Gathering Ground Research Articles

The Gathering Ground: Composing Collaboration in Nyilipidgi, a Dynamic Meeting of manikay and jazz

ABSTRACT Scholarship on Australian composition regularly draws attention to practices of unethical borrowing from Indigenous musical cultures, especially the incorporation of musical elements or themes from Australian Aboriginal traditions within orchestral compositions. By contrast, recent collaborative endeavours by improvising musicians renew approaches towards co-creation across cultural differences, foregrounding the generative interactions of Indigenous performance and ceremonial narratives. Exploring features of integration and juxtaposition in Nyilipidgi, by celebrated Australian pianist-composer Paul Grabowsky, this paper shows how jazz composition might be utilised to structure collaborations characterised by responsive listening and improvisation. We argue that Grabowsky’s compositional processes extend from narrative themes within the Yolŋu manikay tradition and performance practice of Wägilak ceremonial leaders, and that his approach sustains relationships between different people and cultures through musical integration and juxtaposition. Further, by outlining the development of Grabowsky’s collaborations with Wägilak singers, we argue that engagements between Indigenous and non-indigenous musicians are best enabled through long-term relationships of trust and the celebration of those relationships in performance.

Orienting Ourselves toward the Critical: Language Arts as a Gathering Ground for Critical Conversations in the Last Twenty Years

This column notes Language Arts’ contributions in orienting the community toward a critical literacy pedagogy through uplifting the work of practitioners and researchers who engage children in critical conversations.

Editors’ Introduction: In Pursuit of a Gathering Ground for Liberation

Editors’ Introduction: In Pursuit of a Gathering Ground for Liberation

Analysis of Remotely Sensed Imagery and Architecture Environment for Modelling 3D Detailed Buildings Using Geospatial Techniques

The use of three-dimensional maps is more effective than two-dimensional maps in representing the Earth’s surface. However, the traditional methods used to create digital surface models are not efficient for capturing the details of Earth’s features. This is because they represent only three-dimensional objects in a single texture and do not provide a realistic representation of the real world. Additionally, there is a growing demand for up-to-date and accurate geo-information, particularly in urban areas. To address this challenge, a new technique is proposed in this study that involves integrating remote sensing, Geographic Information System, and Architecture Environment software to generate a highly-detailed three-dimensional model. The method described in this study includes several steps such as acquiring high-resolution satellite imagery, gathering ground truth data, performing radiometric and geometric corrections during image preprocessing, producing a 2D map of the region of interest, constructing a digital surface model by extending the building outlines, and transforming the model into multi-patch layers to create a 3D model for each object individually. The research findings indicate that the digital surface model obtained with comprehensive information is suitable for different purposes, such as environmental research, urban development and expansion planning, and shape recognition tasks.

Managing the non-integration of transient migrant workers: Urban strategies of enclavisation and enclosure in Singapore

Research on migration in arrival cities, particularly in the west, has traditionally focused on spatial formations such as ‘ethnic enclaves’ or ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ in order to investigate questions around assimilation, integration and settlement issues relating to more permanent forms of migration. By shifting attention to the cities of migration in Asia that operate largely under a regime of temporary migration, we foreground the twin concepts of enclavisation and enclosure not as fixed entities but as ongoing spatial-temporal strategies of disciplinary power with uneven consequences for migrant life and labour in the city. Set within the context of Singapore, we draw on qualitative interviews with two groups of transient migrant workers – male construction workers and female domestic workers – to examine two sets of conjoined processes underpinning their spatial containment in the city-state: ground-driven enclavisation or the formation of ‘weekend enclaves’ /gathering grounds as co-national social spaces of support and comfort zones of co-ethnic belonging; and state-driven enclosure in dormitories or home-workspaces as a set of containment measures in response to gender-differentiated concerns about enclavisation. As spatial–temporal processes that shape the migrant’s place in, and mobility through, the city in highly gendered and disciplined ways, enclavisation and enclosure work in tandem to reinforce the non-integration of low-waged transient migrants in the city.

Assessment of importance of 64 Ramsar sites in China for waterfowl

Wetlands, especially Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar sites), are of significance to provide habitats, food sources and gathering grounds for waterfowl to molt, rest, winter and nest. And the importance degrees of wetlands are heterogeneous owing to the different population and distribution of waterbirds. But the literature on importance evaluation of Ramsar sites in China is limited. Therefore, there is an urgent need to bridge the gap and evaluate 64 sites in China, aiming at priority sites identification and better differentiated management. A new wetland evaluation index called habitat importance index (HII) based on Ramsar Convention criteria was constructed to assess the importance degree of Ramsar site. The results showed that: First, 64 Ramsar sites in China play significant role to conserve waterbirds. In total, there were 177 species of waterbirds found in 64 sites. 59 globally threatened species were identified, and 143 species were supported during their wintering or breeding stage. Moreover, 86 species met Ramsar 1% population threshold. 39 Ramsar sites (61%) supported 20,000 waterbirds or more. Second, a large disparity was found among the HII scores of 64 sites. Top seven HII-score sites were Poyanghu, Jilin Momoge, Yancheng, Heilongjiang Nanweng River, Shuangtai Estuary, Tianjin Beidagang, Shandong Yellow River Delta. Third, through hierarchical clustering method, 64 sites could be categorized into three groups with average HII scores of 0.575, 0.313 and 0.075 respectively. Accordingly, targeted policy recommendation including differentiated hierarchical management and network management approaches were proposed to realize the effective management and conservation of Ramsar sites in China.

Seasonal bean yield forecast for non-irrigated croplands through climate and vegetation index data: Geospatial effects

Seasonal crop estimates at large scales are essential for national food security. Therefore, this study aimed to predict non-irrigated dry bean yields for 41 districts in the semi-arid region in central Mexico before estimations from crop census. 13-year period data included: bean yields from official statistics, climate data from local weather stations, and Remote Sensing Imagery. The study examined a suite of econometric modeling approaches to predict seasonal bean yields under different precipitation categorization scheme (normal-wet seasons and dry seasons), as well as predictand/predictor log-transformations. The method tested Ordinary least Squares (OLS) and OLS + Dummy (dummy variable with spatial regimes), and spatial regression methods: Spatial Lag (SAR) and Spatial Error (SER), and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). At first, exploratory OLS regressions were used to create a subset of specified models before testing the spatial regression models. The predictors that accounted for most of the bean yield variability were precipitation and Enhanced Vegetation Index. The models that incorporated explicit and implicit spatial effects (SAR and OLS + Dummy, respectively), with log-transformations of predictand and non-transformation of predictors, showed the best performances (r2 between 0.81 and 0.84 with an AIC between −81 and −99). Likewise, a prognosis of a13-year yield simulations (hindcasts) indicated that the latter models are adequate for normal-wet and dry seasons (mean absolute error less than 0.190 ton ha−1). Overall, spatial regression techniques have the potential to estimate bean yields as an early forecast for crop official statistics, eluding large amounts of monetary and human resources on gathering ground data in poor or developing countries, particularly.

Tropical forest conversion and its impact on indigenous communities Mapping forest loss and shrinking gathering grounds in the Western Ghats, India

Conversions of natural forests to forest plantations threaten ecosystems and forest-dependent indigenous populations in many parts of the world. It is crucial to understand the scale and nature of such forest conversions and how they affect forest-dependent communities as a basis for prudent forest management and protection of indigenous livelihoods. This study analyses natural forest conversions and their impacts on tribal communities in the southern Western Ghats, a globally significant biodiversity hotspot. It focuses on two tribal settlements in protected forests within the catchment of the Achankovil River. The study involves time series analysis of forest cover change, based on a historical map and satellite images, field mapping of changes in the tribal communities’ areas of operation, household surveys, and focus group discussions. The analysis shows that the area of protected forest decreased by 53 % from 1978 to 2015. As a result, the size of the tribal communities’ gathering areas considerably shrunk, resulting in a decline in their collection of non-timber forest products and increased dependency on forest plantations labour for their livelihood. This is especially critical as the tribal communities still prefer to depend on natural forests for their sustenance. Preservation of natural forests is hence crucial not only for biodiversity conservation, but also to protect socio-economic and cultural traits of tribal populations.

Survey of flight and numerical data of hypersonic rarefied flows encountered in earth orbit and atmospheric reentry

The control of the satellites end-of-life including deorbiting and atmospheric entry as well as the investigation of orbital maneuvers for new space missions confer a growing importance to the study of the hypersonic rarefied regime. While flight data are necessary for the validation of Direct Simulation Monte-Carlo numerical simulations, only a few studies and data are available for this purpose. Therefore, this article aims at gathering ground wind-tunnel and flight data in rarefied regime as well as their numerical reconstruction from a wide scope of space programs. A detailed analysis of these data will be presented. After a review of hypersonic low-density wind-tunnel experiments that are the main source of non-reacting hypersonic rarefied flow study cases, we address, with our own simulations, unexploited afterbody heating data from former space programs such as Mercury and Apollo. Numerically reconstructed flight data from OREX and the Space Shuttle are also considered. Finally, ionization and radiative environment are discussed through the data collected during Stardust, Fire II and RAM-C II Earth atmospheric entry.

Empirical methodology for crowdsourcing ground truth

The process of gathering ground truth data through human annotation is a major bottleneck in the use of information extraction methods for populating the Semantic Web. Crowdsourcing-based approaches are gaining popularity in the attempt to solve the issues related to volume of data and lack of annotators. Typically these practices use inter-annotator agreement as a measure of quality. However, in many domains, such as event detection, there is ambiguity in the data, as well as a multitude of perspectives of the information examples. We present an empirically derived methodology for efficiently gathering of ground truth data in a diverse set of use cases covering a variety of domains and annotation tasks. Central to our approach is the use of CrowdTruth metrics that capture inter-annotator disagreement. We show that measuring disagreement is essential for acquiring a high quality ground truth. We achieve this by comparing the quality of the data aggregated with CrowdTruth metrics with majority vote, over a set of diverse crowdsourcing tasks: Medical Relation Extraction, Twitter Event Identification, News Event Extraction and Sound Interpretation. We also show that an increased number of crowd workers leads to growth and stabilization in the quality of annotations, going against the usual practice of employing a small number of annotators.

The Now of Gwendolyn Brooks

The Now of Gwendolyn Brooks Carolyn Joyner (bio) Like a full moon in winter,her light comes inside,gives breath to voicespeaking behind plain-folkeyes, to song hummingsway at their core. Long-limbed words with big souls—a collective embrace, armoring.There's no looking up or downon her charted journey, justthe challenge of being human,assorting humanness. Soon I'll be done wid the troublesof the world, soon… We dance, stride, gallop the idiom,rhythmic riffs resonant in portraitsof young men dangling hopeby the foot (but they cool, real cool),the bourgeois raining condescensionon the poor, that old yellow pairsharing broken-dreamed devotion. She seats us in kitchenette buildings,gives us a whiff of hallway's over-ripenedgarbage after strutting our stuff downBronzeville streets with Satin-legs Smith.We neighbor with a young girl namedAnnie Allen, grow into adulthood with her. Black urban poor skin slips on easily,reshapes truths that speak of our own, reachinto modernity's chest, illuminate it,like a full moon in winter. —inspired by Dolores Kendrick [End Page 113] Carolyn Joyner Carolyn Joyner, a Washington, DC poet, has been featured in various literary magazines and anthologies, among them, Obsidian, Beyond the Frontier, Gathering Ground and Beltway Quarterly. She has a Master of Arts degree in creative writing from The Johns Hopkins University, is a Cave Canem fellow, and has been awarded artist fellowship grants from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

An Oasis in Europe: Hollywood Depictions of Portugal during the Second World War

In the early 1940s, the wave of North American fiction films dealing with the Second World War devoted unprecedented attention to Portugal, then a neutral nation under a fascist-inspired dictatorship led by António de Oliveira Salazar. This article analyses the underlying discourse about Portugal in the stories filmed by Hollywood during this period. It focuses on three key motifs, namely the portrayal of the country as an escape point for refugees, as a gathering ground for spies and as a safe haven from European war and oppression. Besides identifying common patterns in the narratives, the article seeks to contextualize them by taking into account the evolution of the scripts, as well as the feedback from the Production Code Administration and the Office of War Information. It also briefly contrasts the portrayal of Portugal with that of Spain, where a similar political regime was in place. It concludes that the combination of Hollywood’s formulaic narratives and Washington’s propaganda strategy resulted in a depiction of Portugal that was patronizing yet mostly benevolent, romanticizing local living conditions and dissociating the Salazar dictatorship from its fascist origins and practices.

Economic and Natural Effects of Nitrate Pollution of Agricultural Origin, in particular the Aquatic Environment

The whole area of Hungary is the gathering ground of our principal rivers (Duna, Tisza) and some bigger lakes, like Balaton, Fertő lake and Velencei lake. The water isn’t only staff of life; it is one of the most sensitive biotope of world. We suppose to protect our aquatic environment from environmental pollution as such nitrate pollution or eutrophication. Trough agricultural production the nutrient rate increases in water. The weeds begin to pullulate, they are taking up more oxygen from the water, they are necrosis, the depth of warp increases faster so the eutrophication drowns on, and the nitrate rate of rivers increases.

Application of High Resolution Satellite Imagery to Characterize Individual-Based Environmental Heterogeneity in a Wild Blue Tit Population

Environmental heterogeneity in space and time plays a key role in influencing trait variability in animals, and can be particularly relevant to animal phenology. Until recently, the use of remotely sensed imagery in understanding animal variation was limited to analyses at the population level, largely because of a lack of high-resolution data that would allow inference at the individual level. We evaluated the potential of SPOT 4 (Take 5) satellite imagery data (with observations every fifth day at 20 m resolution and equivalent to acquisition parameters of Sentinel-2) in animal ecology research. We focused on blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus reproduction in a study site containing 227 nestboxes scattered in a Mediterranean forest dominated by deciduous downy oaks Quercus pubescens with a secondary cover of evergreen holm oaks Quercus ilex. We observed high congruence between ground data collected in a 50 m radius around each nestbox and NDVI values averaged across a 5 by 5 pixel grid centered around each nestbox of the study site. The number of deciduous and evergreen oaks around nestboxes explained up to 66% of variance in nestbox-centered, SPOT-derived NDVI values. We also found highly equivalent patterns of spatial autocorrelation for both ground- and satellite-derived indexes of environmental heterogeneity. For deciduous and evergreen oaks, the derived NDVI signal was highly distinctive in winter and early spring. June NDVI values for deciduous and evergreen oaks were higher by 58% and 8% relative to February values, respectively. The number of evergreen oaks was positively associated with later timing of breeding in blue tits. SPOT-derived, Sentinel-2 like imagery thus provided highly reliable, ground-validated information on habitat heterogeneity of direct relevance to a long-term field study of a free-living passerine bird. Given that the logistical demands of gathering ground data often limit our understanding of variation in animal reproductive traits across time and space, there appears to be great promise in applying fine-resolution satellite data in evolutionary ecology research.

Breeding Status of Ancient Murrelets Attending Gathering Grounds Near Langara Island, British Columbia, 1970–1971

A conspicuous but incompletely studied activity of breeding Ancient Murrelets (Synthliboramphus antiquus) is the gradual increase in the number of individuals on the sea near the colonies from midto late afternoon until darkness each day during the breeding season. Ancient Murrelets fly from the foraging area to the ‘‘staging area’’ (Sealy 1976; Vermeer and others 1984) or ‘‘gathering ground’’ (Gaston 1992, 1996) adjacent to the breeding colony, and spend up to several hours each day for more than 2 months each year engaging in social activities (Fig. 1), possibly strengthening pair bonds and prospecting for mates. An undetermined proportion of individuals then fly to the colony during the 3 to 4 h of darkness, where socialization continues (Jones and others 1990; SGS, pers. obs.). As the breeding season progresses, incubation duties are exchanged between females and males, and the off-duty individuals return to the sea before sunrise (Gaston 1992). By late May the precocial chicks begin to leave the colonies about 2 d after hatching and, accompanied by 1 or both parents, swim rapidly offshore where the chicks are reared (Sealy 1976; Sealy and Campbell 1979; Gaston 1992; Sealy and others 2013). Several authors have noted Ancient Murrelets on the gathering grounds near colonies on Haida Gwaii, British Columbia (Guiguet 1953; Sealy 1976; Vermeer and others 1985; Gaston 1992), but whether breeding adults and nonbreeders, which may include subadults, visit them over the course of the breeding season has not been ascertained. The function of the activities that occur on the gathering ground, therefore, remains for the most part conjecture. Gaston (1992) acknowledged that it would be difficult to distinguish between breeding adults and non-breeders on the gathering ground without collecting birds over the course of the breeding season, as the age and sex of individuals are indistinguishable at sea. He stated, however (p 146), that ‘‘we must presume that the majority of birds on the gathering grounds were non-breeders,’’ during the latter part of the chick-departure period, but went on to say ‘‘We do not know whether the majority of birds attending the gathering grounds in late April [when clutches are initiated] were breeders or non-breeders. However, I think that they were mainly breeders, because few non-breeders came ashore at that date.’’ Results of a study of breeding and feeding ecology of the Ancient Murrelet, involving individuals collected on gathering grounds from 6 May to 10 July 1970 and 17 March to 9 August 1971, in the vicinity of Langara Island, Haida Gwaii, British Columbia (Sealy 1972, 1975a, 1976), shed light on the seasonal pattern of visitation by breeders and non-breeders on the gathering grounds. In 1970–1971, I collected 75 Ancient Murrelets (56 breeding adults, 19 non-breeders [criteria for separating groups in Sealy 1972, 1976; also see Table 1]) between 15:30 and 22:45 PST on gathering grounds approximately adjacent to 3 colonies on Langara Island (Fig. 2: colony A, Iphigenia Point [see also Fig. 3A]; colony B, southern headland of Egeria Bay; colony C, McPherson Point [Fig. 3B]). (The build-up of murrelets at each gathering ground occurs anew each day, and area and shape of the ground may be variable.) The collections of specimens spanned the period individuals first began to attend gathering grounds in the last 2 wk of March through the end of July (Table 1). I had previously lumped data obtained from each GENERAL NOTES

Meditation

Meditation Camille Dungy (bio) Sit quietly long enough and the river I hear will be the courseof my own blood. Everything I know I have to forget: the champ of lichenchewing down boulder and the unsustainable thrill of the spectrumat magenta and lapis, those and air’s heft, the oppression of fluorescence. Marrow,proximity, its loss: the world gives us too much, truly, to bear. Science says everythingmust quiet so we can continue. Rather, we must quiet everything. I hardly feel the cords I’ve worn so oftenI don’t notice anymore the stain from the time when my uncle swiveled from sinkto cupboard as he’d done daily seven decades, and failedto see me standing with a full cup. Forget it. It’s fine, I said. Distracted by the heat of surprise, practicallydancing, I reached around what I now rememberwas the heart and lung part of his body. I am remembering the muscles that built his body, but not what he said, not the texture of the towel I must have needed.I remember everyone laughing, evenMother, the sound of whose approaching steps I can’t recall. Mother chose maple for her brother’s coffin and, because she did not want us [End Page 495] to have to think about it, for her own. These things are true, but I don’t let them vex me most of the time. Let me bemore specific. The maple floorboards of that old house, their vibrancyprotected by a nearly impenetrable finish: I never thought about that floor. [End Page 496] Camille Dungy CAMILLE DUNGY is Professor of English at Colorado State University. She is author of three volumes of poems, Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow (winner of the American Book Award in 2011), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She has edited three anthologies, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems That Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Postglacial inception and growth of anthropogenic landscapes in China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East

Abstract With the onset of deglaciation in the Northern Hemisphere about 20,000 years ago, a rich temperate biota, earlier driven southward by ice-age cold, began its long, slow return to East Asia. Fully modern and technologically sophisticated Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens communities re-engineered their ecological niche in keeping with these changes by mapping on to newly productive hunting localities, gathering grounds, and raw-material sources and situating their wintering/home base residential sites in relation to the others. Acorns, nuts, annual seeds, and other foods accessed within such logistic networks were at first gathered wild, but over millennia came to be harvested, tended, and finally domesticated in great quantity. Agriculture, population, and infrastructural additions to natural landscapes expanded in scope. Over a long period, originally familistic lineage heads and elders claimed an ever-increasing authority and personal share of the collective wealth generated by the community. Archeological evidence and written histories, appearing earliest in Central China, document the rise of elite family dynasties that garnered enormous wealth and luxury through their control of agriculture, industry, and trade, while peasant laborers profited far less. Military force applied to outsiders on their borders, and at times to their own people, became an important instrument of this ruling class. Central Riverine China led in all these developments, and over time neighboring peoples in Northeast China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East engineered their own civic and productive infrastructures according to the same dynamics, resulting in a pervasive spread of anthropogenic landscapes throughout East Asia.

Writing Love: Into a New Correspondence with Ourselves

Writing LoveInto a New Correspondence with Ourselves Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon Callaloo © 2012 [End Page 582] I live where it’s grey: Ithaca, NY, “a place full of winters.” Each year—is it always in fall?—I travel to some settled upon black lit space to confer with black people whose minds and bodies I love. I travel with my heart, who calls herself Dagmawi and walks on legs and laughs and encourages all my naughtiness; my heart, himself joy, who in the car asks me why it is again trees change colors in fall, so that I must remind myself the process by which maple leaves blush, spent of chlorophyll, full of sugar after photosynthesis stops. Each year in the between-stillness of fall, love discovers itself. Writing Purchase, writing Coal Tar Colors, I arrive in Princeton to the hover of a published love letter (and Black letters) as though to a vodka-soaked tune, to find myself necessarily and beautifully, masterfully unsettled. (And Billie slurs “There is nothing left for me to save.”) Errant again, because, half-crowing “But that was mine! That was for me!”— the love letter, I mean—slurring toward possession and law— wanting to save them for myself—I rehearse materials: parchment, of which I spoke to my heart; parchment on which I penned a reply. But why wasn’t my first impulse to dance across letters aslant like a flurry of yellow leaves across the empty space above a street? “Yes,” the author of my love letter teases. “You femme girls want everything.” So why not strut too that chagrin? That is, both skins: the one surface roughed to rub, to polish; the other dressed to take ink. If black life is public property, by Purchase, I meant to write myself onto the walls of the house I own. And searching the cure for some other woe, uncover the pink trying to be purple in processed coal. In the black veins biographies of mauve. Each year, I intend not to shame that part of myself that walks apart from me: that is, you [End Page 583] because “our world is full of sound/our world is more lovely than anyone’s.” The love letter began, “How dare I?” Beyond that, to move us, no incantation’s set. How dare we but publicly love each other, like this, home? [End Page 584] Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, an associate professor at Cornell University, is author of two books of poems, Black Swan (winner of 2001 Cave Canem Prize) and Open Interval (a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award); and co-author, with Elizabeth Alexander, of Poems in Conversation and a Conversation. Her poems have also appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, Rattapallax, Shenandoah, Roll Call, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, and Angles of Ascent. Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Cockles in custody: the role of common property arrangements in the ecological sustainability of mangrove Fisheries on the Ecuadorian Coast

Scholars of common property resource theory (CPR) have long asserted that certain kinds of institutional arrangements based on collective action result in successful environmental stewardship, but feedback and the direct link between social and ecological systems remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how common property institutional arrangements contribute to sustainable mangrove fisheries in coastal Ecuador, focusing on the fishery for the mangrove cockle ( Anadara tuberculosa and A. similis ), a bivalve mollusk harvested from the roots of mangrove trees and of particular social, economic, and cultural importance for the communities that depend on it. Specifically, this study examines the emergence of new civil society institutions within the historical context of extensive mangrove deforestation for the expansion of shrimp farming, policy changes in the late 1990s that recognized “ancestral” rights of local communities to mangrove resources, and how custodias, community-managed mangrove concessions, affect the cockle fishery. Findings from interviews with shell collectors and analysis of catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) indicate that mangrove concessions as common property regimes promote community empowerment, local autonomy over resources, mangrove conservation and recovery, higher cockle catch shares, and larger shell sizes, but the benefits are not evenly distributed. Associations without custodias and independent cockle collectors feel further marginalized by the loss of gathering grounds, potentially deflecting problems of overexploitation to “open-access” areas, in which mangrove fisheries are weakly managed by the State. Using Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, the explicit link between social and ecological systems is studied at different levels, examining the relationship between collective action and the environment through quantitative approaches at the fishery level and qualitative analysis at the level of the mangrove landscape. Implications for coastal and fishery management are discussed in the conclusions.

Cockles in custody: the role of common property arrangements in the ecological sustainability of mangrove Fisheries on the Ecuadorian Coast

Scholars of common property resource theory (CPR) have long asserted that certain kinds of institutional arrangements based on collective action result in successful environmental stewardship, but feedback and the direct link between social and ecological systems remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how common property institutional arrangements contribute to sustainable mangrove fisheries in coastal Ecuador, focusing on the fishery for the mangrove cockle (<em>Anadara tuberculosa</em> and <em>A. similis</em>), a bivalve mollusk harvested from the roots of mangrove trees and of particular social, economic, and cultural importance for the communities that depend on it. Specifically, this study examines the emergence of new civil society institutions within the historical context of extensive mangrove deforestation for the expansion of shrimp farming, policy changes in the late 1990s that recognized “ancestral” rights of local communities to mangrove resources, and how <em>custodias, </em>community-managed mangrove concessions, affect the cockle fishery. Findings from interviews with shell collectors and analysis of catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) indicate that mangrove concessions as common property regimes promote community empowerment, local autonomy over resources, mangrove conservation and recovery, higher cockle catch shares, and larger shell sizes, but the benefits are not evenly distributed. Associations without <em>custodias </em>and independent cockle collectors feel further marginalized by the loss of gathering grounds, potentially deflecting problems of overexploitation to “open-access” areas, in which mangrove fisheries are weakly managed by the State. Using Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, the explicit link between social and ecological systems is studied at different levels, examining the relationship between collective action and the environment through quantitative approaches at the fishery level and qualitative analysis at the level of the mangrove landscape. Implications for coastal and fishery management are discussed in the conclusions.