscaled forcing driving the CoLM model showed comparable or better skills in simulating water and energy fluxes, as verified by in situ validations. The hyper‐resolution simulations provided a detailed and more reasonable description of land surface processes and attained similar spatial patterns and magnitudes with high‐resolution land surface data, especially over highly elevated areas. Additionally, this study highlighted the benefits of using mountain radiation theory‐based shortwave radiation downscaling models and AutoML‐assisted precipitation downscaling models. These findings emphasized the significance of integrating topography‐based downscaling methods for hillslope‐scale simulations.

Commons land management in Southern, post-unification Italy: New evidence from a micro analysis on Salerno province

Abstract The aim of this study is to observe the ability of Southern Italian municipalities to respond to and redefine the management of common lands following the national privatisation and partition policies promoted by the State during the second half of the nineteenth century. The hypothesis tested is whether, through the analysis of new archival sources such as management rules, it is possible to identify good practices of management of common lands, along with the presence of resilience on the part of local communities during a period defined as one of uncontrollable ‘decline’ for these resources. Three Apennine areas (Campania Region) were identified as the observation sample. The analysis revealed that for these specific cases, it is imprecise to speak of decline and a lack of propensity to develop good management practices, but rather of institutions that are attentive to the protection and preservation of their commons through specific rules.

Soil greenhouse gas fluxes partially reduce the net gains in carbon sequestration in mangroves of the Brazilian Amazon

There is interest in assessing the potential climate mitigation benefit of coastal wetlands based on the balance between their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sequestration. Here we investigated soil GHG fluxes (CO2 and CH4) on mangroves of the Brazilian Amazon coast, and across common land use impacts including shrimp farms and a pasture. We found greater methane fluxes near the Amazon River mouth (1439 to 3312 μg C m−2 h−1), which on average are equivalent to 37% of mangrove C sequestration in the region. Soil CO2 fluxes were predominant in mangrove forests to the East of the Amazon Delta. Land use change shifted mangroves from C sinks (mean sequestration of 12.2 ± 1.4 Mg CO2e ha−1 yr-1) to net GHG sources (mean loss of 8.0 ± 3.3 Mg CO2e ha−1 yr−1). Our data suggests that mangrove forests in the Amazon can aid decreasing the net annual emissions in the Brazilian forest sector in 9.7 ± 0.8 Tg CO2e yr−1 through forest conservation and avoided deforestation.

Drone remote sensing to define heat exchange between urban surfaces and stormwater runoff

ABSTRACT Urban water bodies are often subject to high runoff temperatures from heat exchange between rainfall and urban surfaces; however, this process can be difficult to define due to the complexity of spatially heterogeneous urban areas. This research seeks to improve our understanding of heat exchange in urban stormwater runoff by integrating in situ measurements of runoff temperature with land surface temperature data captured in high spatial resolutions by a drone. To do so, this study monitored four urban catchments in Milwaukee, WI that are dominated by different land surfaces (concrete parking lot, asphalt road, black bitumen roof, and grass). Results indicate that land surface temperature was variable among common land surface types (1.34–2.24 °C), with higher variations in surfaces subject to foot and vehicular traffic. In addition, the temperature of runoff from impervious surfaces responded differently between buildings and those with a ground subsurface, with higher event mean temperatures from concrete (21.4 °C) and asphalt (21.9 °C) ground surfaces as compared with the bitumen roof (19.8 °C), despite similar initial surface temperatures. Ultimately, these outcomes demonstrate how drone remote sensing of land surface temperature and in situ monitoring can be integrated to understand heat exchange processes in urban stormwater runoff.

Presence of vitamin B12 metabolism in the last common ancestor of land plants.

Vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, is an essential organic cofactor for methionine synthase (METH), and is only synthesized by a subset of bacteria. Plants and fungi have an alternative methionine synthase (METE) that does not need B12 and are typically considered not to utilize it. Some algae facultatively utilize B12 because they encode both METE and METH, while other algae are dependent on B12 as they encode METH only. We performed phylogenomic analyses of METE, METH and 11 further proteins involved in B12 metabolism across more than 1600 plant and algal genomes and transcriptomes (e.g. from OneKp), demonstrating the presence of B12-associated metabolism deep into the streptophytes. METH and five further accessory proteins (MTRR, CblB, CblC, CblD and CblJ) were detected in the hornworts (Anthocerotophyta), and two (CblB and CblJ) were identified in liverworts (Marchantiophyta) in the bryophytes, suggesting a retention of B12-metabolism in the last common land plant ancestor. Our data further show more limited distributions for other B12-related proteins (MCM and RNR-II) and B12 dependency in several algal orders. Finally, considering the collection sites of algae that have lost B12 metabolism, we propose freshwater-to-land transitions and symbiotic associations to have been constraining factors for B12 availability in early plant evolution. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of plant metabolism'.

A better simulation of water and carbon fluxes in a typical desert grassland ecosystem through the Common Land Model

How to improve the accuracy and fit-for-purpose of Land surface models (LSMs) in simulating carbon and water fluxes in arid regions, is still a great challenge, since the latent heat flux and terrestrial respiration are underestimated. In this study, we first modified the root water uptake, soil respiration, and stomatal conductance processes and introduced a Bayesian parameter optimization algorithm to optimize the newly introduced fitting parameters. Then, the performance of the calibrated model was evaluated by using eddy covariance observations at a typical desert grassland station. The results showed that the modified soil respiration model better captures the seasonal pattern of terrestrial ecosystem respiration (TER), with the distance between simulated and observed indices (DISO) value decreased from 1.45 to 0.95. Additionally, modifying the root water uptake process can noticeably enhance the simulation of water flux (i.e., latent heat flux) with DISO value decreased from 1.43 to 1.28, but uncertainties remain in simulating carbon flux (i.e., gross primary productivity). Through evaluating three stomatal conductance models under different levels of water stress, we found that both Ball-Woodrow-Berry (BWB) and Ball-Berry-Leuning (BBL) models could improve the CoLM performance in simulating carbon and water fluxes due to their effective response to the water stress with DISO values decreased from 1.96 to 1.68 and 1.67, respectively, while the Unified Stomatal Optimization (USO) model has a relatively poor simulation performance, which fails to capture the impact of water stress with DISO value increased to 2.13. Our study provides valuable insights for improving the simulations of carbon and water fluxes in arid regions by using CoLM.

Land use transformations in the Brazilian Savanna: A decade of soil erosion and runoff measurements

Changes in land cover and land use (LULC) are one of the main drivers of erosion and runoff. How ever, most research has relied on short-term observations and only focused on one or two land cover types. We investigated the long-term trade-off between common agricultural land covers (sugarcane, pasture, and soybean), runoff, and soil loss rates. We compared these to native forest (wooded Cerrado) and bare soil. The field observations were done in 100 m2 experimental plots in Brazil maintained during the past 10 years. The paper provides three main contributions: (1) long-term runoff and soil loss rates of plots under different LULCs, (2) comparison of runoff, soil loss, and pedological characteristics between plots constructed 10 years apart, and (3) analysis of the trade-off between different LULCs. When ranking land covers based on runoff and soil loss rates, there is a shift in ranking positions, making it difficult to determine which one is more environmentally harmful. However, it is evident that whatever agricultural practice is used, there is a significant impact when compared to native forest. For example, the area converted to pasture resulted in almost 20 times higher runoff, while conversion to sugarcane resulted in 5 times higher soil loss. Not only land cover plays a major influencing factor, but also weathering exposing time. Areas under the same land cover and environmental conditions had different rates of soil loss and runoff due to long-term exposure effects such as soil crusting. Our findings have high relevance for the hydrological and agricultural community by demonstrating (i) the magnitude of trade-off in terms of soil loss and runoff due to land cover changes and (ii) that soil loss should not be assumed to be a linear process over time, as it is commonly assumed.

Texas Water Observatory: A Distributed Network for Monitoring Water, Energy, and Carbon Cycles Under Variable Climate and Land Use on Gulf Coast Plains

Abstract In the Gulf Coastal Plains of Texas, a state-of-the-art distributed network of field observatories, known as the Texas Water Observatory (TWO), is developed to better understand the water, energy, and carbon cycles across the critical zone (encompassing aquifers, soils, plants, and atmosphere) at different spatiotemporal scales. Using more than 300 advanced real-time / near-real-time sensors, this observatory monitors high-frequency water, energy, and carbon storage and fluxes in the Brazos River corridor, which are critical for coupled hydrologic, biogeochemical, and land-atmosphere process understanding in the region. TWO provides a regional resource for better understanding and/or managing agriculture, water resources, ecosystems, biodiversity, disasters, health, energy, and weather/climate. TWO infrastructure spans common land uses in this region, including (traditional/aspirational cultivated agriculture, rangelands, native prairie, bottomland hardwood forest, and coastal wetlands). Sites represent landforms from low-relief erosional uplands to depositional lowlands across climatic and geologic gradients of central Texas. We present the overarching vision of TWO and describe site design, instrumentation specifications, data collection, and quality control protocols. We also provide a comparison of water, energy, and carbon budget across sites, including evapotranspiration, carbon fluxes, radiation budget, weather, profile soil moisture and soil temperature, soil hydraulic properties, hydrogeophysical surveys, groundwater levels and groundwater quality reported at TWO primary sites for 2018-2020 (with certain data gaps). In conjunction with various earth-observing remote sensing and legacy databases, TWO provides a master testbed to evaluate process-driven or data-driven critical zone science, leading to improved natural resource management and decision support at different spatiotemporal scales.

Groundwater table prediction and seasonal variation influenced by short rotation willow plantation on marginal riparian lands of the Prairie potholes in Canada

Shallow groundwater consumption via phreatophytic transpiration and resulting vegetation-linked groundwater table (GWT) fluctuation is a typical soil hydrological process in wetland riparian areas. However, upland and riparian land use alterations may further influence the shallow GWT fluctuation, temporally and spatially. In this multi-year field study, we investigated whether introducing short rotation willow (SRW) positively or negatively affects the shallow GWT, soil water availability, and soil health on marginal riparian lands of the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR). We compared the impact of SRW on these parameters to two common land uses: annual crop (AC) and pasture (PA). Depth to GWT was monitored via data loggers from 28 wells in two semi-arid PPR sites. The GWT depth varied by land use practices only in site B (p < 0.001; PA > SRW = AC) but not significantly in site A (p = 0.325), and the patterns were inconsistent between sites. In GWT depth prediction, the performance of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was better than Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models but was inconsistent alike with field observations. The GWT depth responded to seasonal precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (ET) patterns. The monthly GWT fluctuations peaked between June and August due to increased precipitation, while they were lower during May and September with reduced precipitation; however, these variations were not significant (p > 0.05). Higher precipitation and lower potential ET throughout the wet year (i.e., in 2014) significantly (p < 0.05) raised GWT (i.e., decreased depth to GWT) under all land uses, and vice versa. Our study indicated that planting SRW in marginal riparian land of the PPR would not negatively impact shallow GWT or soil water availability. Moreover, the SRW plantation could also help manage soil salinity without severely depleting the soil's nutrient pools or diminishing soil quality and health indicator parameters measured during the first rotation.

CWRF Downscaling with Improved Land Surface Initialization Enhances Spring–Summer Seasonal Climate Prediction Skill in China

Abstract This study investigates skill enhancement in operational seasonal forecasts of Beijing Climate Center’s Climate System Model through regional Climate–Weather Research and Forecasting (CWRF) downscaling and improved land initialization in China. The downscaling mitigates regional climate biases, enhancing precipitation pattern correlations by 0.29 in spring and 0.21 in summer. It also strengthens predictive capabilities for interannual anomalies, expanding skillful temperature forecast areas by 6% in spring and 12% in summer. Remarkably, during 7 of 10 years with relatively high predictability, the downscaling increases average seasonal precipitation anomaly correlations by 0.22 and 0.25. Additionally, the substitution of initial land conditions via a Common Land Model integration reduces snow cover and cold biases across the Tibetan Plateau and Mongolia–northeast China, consistently contributing to CWRF’s overall enhanced forecasting capabilities. Improved downscaling predictive skill is attributed to CWRF’s enhanced physics representation, accurately capturing intricate regional interactions and associated teleconnections across China, especially linked to the Tibetan Plateau’s blocking and thermal effects. In summer, CWRF predicts an intensified South Asian high alongside a strengthened East Asian jet compared to CSM, amplifying cold air advection and warm moisture transport over central to northeast regions. Consequently, rainfall distributions and interannual anomalies over these areas experience substantial improvements. Similar enhanced circulation processes elucidate skill improvement from land initialization, where the accurate specification of initial snow cover and soil temperature within sensitive regions persists in influencing local and remote circulations extending beyond two seasons. Our findings emphasize the potential of improving physics representation and surface initialization to markedly enhance regional climate predictions.

Classification and detection of changes in land use and land cover using satellite images and GIS- near Suez Canal area

Egypt has developed significantly in the vicinity of the Suez Canal and its surrounding towns over the last ten years. Utilizing satellite pictures to identify land use and cover types from thematic maps remains difficult. Select the optimal strategy for successful satellite image classification across various applications. Enhancing classification accuracy requires the most effective algorithm. The effectiveness of a change detection system has not been tested in the community of Abu SUWEIR, located near the Suez Canal region in Ismailia City, Egypt. This project analyzes seven classification algorithms with the use of remotely sensed Planet Scope multispectral pictures to evaluate and monitor changes in land cover in ABU SUWEIR Village from 2016 to 2022. The post-January 25, 2011 revolution period in Egypt saw a transition from anarchy to the commencement of progress and improvement. This analysis demonstrates that the ANN classifier achieved an overall accuracy of 77.33% in 2016 and 72.00% in 2022, with corresponding KAPPA coefficients of 0.66 and 0.58 for each year. Agriculture was the most common land use type according to the ANN categorization, making up over 60.48% of the study area in 2016 and 53.89% in 2022. Bare terrain is the second most common landcover type, accounting for 30.31% in 2022 and 25.91% in 2016. On the contrary, urbanized regions, accounting for 13.61% in 2016 and 15.80% in 2022, are the least categorized.

Assessing landscape ecological risk in the Southern Hill and Mountain Belt of China: A 30-year analysis and future projection

Hills and mountains cover approximately 25 % of Earth’s landmass; therefore, investigating landscape ecological risk (LER) in these regions is imperative for ecosystem management. Hilly and mountainous regions susceptible to influences such as desertification and erosion include the Southern Hill and Mountainous Belt (SHMB) in southern China. Over the past 30 years, the SHMB has undergone significant changes, offering an excellent research case. A comprehensive assessment of the ecological status of this region is crucial for the protection and management of the ecosystems in the SHMB. This study assessed the LER of the SHMB, identified influencing factors over the past 30 years, and utilized a patch-generating land-use simulation model (PLUS) to project future land use and LER. Accounting for more than 90 % of the total area, cropland and forestland were the two most common land use types in the SHMB. From 1990 to 2020, impervious surface and water area saw obvious increases, rising by 154 % (from 1209.37 km2 to 3073.59 km2) and 21 % (from 1584.78 km2 to 1924.8 km2), respectively. Grasslands and shrublands decreased by 54 % and 34 %. It is anticipated that there will be little change in land-use types by 2030 compared to 2020. Additionally, the overall LER in the SHMB was low, with low- and medium–low-risk representing around 70 % of the overall risk. The general state of LER improved during the research period but did not converge. Specifically, the LER intensity did not decrease although the total LER showed a declining trend. In the western portion of the research region, the karst area displayed an increasing LER, and the severity of the high-risk area increased. Furthermore, natural factors promote the restoration of LER. For example, the abundance of hydrothermal conditions (i.e., increased temperature and precipitation) promotes the recovery of vegetation growth and reduces the LER. Human activities, such as the construction of stations, highways, and an increasing population, exacerbate LER, contributing to an increase in LER. This study offers helpful guidance for formulating ecological conservation strategies to maintain the ecological balance and sustainability of hilly and mountainous regions.

Embedding a novel phenology model into the Common Land Model for improving the modeling of land-atmosphere fluxes

Land surface models (LSMs) are essential tools for simulating the energy and momentum exchange between the land surface and the atmosphere. The vegetation phenology module, a pivotal component of LSMs, reflects the feedback of vegetation to climate variations. However, the vegetation phenology module in several LSMs, such as the Common Land Model (CoLM), face challenges concerning its rationality. Currently, the original satellite phenology mode in CoLM, which uses satellite-based leaf area index (LAI) data directly and statically, constrains the model's ability to accurately represent complex and dynamic ecosystem processes. In this study, we embedded a dynamic vegetation phenology model into CoLM, serving as a novel phenology module. We conducted an extensive comparison of the effects of various phenology modules on CoLM, focusing on their performance in the modeling of gross primary productivity (GPP) and evapotranspiration (ET) at both site and global scales. Results demonstrate an improvement in CoLM for modeling GPP and ET following the integration of the novel phenology module. Specifically, the Pearson's correlation coefficient for GPP increased by 1.29 % to 33.74 %, and for ET by 0.32 % to 7.47 % on a site scale. Furthermore, on a global scale, when compared with global reference datasets, the CoLM embedded with the novel phenology module successfully captures the spatiotemporal distribution of GPP and ET, and its performance is closer to the reference data than that of the CoLM with the original satellite phenology mode. This study highlights the importance of vegetation phenology in LSMs and its potential to improve the modeling of dynamic interactions between vegetation processes and environmental changes within LSMs.

Pacas Choquenzá: una experiencia poscapitalista sobre la producción de lo común

The Paca Digestora Silva [a composting technique], a system for using organic waste, arrived in 2019 in the Niza Antigua neighborhood in the Córdoba wetland, northwest of Bogotá (Colombia). Since then, the pacas (composting piles) have become a way of transforming pre-existing neighborhood dynamics and fostering the care of the common land, despite certain logics of fragmentation based on the defense of one’s own well-being. The Paca Digestora Silva is proposed here as a post-capitalist alternative that goes beyond the human-nature structural rupture so that the race for capital accumulation, reflected in landfills, can be overcome with the resignification of waste. The paper is constructed from the intersectional perspective of feminist political ecology and relates the process of pacas to the production of communality and the commons. This lens allows the analysis of care through two intertwined routes since the commons propitiate the care of a common good, and, in this care, which is reproduced in the doing in common, a community that watches over its protection and subsistence is strengthened or consolidated. This article documents community experiences with pacas and provides an alternative reading of this system, which transcends the dimension of waste utilization and demonstrates the possibility of building an ethic of care based on collective action.

Forest management for water yield: Assessing the barriers and impacts of privately-owned open pine woodlands in the Southeastern United States

In the Southeastern United States, freshwater resources are stressed due to human development, population growth, expansion of agricultural irrigation, and climate change. Restoring land to a low-density, fire-maintained longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) savanna and woodland ecosystem may provide distinct ecosystem services such as increases in water quantity for vulnerable watersheds. To understand how economic incentives may bolster restoration programs, we analyze the economic and hydrologic impacts of longleaf pine restoration scenarios. We compare these scenarios against other common land uses in the Coastal Plain of Georgia, a major forestry state located in the Southern United States, identifying the financial barriers and water use impacts of alternative forest management regimes. Longleaf pine restoration shows the greatest increase in water yield per acre at 66 % over baseline timber production scenarios but at a lower timber value return. Thinning planted loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) stands to low-density woodlands may offer a more cost-efficient, immediate alternative that improves water yields by 38 %. Current incentives to restore native habitats on private lands increase financial returns but lack sufficient incentives and governance to meet or exceed baseline forest income levels by $90-$235 ha-1 annually for longleaf savanna restoration. In the future, the emerging ecosystem service market in Georgia may steer decisions about competing values of carbon storage, water yield, and native habitat restoration.

미국에서의 콘도미니엄 관리

Like apartment buildings in Korea, condominiums in the United States are not a physical style or type of building, but rather a mode of ownership. In addition to the physical elements of private and common areas, condominiums in the U.S. also have an owner's association as a human element. However, unlike Korea, the human factor is much stronger than the physical factor. This is because the U.S. condominium law focuses on collective management of property. On the other hand, the Korean Collective Buildings Act has emphasized the right of separate ownership of the exclusive use part from the time of its enactment, as it originated from the modification of the sharing theory of the civil law to adjust the sharing relationship between the exercise of ownership of each exclusive use part and the common part or land, and to promote the survival of each unit owner with respect to the sharing relationship. However, collective buildings in Korea are becoming larger and larger, and large apartment complexes with many facilities are becoming more popular, and the proportion of common areas to the total area is increasing. Therefore, even in the Collective Building Act, it is necessary to strengthen the human factor through the community of residents to manage the common areas and control the interests of users of the common areas, such as noise between floors.

Research on Hyperspectral Surface Reflectance Dataset of Typical Ore Concentration Area in Hami Remote Sensing Test Field

Abstract. Surface reflectance data is the basic data source for the hyperspectral parametric remote sensing products and remote sensing quantitative application, which is widely used in various application fields such as natural resources and ecological environment monitoring. At present, multispectral data takes the leading role among the common land surface reflectance datasets and the reflectance data mainly involves the types of ground objects such as farmland, forest land, water body, soil, etc., while the datasets relatively less targets the types of rock and mineral surface objects, yet especially the reflectance datasets with the combination of time series and multi-scale satellite-earth are even more scarce. In order to better promote the application of hyperspectral surface reflectance and explore the advantages of joint application of satellite-earth multi-scale reflectance data, on the basis of field-measured rock and mineral target spectral, a comprehensive surface reflectance dataset was generated by using domestically produced hyperspectral satellite data as the data source in this study, mainly focusing on the typical ore concentration area in the Hami Remote Sensing test field in Xinjiang. The dataset includes multi-period hyperspectral satellite surface reflectance images, field measured rock and mineral spectral data, and multi-period sub-pixel spectral data collected based on ground spectral measured points, which can provide significant support for the research and development and accuracy verification as well as performance evaluation of algorithms such as surface reflectance inversion, mineral identification and ground object classification.

Common Land in Britain: A History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day

Common Land in Britain: A History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day

Development and preliminary validation of a land surface image assimilation system based on the Common Land Model

Abstract. Data assimilation is an essential approach to improve the predictions of land surface models. Due to the characteristics of single-column models, assimilation of land surface information has mostly focused on improving the assimilation of single-point variables. However, land surface variables affect short-term climate more through large-scale anomalous forcing, so it is indispensable to pay attention to the accuracy of the anomalous spatial structure of land surface variables. In this study, a land surface image assimilation system capable of optimizing the spatial structure of the background field is constructed by introducing the curvelet analysis method and taking the similarity of image structure as a weak constraint. The fifth-generation ECMWF Reanalysis – Land (ERA5-Land) soil moisture reanalysis data are used as ideal observation for the preliminary effectiveness validation of the image assimilation system. The results show that the new image assimilation system is able to absorb the spatial-structure information of the observed data well and has a remarkable ability to adjust the spatial structure of soil moisture in the land model. The spatial correlation coefficient between the model surface soil moisture and observation increased from 0.39 to about 0.67 after assimilation. By assimilating the surface soil moisture data and combining these with the model physical processes, the image assimilation system can also gradually improve the spatial structure of soil moisture content at a depth of 7–28 cm, with the spatial correlation coefficient between the model soil moisture and observation increased from 0.35 to about 0.57. The forecast results show that the positive assimilation effect could be maintained for more than 30 d. The results of this study adequately demonstrate the application potential of image assimilation system in short-term climate prediction.

The Robustness of Common-Pool Resource Governance in the Gulf of Mottama Ramsar Wetland, Myanmar under Pre- and Post-Political Crisis Conditions

This study examines the role of communities, local institutions, conservation organizations and government agencies in the governance of large-scale common-pool resources (CPR) at the Gulf of Mottama Ramsar wetland, Myanmar before and one year after the 2021 coup d’état. The research employed a mixed method approach in two villages in the GOM on common alluvial land, waterbirds, and fisheries CPRs. The robustness of CPR governance is evaluated with Ostrom’s eight design principles. We found that pre-coup the formation of local user associations, livelihood incentive strategies, and co-management approaches were increasingly effective to conserve fisheries and waterbirds CPRs, while land conflicts over new common alluvial land persisted. One year following the coup, offshore fisheries especially faced challenges from illegal practices by outsiders, due to significantly weakened co-management practices and accountability of local authorities and large-scale commercial fishers to the fishing communities.