Academic literature on the topic 'Land manager perceptions'

Despite decades of colonization and development initiatives, the southern Yucatán peninsular region remains an economic frontier. The term ‘frontier’, however, hides a complex political economy of social, political, and economic structures in which land managers operate. Presently, multiple interest groups vie for influence, increasingly positioning themselves around sustainability concerns, and attempting to reconcile the competing goals of economic development and environmental preservation. The major political institutions and organizations promoting conservation and development in the region fit into five categories: federally decreed land management regimes, federal and state secretariats, local community-based groups and institutions, national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international accords. These institutions and organizations aim to influence land-use decisions in the dominant land access unit, the ejido. The relationships among ejidos, social movements, NGOs, government policy, and international activity in the region are examined here, highlighting how even within a frontier economy, conservation and development visions increasingly influence resource use. Before the Mexican revolution of 1910–17, 96 per cent of Mexico’s rural people were landless (Sinha 1984). These rural poor supported the revolution, in large part, to break up grand haciendas (estates) and to allow campesinos (peasants) access to agricultural land. Ejidos, one of four landtenure types federally mandated, were designed to provide campesinos access to land that could not be transferred easily and thereby taken from them. Based on interpretations of pre-Hispanic land tenure, Article 27 of the Constitution established ejido land to be communal, ruled by an ejido assembly (consisting of all members with land rights in the ejido, or ejidatarios), and used in ejido-defined usufruct. Prior to 1992, when the law was reformed, ejidatarios were prevented from selling their land, renting it, or using it as collateral, and from negotiating deals with private investors. Perhaps more important than these official guidelines, however, are the perceptions of ejidos by state officials. Established, in part, to protect ‘indigenous’ people and not open to privatization, the ejido was stigmatized as ill-suited for modernization (Oasa and Jennings 1982). A bimodal Mexican agrarian policy followed (de Janvry 1981; Tomich, Kilby, and Johnston 1995) in which the potential productive role of ejidatarios was largely ignored (Oasa and Jennings 1982; Sonnenfeld 1992; Tomich, Kilby, and Johnston 1995).

Many executives invest considerable resources in restructuring their companies, drawing and redrawing organizational charts only to be disappointed by the results. That’s because much of the real work of companies happens despite the formal organization. Often what needs attention is the informal organization, the networks of relationships that employees form across functions and divisions to accomplish tasks fast. These informal networks can cut through formal reporting procedures to jump start stalled initiatives and meet extraordinary deadlines. But informal networks can just as easily sabotage companies’ best laid plans by blocking communication and fomenting opposition to change unless managers know how to identify and direct them. Learning how to map these social links can help managers harness the real power in their companies and revamp their formal organizations to let the informal ones thrive. If the formal organization is the skeleton of a company, the informal is the central nervous system driving the collective thought processes, actions, and reactions of its business units. Designed to facilitate standard modes of production, the formal organization is set up to handle easily anticipated problems. But when unexpected problems arise, the informal organization kicks in. Its complex webs of social ties form every time colleagues communicate and solidify over time into surprisingly stable networks. Highly adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and elliptically, skipping entire functions to get work done. Managers often pride themselves on understanding how these networks operate. They will readily tell you who confers on technical matters and who discusses office politics over lunch. What’s startling is how often they are wrong. Although they may be able to diagram accurately the social links of the five or six people closest to them, their assumptions about employees outside their immediate circle are usually off the mark. Even the most psychologically shrewd managers lack critical information about how employees spend their days and how they feel about their peers. Managers simply can’t be everywhere at once, nor can they read people’s minds. So they’re left to draw conclusions based on superficial observations, without the tools to test their perceptions.

<em>Abstract.</em> —The magnitude of changes occurring in Louisiana’s estuaries creates a unique set of challenges in fish habitat management. Louisiana leads the nation in rate of coastal land loss, with some 70% of national losses. Both natural and anthropogenic factors are involved in coastal land loss in Louisiana: subsidence, erosion, sediment and freshwater deficits, channelization, and rising mean sea level. Disruption of the natural deltaic cycles of the Mississippi River has been particularly detrimental to estuarine fish habitat. Navigation and flood control needs have resulted in the near-total leveeing of the river, preventing normal overbank flooding, channel filling and switching, delta and subdelta development, and sediment nourishment of adjacent and down-current marshes. The resulting system is one in which the quantity and quality of estuarine habitat are linked to rapidly degrading wetland environments. Although the relative production value of subsiding marsh surfaces is often very high, this condition is not sustainable. Steep declines in fish production have been forecast for the next century. Federal, state, and local coastal restoration projects are attempting to address the loss of estuarine habitat with a number of techniques that may produce localized changes in fisheries production and distributions. Temporary resource displacements can result in increased harvest costs, and basin-scale changes may be particularly hard to accept for resource users who are satisfied with current conditions. Harvesters have demonstrated reluctance, and may lack the financial flexibility, to forfeit expected current catches for predicted enhancement of long-term fisheries production. In some instances, both sportfishers and commercial resource users have expressed concern over estuarine freshening and turbidity from restoration inputs from riverine sources. Additional public perception difficulties with restoration efforts arise from misunderstandings of the nature of estuarine functions, particularly of the importance of nursery habitat and of the value of low-salinity marshes as nursery habitat. Significant improvement in the outlook for estuarine fish habitat in Louisiana will require long-term and large-area vision from resource managers and the public.

<em>Abstract.</em> —The magnitude of changes occurring in Louisiana’s estuaries creates a unique set of challenges in fish habitat management. Louisiana leads the nation in rate of coastal land loss, with some 70% of national losses. Both natural and anthropogenic factors are involved in coastal land loss in Louisiana: subsidence, erosion, sediment and freshwater deficits, channelization, and rising mean sea level. Disruption of the natural deltaic cycles of the Mississippi River has been particularly detrimental to estuarine fish habitat. Navigation and flood control needs have resulted in the near-total leveeing of the river, preventing normal overbank flooding, channel filling and switching, delta and subdelta development, and sediment nourishment of adjacent and down-current marshes. The resulting system is one in which the quantity and quality of estuarine habitat are linked to rapidly degrading wetland environments. Although the relative production value of subsiding marsh surfaces is often very high, this condition is not sustainable. Steep declines in fish production have been forecast for the next century. Federal, state, and local coastal restoration projects are attempting to address the loss of estuarine habitat with a number of techniques that may produce localized changes in fisheries production and distributions. Temporary resource displacements can result in increased harvest costs, and basin-scale changes may be particularly hard to accept for resource users who are satisfied with current conditions. Harvesters have demonstrated reluctance, and may lack the financial flexibility, to forfeit expected current catches for predicted enhancement of long-term fisheries production. In some instances, both sportfishers and commercial resource users have expressed concern over estuarine freshening and turbidity from restoration inputs from riverine sources. Additional public perception difficulties with restoration efforts arise from misunderstandings of the nature of estuarine functions, particularly of the importance of nursery habitat and of the value of low-salinity marshes as nursery habitat. Significant improvement in the outlook for estuarine fish habitat in Louisiana will require long-term and large-area vision from resource managers and the public.

The H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has nurtured a large, highly interdisciplinary community that has been a wonderful seedbed for emergence of ideas from our group, and for my own growth as a scientist, educator, collaborator, and communicator. Collaborations for me as an individual and within the Andrews forest group have grown over the decades: research–land management since the 1950s, ecology–earth sciences since the early 1970s, biophysical sciences–social sciences since the early 1990s, and humanities–arts–sciences over the past dozen years. As a US Forest Service scientist in seamless collaboration with academic and land manager colleagues, the stable yet dynamic community that the LTER program fosters has served as a great platform for connecting science lessons with society through many means, ranging from development of regional conservation strategies and landscape management plans to storytelling. This is a practice of citizenship by individual scientists and by a science-based team. The sustained learning that the LTER program has underwritten gives scientists a foundation for communicating findings from science and discussing their implications with the public, and the forest itself is a great stage for these conversations. I have had a career of immersion in the International Biological Program (IBP) and in the LTER program since its inception. After completing graduate studies in geology in 1972, I had the good fortune to join the early stages of IBP in the Coniferous Forest Biome Project at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest (AND) in the Cascade Range of Oregon. Our team of forest and stream ecologists, and a few earth scientists, had the decade of the 1970s to coalesce, mature, and craft stories of the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest. The Andrews forest was a wonderful place to do that. It has a complex, ancient forest with nearly 100-m tall trees and fast, cold, clear, mountain streams whose beauty and chill takes your breath away. The year 1980 was pivotal for the group in three ways. First, Jerry Franklin led a synthesis of our team’s knowledge of old-growth forests, which set the stage for major transformation in public perception and policy toward federal forests a decade later and, incidentally, changed our lives.

Oil palm has been widely adopted and cultivated as monoculture plantations in Indonesia. Research suggests that these monoculture practices have led to adverse impacts both on natural and human systems and smallholder farmers have been severely impacted by these unsustainable practices. This chapter aims to analyze how oil palm agroforestry (OPAF) has been adopted by smallholder farmers in the Jambi and Central Kalimantan provinces of Indonesia as part of the social forestry (SF) program to solve the tenure-related conflict in the designated forest areas which are disturbed by monoculture oil palm plantations managed by smallholder farmers. This chapter shows that although oil palm is widely adopted as monoculture plantations for the sake of high yielding, smallholder farmers tend to adopt OPAF to maintain the stability of household incomes amidst the uncertainty of oil palm price in the global market and secure their tenurial access to the designated forest lands. Their perception of OPAF is influenced by their knowledge and determines their decision in adopting OPAF. However, peer pressure and external supports also play important roles in accelerating the adoption of OPAF. More efforts on evidence and knowledge production, communication with stakeholders, and expert backstopping are needed to accelerate the adoption of OPAF.

It is possible to associate the idea of territorial harmony with the idea of territorial function. The perception of a territory with distributed uses that allow the observer to identify its functions and a landscape, urban and territorial, appropriate to the uses, generates a sense of harmony or order of “things”, uses, in the territory. To the contrary, when, for example, people observe a natural space or resource as agricultural lands, where other external uses are located, such as industrial installations or transport infrastructures, the observer perceives a disorderly, degraded and dysfu

Urban functions are no longer separated spatially or socially, and the contest between diverse land-uses is reaching a peak due to growing populations and increasing urbanization that inflates the pressure on already strained resources within the urban fabric. The trend of depletion of green spaces is an increasing global phenomenon, intensifying the growing carbon footprint, impairing water quality and compromising health and overall quality of life, ultimately leading to cities that are far removed from the safe, clean, and livable environments, as envisioned in planning theory. Green spaces

The high competitiveness in the oil sector, the velocity of changes in the world and the increasingly short life cycles of projects, have forced the large companies in this sector to maintain extensive project portfolios in engineering. These demand efficient management and balancing, because otherwise the competitive position relative to other companies is placed at risk. These companies have the challenge of developing appropriate methodologies to manage the portfolios and provide support to the decision makers, aiming at maximizing the results of the projects. One of the activities of portf

Attention to safety and health are of ever-increasing priority to industrial organizations. Good Safety is demanded by stockholders, employees, and the community while increasing injury costs provide additional motivation for safety and health excellence. Safety has always been a strong corporate value of DuPont and a vital part of its culture. As a result, DuPont has become a benchmark in safety and health performance. Since 1990, DuPont has re-engineered itself to meet global competition and address future vision. In the new re-engineered organizational structures, DuPont has also had to re-