Perceptions of risk in aquatic ecosystem services
This project was a pursuit at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), and included 17 (by last count) researchers from multiple organizations to study the drivers of risk (and perceptions of risk) in the Lake Erie and Lake Champlain systems.
Our goals were to:
Develop comparable measures of objective risk signals for harmful cyanobacteria blooms
Compile data on psychological and socio-economic risk signals to integrate with the objective risk database.
Use systems modeling techniques to test the hypothesis that amplification of subjective risk perceptions may trigger a shift in policy cycle from ineffective to effective; and dampening of subjective risk perceptions may trigger policy cycle to shift from effective to ineffective cycle.
My role in the project was to synthesize models of adaptive decision-making, remotely-sensed water quality imagery, and indicators of governance capacity across watersheds. While the project has formally concluded, our research network (in the spirit of SESYNC) continues to study these issues.
Find out more about this project here: