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Top Ten Lists:
“Top 10” lists provide a synthesis of common themes, methods, strategies and outcomes within SSI and reflect the collective input of more than 30 SSI faculty and students.
Top 10 Questions We Are Trying to Answer with SSI
- How do people, landscapes, and technologies affect one another?
- How do we balance ecological, economic, and social needs to support Maine’s future?
- How can we manage the natural environment for human benefit in ways that leave ample resources for future generations?
- What research do different types of decision makers need to address their pressing concerns, and can modeling and visualization be used as tools in planning for a more sustainable future?
- How do we prepare our workforce with the skills to address sustainability issues and meet future STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) industry demands?
- How do we create better linkages between the production of knowledge and motivating action toward solutions?
- In what ways does interdisciplinary, collaborative research improve decision making?
- What strategies and structures encourage universities and colleges and communities to work together to develop short- and long-term solutions?
- How do we transform a state’s higher education network into a collaborative infrastructure and foster a culture of engaged research?
- How can we reach a more comprehensive understanding of the interactions in social-ecological systems for making decisions while allowing for potential sources of scientific uncertainty?
Top 10 Ways SSI Is Not “Science as Usual”
- SSI is working with Maine citizens to address their needs, through all stages of the research process
- SSI is focused on solutions
- SSI researchers are working with stakeholders
- SSI is working across disciplines rather than having individual disciplines work in isolation
- SSI researchers are working together across higher education campuses
- SSI is working across and integrating problems
- SSI is focused on addressing economic, environmental, and social challenges at the same time
- SSI researchers are focused on adapting their research to make it more applicable to Maine communities, using a place-based approach
- SSI scientists are focused on finding new ways to get the word out about research
- SSI is training applied and solutions-oriented researchers
Top 10 Ways SSI Will Make a Difference for Maine in the Policy Arena
- By identifying research needs of Maine’s policy community
- By aligning higher education research efforts with Maine’s local and state needs
- By improving research-informed policy
- By ensuring that the higher education institutions in Maine have the resources and infrastructure to be responsive to communities
- By improving the likelihood, efficiency, and speed of knowledge transfer between researchers, community stakeholders, and decision makers
- By serving as a link between research and policy
- By providing opportunities for students to address policy issues through their research and training
- By finding new ways that academic researchers can help communities, towns, and industries to build a better future for Maine
- By providing Maine citizens with research-based evidence that accounts for and informs complex decision making in the face of uncertainty
- By training Maine’s future leaders to understand links between policy and research and extending workforce development into policy arenas
Top 10 New Policy-related Practices Coming Out of SSI
- New practices for ensuring that research leads to action
- New ways of training and mentoring students
- New ways of training the workforce
- New ways of working across disciplines
- New ways of working with stakeholders
- New ways to develop environmental and natural resource policies (e.g., vernal pools, family forests, land-use planning)
- New ways of involving stakeholders in the design of research on societal issues in their communities
- New ways of ensuring that social science is an essential component of environmental management
- New techniques for understanding integrated problems so that better policies emerge
- New ways of bringing separate research projects together to assess their wider-ranging policy implications
Top 10 Ways SSI Is Using Tools to Work Across Disciplinary Boundaries
- Models: Using coupled social-ecological-economic simulations to understand, predict, protect, and enhance Maine’s unique heritage, such as
• Social network analysis
• Bayesian belief networks and future scenarios
• Agent-based modeling
• Species-niche modeling
• Mediated modeling and participatory mapping
• Water-flow models
- Social science methods: Using mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) to understand, predict, protect, and enhance Maine’s heritage, such as
• Participant observations
• Targeted focus groups
• Interviews (structured, semi-structured)
• Surveys
- Citizen science: Expanding and educating for improved science outcomes
- Economics-based experimental games
- Paleo-reconstruction to better understand historic landscapes and disturbance regimes
- Maps for improved and long-term decision making.
- Enzyme, isotope, and dissolve organic matter analyses to understand landscape effects on water
- Molecular population genetics analysis
- High tech tools, e.g., innovative radar tags for tracking movements of amphibians or other small-bodied organisms and automated loggers for water level
- Low-tech tools, e.g., “One Orange,” a stop watch and
tape measure for stream flow.
Top 10 Ways SSI Will Make a Difference for Workforce Development
- Building workforce skills and innovation in science, technology, engineering, and math
- Strengthening networks to help the flow of resources to match people with needs and solve problems
- Creating a new generation of scholars and students focused on integrating problems and solutions in sustainability science
- Developing municipal, nonprofit, and policy-related internships for students
- Gaining skills in cross-functional team work
- Facilitating connections between students and professionals so they can work across boundaries
- Cultivating a workforce with a problem-solving orientation, to integrate across the pure and applied sciences
- Promoting awareness of new industries supporting public demands for ecological services
- Encouraging innovative thinking to support Maine’s innovation economy
- Fostering opportunities to keep students in Maine
Top 10 Ways We Are Measuring the Impacts of SSI
- By the number of “problems” we have solved
- By successfully training and mentoring innovative researchers at graduate, undergraduate, and high-school levels
- By measuring effective partnerships, through iterative assessments of the research and collaboration process
- By evaluating how our research assists with the legislative process
- By communicating with and hearing testimonies from stakeholders who see research outcomes
- By decreasing the amount of time it takes for research to reach stakeholders
- By connecting Maine residents and researchers for greater collaborative potential
- By providing opportunities for Maine policymakers to access and leverage research capacity
- By the degree to which SSI is a fundamental voice in sustainability science
- By the extent to which SSI findings are applied to other states, regions, and countries
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Maine Policy Review
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