Ecological Domains Research Articles

Re-embedding the circular economy in Circles of Social Life: beyond the self-repairing (and still-rapacious) economy

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, the aspirational rhetoric of circular economics has intensified exponentially. At the same time, the boundaries of projected circular economy outcomes have been tightened around a reductive, often neoliberally framed, inter-relation between the domains of economics and ecology. In this process, questions of politics and culture, including issues of justice and social meaning, have largely been ignored. It is this Janus-faced outlook, with one face turned to aspirational intensification and the other face captured by mechanical techniques within the economics/ecology domains, that helps to explain how the circular economy can be the subject of so much hype and so much critique. This also means that, for all their urgency, the emerging lines of critique have not been able to more than hint at an adequate and holistic re-formulation of a circular economy for living sustainably. To give a sense of the nexus of aspirational intensification and economics-ecology domain tightening, this article begins with a dominant story that is told about development of the circular economy by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. The article then responds to this ideological discourse by posing a series of considerations for developing an alternative approach. This alternative will need to bring back in politics and culture, but it will also need (á la Karl Polanyi) to re-embed economics and its technical tools in a broader conception of social life. Here we use the “Circles of Sustainability” approach.

Developing an IoT-Enabled Cloud Management Platform for Agricultural Machinery Equipped with Automatic Navigation Systems

Smart farming uses advanced tools and technologies such as intelligent agricultural machines, high-precision sensors, navigation systems, and sophisticated computer systems to increase the economic benefits of agriculture and reduce the associated human effort. With the increasing demands of individualized farming operations, the internet of things is a crucial technique for acquiring, monitoring, processing, and managing the agricultural resource data of precision agriculture and ecological monitoring domains. Here, an internet of things-based system scheme integrating the most recent technologies for designing a management platform for agricultural machines equipped with automatic navigation systems is proposed. Various agricultural machinery cyber-models and their corresponding sensor nodes were constructed in a pre-production phase. Three key enabling technologies—multi-optimization of agricultural machinery scheduling, development of physical architecture and software, and integration of the controller-area-network with a mobile network—were addressed to support the system scheme. A demonstrative prototype system was developed and a case study was used to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Population parameters and sustainable status of lompa fish Thryssa baelama (Forsskal, 1775) manage through sasi approach at Haruku Village

The harvesting season of lompa fish, Thryssa baelama, through sasi, indigenous knowledge in resources management, in Haruku Village has become a socio-cultural event that attracts many people. The sasi of lompa fish has been conducted for hundreds of years. Information on the bioecology aspect of lompa fish is limited, while this information is crucial for lompa fish sustainability through the sasi approach. This study aimed to investigate some population parameters of lompa fish, its sustainability status, and proposed a sustainable management strategy for the lompa fishery of Haruku Village. Fish population parameter covers length-weight relationship, growth pattern, size distribution, sex ratio, and the body condition index. The sustainability status was assessed following the Rapfish approach. Fisheries management strategy was performed using a conceptual model framework based on Driver Pressure State Impact Response. The research shows that the total length varies between 9.2–14.3 cm. A high relationship was found between total length and weight, and the growth pattern was an allometric negative. There was a difference in sex ratio between males and females, with females dominant. The body condition index varies over time, probably due to reproductive status. The overall sustainability status was at fair condition (61.60%), with the ecological domain having the highest sustainable status (71.07%) and considered sustain. In comparison, the technological domain had the lowest sustainability status (52.58%) and was considered fair sustain. There were seven management strategies proposed for sustainable management for the lompa fishery.

ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF EPIDEMIOLOGICAL CONDITIONS IN THE FOREST ECOTONE OF CROSSS RIVER STATE

Epidemology studies aim at investigation of diseases prevalence on biophysical and sociocultural milleux considerations available literature reveal that there is death or near absence of information on ecological consideration in etiology of diseases in the area under consideration. This study therefore directs attention to investigation of the spatial and temporal prevalence of certain diseases in theory ecological domains. The diseases were investigated in their ecological riches. Two hypothesis were formulated and the data collected were presented tables for statistical analsysis. Two techniques were used in the analysis of data which have the one way analysis of variance(ANOVA) and the chi-square statistics. The results showed that there is a significant relationship in the spatial incidence of disease while there is no significance variation in the seasonal incidence.

Effects of climate and environmental variance on the performance of a novel peatland-based integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) system: Implications and opportunities for advancing research and disruptive innovation post COVID-19 era

Advancing wet peatland ‘paludiculture’ innovation present enormous potential to sustain carbon-cycles, reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) gas emissions and to transition communities to low-carbon economies; however, there is limited scientific-evidence to support and enable direct commercial viability of eco-friendly products and services. This timely study reports on a novel, paludiculture-based, integrated-multi-trophic-aquaculture (IMTA) system for sustainable food production in the Irish midlands. This freshwater IMTA process relies on a naturally occurring ecosystem of microalgae, bacteria and duckweed in ponds for managing waste and water quality that is powered by wind turbines; however, as it is recirculating, it does not rely upon end-of-pipe solutions and does not discharge effluent to receiving waters. This constitutes the first report on the effects of extreme weather events on the performance of this IMTA system that produces European perch (Perca fluviatilis), rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiis) during Spring 2020. Sampling coincided with lockdown periods of worker mobility restriction due to COVID-19 pandemic. Observations revealed that the frequency and intensity of storms generated high levels of rainfall that disrupted the algal and bacterial ecosystem in the IMTA leading to the emergence and predominance of toxic cyanobacteria that caused fish mortality. There is a pressing need for international agreement on standardized set of environmental indicators to advance paludiculture innovation that addresses climate-change and sustainability. This study describes important technical parameters for advancing freshwater aquaculture (IMTA), which can be future refined using real-time monitoring-tools at farm level to inform management decision-making based on evaluating environmental indicators and weather data. The relevance of these findings to informing global sustaining and disruptive research and innovation in paludiculture is presented, along with alignment with UN Sustainable Development goals. This study also addresses global challenges and opportunities highlighting a commensurate need for international agreement on resilient indicators encompassing linked ecological, societal, cultural, economic and cultural domains.

A cross-sectional study on socio-ecological and socio-anthropological determinants of COVID-19 in Lusaka Province of Zambia

The COVID-19 disease constitutes a pandemic that has created an international public health emergency. Besides the significant health challenges, the impact of the COVID-19 disease has been the restriction of movements that have heavily affected the global economy. The first case of COVID-19 in Zambia was identified on March 18th, 2020. By the end of November 2020, the number of districts reporting COVID-19 infections had increased from 68 to 96, with reports of the highest transmission in the capital city, Lusaka, the Copperbelt, and Ndola districts. As COVID-19 spread across the nation of Zambia, several factors are responsible for the spread of the virus. Despite the extensive collection of research done on determinants of COVID-19 disease, the spatial distribution of the disease along socio-demographical and socio- ecological domains remains speculative and infectious diseases have been less looked into in the areas of anthropological dynamics. This study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the ecological and anthropological determinants of COVID-19 disease in four compounds in the Lusaka district of Zambia. A guided questionnaire was used to collect data from 301 participants. A descriptive analysis of all independent variables was done. Analysis for associations of dependent and independent variables and multivariate analysis of the independent variables significant at the bi-variate level was conducted to investigate the association between the dependent variable (Knowledge of anyone infected with COVID-19 virus) and the independent variables. The bi-variate analysis results showed that 14 independent variables with odds ratios greater than one were significantly associated with the spread of COVID-19. Two variables were found to be highly significant in the multivariable logistic regression analysis model. These included beliefs about COVID-19 (odds = 3.0; p = 0.003; CI 1.2-3.3), and participants area of residence (odds = 2.6; p = 0.003; CI = 1.2-5.5). Other significant multivariate variables were ecological variable; climate and anthropological variables; hand hygienic practices. The current research provides further insight into the potential role ecology and anthropology contribute to the spread of communicable diseases. The study recommends awareness of the population to enhance preparedness and response to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

State-led social and environmental policy failure in a Brazilian forest frontier: Sustainable Development Project in Anapu, Pará

In this paper we analyze transformations within a land reform settlement in the Brazilian Amazon, with special land-use regulations targeting forest conservation. We conducted long-term action research in the Virola-Jatobá Sustainable Development Project (PDS), where peasant farmers who were the early settlers of the area, and more recent occupants allied to illegal loggers, land grabbers and speculators adopt antagonistic positions and challenge respective entitlements towards land and forest. In this research we highlight issues of power asymmetry and social injustice when assessing how social relations and environmental conditions in the study area are affected by land use and forest conservation policies since year 2000, when the scheme was established. The PDS situation approached a collapse in late 2017 when the integrity of its forests and the beliefs and practices of vulnerable local residents were damaged. This case study empirically demonstrates that Amazon forest frontier systems have a limited capacity to endure extreme perturbations in the social and ecological interconnected domains. We argue that when a threshold is reached in systems featuring heavily institutionalized social asymmetries that constrain the action of vulnerable resource users, few conditions remain to reorganize the constituent setup through adaptive changes in the same regime or state. Reaching this stage will likely result in drastic changes that will lock the system into a pathway that compromises human wellbeing and the provision of ecosystem services. The fundamental nature of a tenurial scheme that combines social justice and environmental conservation tends thus to be lost for good, to enter a new regime with fewer options and novelties in social-ecological advances, reflecting the overall setbacks currently experienced in Brazilian policy.

TaxoNERD: Deep neural models for the recognition of taxonomic entities in the ecological and evolutionary literature

Abstract Easy access to multi‐taxa information (e.g. distribution, traits, diet) in the scientific literature is essential to understand, map and predict all‐inclusive biodiversity. Tools are needed to automatically extract useful information from the ever‐growing corpus of ecological texts and feed this information to open data repositories. A prerequisite is the ability to recognise mentions of taxa in text, a special case of named entity recognition (NER). In recent years, deep learning‐based NER systems have become ubiquitous, yielding state‐of‐the‐art results in the general and biomedical domains. However, no such tool is available to ecologists wishing to extract information from the biodiversity literature. We propose a new tool called TaxoNERD that provides deep neural network (DNN) models to recognise taxon mentions in ecological documents. To achieve high performance, these models usually need to be trained on a large corpus of manually annotated text. Creating such a corpus is a laborious and costly process, with the result that manually annotated corpora in the ecological domain tend to be too small to learn an accurate DNN model from scratch. To address this issue, we leverage existing models pretrained on large biomedical corpora using transfer learning. The performance of our models is evaluated on four corpora and compared to the most popular taxonomic entity recognition tools. Our experiments suggest that existing taxonomic NER tools are not suited to the extraction of ecological information from text as they performed poorly on ecologically oriented corpora, either because they do not take account of the variability of taxon naming practices or because they do not generalise well to the ecological domain. Conversely, a domain‐specific DNN‐based tool like TaxoNERD outperformed the other approaches on an ecological information extraction task. Efforts are needed to raise ecological information extraction to the same level of performance as its biomedical counterpart. One promising direction is to leverage the huge corpus of unlabelled ecological texts to learn a language representation model that could benefit downstream tasks. These efforts could be highly beneficial to ecologists on the long term.

Harnessing the NEON data revolution to advance open environmental science with a diverse and data‐capable community

AbstractIt is a critical time to reflect on the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) science to date as well as envision what research can be done right now with NEON (and other) data and what training is needed to enable a diverse user community. NEON became fully operational in May 2019 and has pivoted from planning and construction to operation and maintenance. In this overview, the history of and foundational thinking around NEON are discussed. A framework of open science is described with a discussion of how NEON can be situated as part of a larger data constellation—across existing networks and different suites of ecological measurements and sensors. Next, a synthesis of early NEON science, based on >100 existing publications, funded proposal efforts, and emergent science at the very first NEON Science Summit (hosted by Earth Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2019) is provided. Key questions that the ecology community will address with NEON data in the next 10 yr are outlined, from understanding drivers of biodiversity across spatial and temporal scales to defining complex feedback mechanisms in human–environmental systems. Last, the essential elements needed to engage and support a diverse and inclusive NEON user community are highlighted: training resources and tools that are openly available, funding for broad community engagement initiatives, and a mechanism to share and advertise those opportunities. NEON users require both the skills to work with NEON data and the ecological or environmental science domain knowledge to understand and interpret them. This paper synthesizes early directions in the community’s use of NEON data, and opportunities for the next 10 yr of NEON operations in emergent science themes, open science best practices, education and training, and community building.

Correlates of solitary alcohol and cannabis use among American Indian adolescents

BackgroundSolitary substance use, or using substances while alone, is common among adolescents but understudied. This is the first study to examine solitary substance use among American Indian (AI) adolescents. The objective was to examine correlates of solitary alcohol use and solitary cannabis use that occur within the individual, family, school, peer, and cultural domains of the social ecology. MethodData were from the 2009–2013 Drug Use Among Young American Indians Study, a cross-sectional cohort study. Two sets of hierarchical logistic regressions were conducted to examine solitary alcohol use (getting drunk) among lifetime alcohol users (n = 2082; Mage = 15.12 years; SD = 1.68; 54.2% female) and solitary cannabis use among lifetime cannabis users (n = 2085; Mage = 14.99 years; SD = 1.69; 50.5% female), including adjustment for level of substance involvement. ResultsPrevalence of solitary alcohol use among lifetime drinkers was 24.9%. Among lifetime cannabis users, 53.6% reported solitary cannabis use. Regression analyses for solitary alcohol use showed statistically significant positive associations with coping motive, descriptive norms, violent behavior, depression, peer models for use, and (unexpectedly) peer sanctions against use and a negative association with family sanctions against use. Regression analyses for solitary cannabis use showed statistically significant positive associations with coping motive, violent behavior, and peer models for use and a negative association with family sanctions against use. ConclusionsSolitary alcohol and cannabis use are prevalent among AI adolescents and might, in particular, reflect attempts to cope with adversity. Findings could help guide the development of screening and prevention efforts.

Development and Assessment of a Web-Based National Spatial Data Infrastructure for Nature-Based Solutions and Their Social, Hydrological, Ecological, and Environmental Co-Benefits

Comprehensive datasets for nature-based solutions (NBS), and their diverse relationships have not yet been accumulated into a deployable format. This research describes the development of a novel National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) system for NBS co-benefits throughout the contiguous United States. Here, we gather and integrate robust geospatial datasets from the social, ecological, environmental, and hydrologic domains using seamless, cloud-based data services to facilitate the trans-disciplinary assessment of NBSs as a function of society and Earth. This research enhances practical decision making and research by assimilating web-based datasets and describing the missing links between national policy and robust adoption of NBSs as a sustainability solution. This NSDI serves to foster participatory planning capabilities and integrate local sustainability goals into decision–support frameworks. Such a platform strengthens the knowledge base necessary for addressing multiple, co-evolving issues of societal relevance, an essential component of fully espousing NBSs within the realm of socio-technological systems and improving policies and implementation regarding sustainable solutions. The efficacy of the proposed platform to serve as a holistic data information system is assessed by exploring important characteristics associated with geospatial NSDI tools, namely, openness, spatial functionality, scalability, and standardization. By placing GIS strengths and weaknesses in the context of transdisciplinary NBSs, we reveal strategic directions toward further co-production of such NSDIs. We conclude with recommendations for facilitating a shared vision of transdisciplinary technologies to strengthen the amalgamation of broad co-benefits and multi-disciplinary influences in sustainability planning.

Environmental conditions are more effective than nutrient availability and spatial processes on explaining microphytoplankton functional structure in a subtropical hypereutrophic reservoir

AbstractThe structure of freshwater phytoplankton communities can be strongly influenced by environmental and spatial processes at different scales. To identify the main forces that drive phytoplankton structure becomes a relevant tool to understand several knowledge gaps in the phytoplankton ecology domain, such as community succession, biological invasions and responses to disturbances. We used the morphological‐based functional groups (MBFG) approach to investigate the influence of environmental conditions (physical and chemical factors), nutrient availability and spatial processes (habitat connection and species dispersal) in structuring microphytoplankton community in a subtropical hypereutrophic reservoir located in southern Brazil. Samples were taken quarterly, between February 2017 and December 2018. We used distance‐based multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) to evaluate potential spatial and seasonal dissimilarities in the MBFG’s biovolume, and variation partitioning approach (pRDA) to evaluate the role of environmental, nutrient availability and spatial components in explain the microphytoplankton community structure. We identified 16 microphytoplankton taxa, which were sorted into five MBFGs. Significant seasonal dissimilarities were observed in the MBFG’s biovolume. Higher relative biovolume of potential harmful cyanobacteria (MBFG III) and alien dinoflagellates (MBFG V) was observed in summer and autumn/winter, respectively. Pure environmental component (composed by physical and chemical predictors insolation, precipitation, total dissolved solids, turbidity, water temperature, water transparency and wind intensity) explained 45% of the variance in the MBFG’s biovolume, whereas pure nutrient availability component explained 7% and spatial component explained only 3% of the biotic variance. The results showed that the environmental factors – especially the seasonal‐influenced ones – are more effective than nutrient availability and spatial processes in explaining the microphytoplankton community structure in this ecosystem. Our findings alert to the need to consider the variability of the environmental conditions (mainly those directly influenced by seasonality) in phytoplankton community structure in disturbed freshwater ecosystems prone to eutrophication events.

Data Management and Sharing for Collaborative Science: Lessons Learnt From the Euromammals Initiative

The current and future consequences of anthropogenic impacts such as climate change and habitat loss on ecosystems will be better understood and therefore addressed if diverse ecological data from multiple environmental contexts are more effectively shared. Re-use requires that data are readily available to the scientific scrutiny of the research community. A number of repositories to store shared data have emerged in different ecological domains and developments are underway to define common data and metadata standards. Nevertheless, the goal is far from being achieved and many challenges still need to be addressed. The definition of best practices for data sharing and re-use can benefit from the experience accumulated by pilot collaborative projects. The Euromammals bottom-up initiative has pioneered collaborative science in spatial animal ecology since 2007. It involves more than 150 institutes to address scientific, management and conservation questions regarding terrestrial mammal species in Europe using data stored in a shared database. In this manuscript we present some key lessons that we have learnt from the process of making shared data and knowledge accessible to researchers and we stress the importance of data management for data quality assurance. We suggest putting in place a pro-active data review before data are made available in shared repositories via robust technical support and users’ training in data management and standards. We recommend pursuing the definition of common data collection protocols, data and metadata standards, and shared vocabularies with direct involvement of the community to boost their implementation. We stress the importance of knowledge sharing, in addition to data sharing. We show the crucial relevance of collaborative networking with pro-active involvement of data providers in all stages of the scientific process. Our main message is that for data-sharing collaborative efforts to obtain substantial and durable scientific returns, the goals should not only consist in the creation of e-infrastructures and software tools but primarily in the establishment of a network and community trust. This requires moderate investment, but over long-term horizons.

Biocultural diversity in an urban context: An indicator-based decision support tool to guide the planning and management of green infrastructure

Cities face growing challenges and urban greenspaces (UGS) play a key role in improving cities liveability. UGS are complex socio-ecological systems and evidence-based and context-sensitive tools are needed to assist planning and manage environmentally sound and socially inclusive UGS. In this paper, we propose an innovative indicator-based tool to operationalize the biocultural diversity (BCD) framework in urban contexts, deriving from its three conceptual layers – materialized, lived and stewardship. Indicators proposed are bundled in themes representing essential components when assessing and analyzing urban BCD from a contextual and sensitizing perspective. The set of indicators highlight key features of socio-cultural and ecological systems, theirs links and interactions, both material and non-material, to capture the essence of biocultural diversity at site-level. By offering a uniform scoring system with the possibility to set site-specific benchmarks, these can be used in any type of greenspace of any city, while allowing different communities/neighborhoods/city councils to embrace different approaches to meet their objectives towards larger scale goals. Twelve urban parks in Lisbon were used as a test-bed for the indicator-based tool and proved its feasibility to gather an overall snapshot of all parks and to demonstrate the possibility to deepen the study to only two parks uncovering self-exclusion processes that otherwise would have remained hidden. The BCD tool brings together essential information scattered over several quality and good practices assessment tools and protocols and, by including indicators specifically addressing governance and stewardship, offers a policy-driven instrument able to capture trade-offs and/or synergies between ecological, social and political domains.

Exploring the Drivers Controlling the Priming Effect and Its Magnitude in Aquatic Systems

AbstractChanges in mineralization rates of stable or persistent organic matter induced by inputs of labile organic matter can alter the organic carbon (C) balance along the terrestrial‐aquatic ecosystem continuum. This phenomenon, also known as the priming effect, is well‐established in terrestrial ecosystems, but has only recently been explored in the domain of aquatic ecology–with widely contrasting responses of stable carbon to the priming effect reported across the literature. Here, we compiled data from experimental studies on C mineralization in aquatic systems that directly or indirectly tested for the priming effect and used a meta‐analytic approach to investigate the physical and chemical drivers behind the differing outcomes reported across studies. We found that the reported heterogeneity could be explained by two main factors: how the priming effect is measured and whether the study was performed in the laboratory or under field conditions. These findings suggest that how the priming effect is tested and measured has strong implications for its detection and magnitude.

Scaling the effects of ocean acidification on coral growth and coral-coral competition on coral community recovery.

Ocean acidification (OA) is negatively affecting calcification in a wide variety of marine organisms. These effects are acute for many tropical scleractinian corals under short-term experimental conditions, but it is unclear how these effects interact with ecological processes, such as competition for space, to impact coral communities over multiple years. This study sought to test the use of individual-based models (IBMs) as a tool to scale up the effects of OA recorded in short-term studies to community-scale impacts, combining data from field surveys and mesocosm experiments to parameterize an IBM of coral community recovery on the fore reef of Moorea, French Polynesia. Focusing on the dominant coral genera from the fore reef, Pocillopora, Acropora, Montipora and Porites, model efficacy first was evaluated through the comparison of simulated and empirical dynamics from 2010–2016, when the reef was recovering from sequential acute disturbances (a crown-of-thorns seastar outbreak followed by a cyclone) that reduced coral cover to ~0% by 2010. The model then was used to evaluate how the effects of OA (1,100–1,200 µatm pCO2) on coral growth and competition among corals affected recovery rates (as assessed by changes in % cover y−1) of each coral population between 2010–2016. The model indicated that recovery rates for the fore reef community was halved by OA over 7 years, with cover increasing at 11% y−1 under ambient conditions and 4.8% y−1 under OA conditions. However, when OA was implemented to affect coral growth and not competition among corals, coral community recovery increased to 7.2% y−1, highlighting mechanisms other than growth suppression (i.e., competition), through which OA can impact recovery. Our study reveals the potential for IBMs to assess the impacts of OA on coral communities at temporal and spatial scales beyond the capabilities of experimental studies, but this potential will not be realized unless empirical analyses address a wider variety of response variables representing ecological, physiological and functional domains.

Identifying the Dominant Ecological Worldviews of Community Leaders and the Influences These Have in Managing Conservation Areas in Ghana

This study was set on the premise of a research question that sought to identify the dominant ecological worldviews of Community Resources Management Area (CREMA) leaders and the influences these have on the management prescriptions of their conservation areas. The relevance of the question was to identify whether the CREMA leaders subscribed to an eco-centric or an anthropocentric worldview which could have direct consequences for the control of resource levels of utilization after the devolution of authority. A phenomenological approach was thus applied to collect data from nine selected conservation leaders from three different CREMAs. Their ecological worldviews were found to be mixed—depending on the ecological worldview domain, the CREMA leaders showed leanings toward stances ranging from complete eco-centrism to ambivalent eco-centrism and ambivalent anthropocentrism. The findings, however, mostly suggested that the dominant ecological worldviews of the CREMA leaders were eco-centric and not anthropocentric. They exercised the middle ground, i.e., ambivalent ecological worldviews stances, to influence sustainable natural resource utilization while complete eco-centric worldviews were applied to protect balances in ecological functions. The leaders applied these determinations to promote the dual purposes of the CREMAs as they were set up for nature conservation and socio-economic development in Ghana. The study also recommends that the findings should be explored further to develop adaptable criteria that include ecological worldviews in the selection of CREMA leaders.

Wisdom: a potential ecological domain of mental health in old age.

Wisdom: a potential ecological domain of mental health in old age.

The prosocial origin of sustainable behavior: A case study in the ecological domain

Prior research has focused on individual difference variables that predict various prosocial behaviors. This work, however, has neglected to consider the underlying commonalities between the different domains behavior can be performed. In line with other authors we propose that individual difference factors can indicate one’s propensity toward acting prosocially across domains, and that prosocial behaviors also include behaviors that support behavior for the common good. We argue that in order for one’s prosocial propensity to be actualized in a particular domain, a motivator in the form of connectedness to the domain is necessary. This paper examines such a model exemplified in the ecological domain by explaining pro-environmental actions. Through two studies (total N = 760) we provide evidence for a mediation model whereby connectedness to nature mediates the positive relation between prosocial propensity and pro-environmental behavior. Prosocial propensity was operationalized as altruism (studies 1 and 2) and honesty-humility (study 2). Further, study 1 also showed a comparison between participants indicating membership in environmental and humanitarian organizations and non-members. This indicated that prosocial propensity was higher in environmentalists and humanitarians compared to non-members, while connectedness to nature and pro-environmental behaviors were higher only in environmental organization members. These studies provide evidence for the premise of a prosocial propensity being actualized in the ecological domain via connectedness to that domain.

Theoretical considerations for the development of urban black adolescent females

ABSTRACT We explore the theoretical frameworks of ecological systems theory, intersectionality, and multi-dimensionality to examine the dynamics of the environment as it relates to the development of Black adolescent females who grow up in urban settings. Frameworks such as intersectionality and multi-dimensionality specifically urge attention to multiple identities and social categories related to race, sex, and class that impact the everyday life for people of color. We argue negotiations regarding multiple identities are unique for Black adolescent females. It is important to explore these frameworks as developmental processes are impacted by navigating systems and power dynamics that may stifle the developmental process for Black adolescent females. This review specifically addresses barriers and milestones unique to urban Black adolescent female development that targets 21st century challenges. Implications for social workers at each ecological domain are discussed.