Search USGS⌕ Search

Geology topics

Amanda E. Cravens

Publications and source records attributed to Amanda E. Cravens.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
USGS2026

Wicked problems in practice: Responding to ecological transformation in wilderness

Congressionally designated wilderness offers the highest level of land protection in the USA, comparable to category 1b wilderness as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, yet wilderness areas face impacts of climate change. Researchers and managers increasingly recognize the immense challenge of stewarding wilderness in a changing climate. Although responding to climate change is considered a wicked problem, this framing has not been applied to wilderness contexts. We move theory into practice by using wicked problem framing and four illustrative cases to explore how the resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework can help untangle the wicked problem of addressing unprecedented ecological transformation in wilderness. The RAD framework clarifies a range of response options including resisting transformation, accepting it, or directing it toward preferred new conditions. As climate change continues to challenge wilderness managers, the RAD framework can help assess trade-offs and preserve wilderness character into the twenty-first century.

Ambio↗
USGS2026

Debunking the myth of the quintessential resource manager: Precision in actionable science

“Actionable science” is a widely held standard for identifying the merits of natural resources research. Yet, science is often framed as actionable to a vaguely identified quintessential “manager” without defining either the intended manager or use. Generic descriptions lack precision for identifying end users or their needs, limiting methodological rigor in research design and leading to contextual misalignments of outputs with the need they intended to serve. Further, imprecise terminology limits the ability to evaluate impact, replicate efforts, or foster adoption and implementation of findings. This perspective article presents the heuristic of “who, what, when, where, why, how” to help researchers be more precise when describing their actionable science. Through intentional reflection, researchers can move beyond generic framings of “managers” representing monolithic organizations. “Managers” become individuals, with unique responsibilities, functions, worldviews, and levels of authority, all influencing their use of and need for scientific information and data.

Conservation Science and Practice↗
USGS2026

Challenges and opportunities for national-scale projections of future coastal landscape change

Local to global scale projections of future coastal landscape change are essential to improve land and resource management decisions that aim to prepare for and reduce risk exposure to impending coastal hazards. However, the availability of actionable knowledge is often limited due to the complexity of drivers of change, their consequences, and uncertainties that span disciplines. Varying spatial and temporal scales of physical processes that occur on landscapes with differing levels of coastal development and modification complicate decision-making. This paper reviews advances in observational approaches, modeling, and quantification of uncertainty to support the next generation of coastal change projections. We also highlight transdisciplinary opportunities for making this information more accessible and useful to support decision-making in the coastal zone. This includes consideration of different levels of user engagement to address specific needs, as well as resources and mechanisms that can support knowledge transfer broadly. A central recommendation is the development of a coordinated framework to support research integration including three components: accounting for relevant drivers, processes, and feedbacks; working with users to identify their information needs; and generating meaningful projections and uncertainty. Actions that would support such frameworks include the evaluation of models through coordinated research approaches and multi-model comparisons; ongoing investments in observations and data-driven approaches necessary to understand this complex environment; expansion of modeling capabilities using novel techniques; prioritization of co-development efforts between researchers and users; and continued training and support for transdisciplinary research.

Alaska, California, Florida, New York↗
USGS2025

Responding to ecological transformation in Capitol Reef National Park, Utah—Employee perspectives from pilot interviews from the Cross-Park Resist-Assist-Direct Project

Executive Summary Climate change is causing a range of changes that can affect the natural, cultural, and built resources of the Nation’s protected areas and affect opportunities to visit and recreate in these spaces. Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns also affect species and habitats, leading to ecological transformation. This report describes findings from pilot research conducted in Capitol Reef National Park, Utah (hereinafter referred to as “Capitol Reef” or “the Park”) as part of a larger interagency study of how National Park Service (NPS) staff are considering management of transforming ecosystems. Semi-structured interviews were used to assess how Capitol Reef employees (n=9) understand the challenge of ecological transformation, including their perceptions of how climate change is affecting the Park’s natural and cultural resources, the multiple timeframes over which employees respond to climate change impacts, and their awareness and understanding of ecological transformation and the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework, which was developed to address ecological transformation, that is, ecosystems changing in response to changes in climate conditions (Schuurman and others, 2020, 2022). The interviews also solicited employee perceptions about constraints and enabling factors that allow Capitol Reef to effectively respond to ecological transformation. The report uses a conceptual framework that has been used by the National Park Service Climate Change Response Program (Clifford and others, 2022) to structure the reporting of the data about constraints and enabling factors, with sections describing the role of factors internal to an individual employee (culture, worldviews, and understanding of an ecological system) and contextual factors external to an individual (institutional context, social feasibility and scientific uncertainty as influenced by available scientific information). Participating Capitol Reef staff perceived the most pressing climate impacts in the Park as increasing air temperatures, aridity, and flash floods, which are impacting natural and cultural resources, public safety, and infrastructure. Staff mostly agreed on what the future landscape (approximately 50 years into the future) may look like at Capitol Reef in terms of changes in vegetation and future temperature and precipitation conditions. However, staff had more divergent views or were uncertain about how specific species will adapt to future conditions (for example, how endemic plants might shift their ranges) and are grappling with which management strategies to take at which times. Staff also had differing opinions about how much data is needed to prompt action. Interviewees agreed that leadership in the Park had made climate change a priority and created a climate-attuned culture among staff. Participating employees described the park culture at Capitol Reef as collaborative, with frequent communication and work across divisions, which, as an example, shapes responses to flash floods and other events (for example, working across divisions on search and rescue, or repairing fencing that is washed out by storms). This collaborative, climate-attuned culture may help Capitol Reef in future problem-solving as it grapples with how to respond to climate change and ecological transformation in the Park.

Utah↗
USGS2025

RAD (Resist-Accept-Direct) switch points and triggers for adaptation planning

Climate change is transforming ecosystems globally. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework has gained traction within many natural resource management institutions to help consider the decision space in response to this transformation. Because RAD helps manage for directional change, RAD choices entail considering which RAD pathway to implement and for how long. For example, one may accept a slowly changing ecosystem, but at a certain point, decide to begin resisting or directing the change an ecosystem is experiencing. Alternatively, one may begin resisting an ecosystem transformation, but ultimately realize resistance is no longer feasible based on cost or efficacy. These choices are challenging and encompass broad domains of cultural, ecological, financial, organizational, public, regulatory, and technological considerations to determine when to switch RAD pathways. We introduce the concepts of RAD switch points and triggers to help support these decision processes. We illustrate these concepts using case studies on walleye ( Sander vitreus ) stocking decisions in Wisconsin, wildfire response in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and bull trout ( Salvelinus confluentus ) management in Oregon, USA. Synthesizing across these examples, we delineate key points for decision makers as they (iteratively) reevaluate among the RAD pathways as conditions continue to change.

Journal of Environmental Management↗
USGS2025

Constraints and enablers for meaningful consideration of plural values through integration of cultural ecosystem services (CES) in decision-making

This chapter presents and applies five constraint/enabler categories that influence integration of the plural values of cultural ecosystem services (CES) in decision-making, highlighting how diverse forms of CES knowledge can intersect with decision making contexts. CES make foundational contributions to human well-being, and yet they are consistently underrepresented in research products intended to inform decision-making. In particular, the relational and holistic values associated with CES categories such as cultural identity and maintenance of knowledge systems have been inadequately conveyed through existing instrumental approaches to ecosystem service assessment and ecosystem valuation. In this chapter we detail (1) a spectrum of forms in which CES knowledge may be conveyed to inform decision-making and (2) constraints and enabling factors that influence whether plural CES values are meaningfully considered in decision-making. This chapter considers how these constraints/enablers commonly influence integration of distinct CES knowledge forms in natural resource management decision contexts. Examples are then offered from case study research on Elwha River dam removal decision-making (Washington state, USA). These examples illustrate that factors commonly constraining integration of diverse CES knowledge forms can transform into enablers for meaningful consideration of relational values and holistic value perspectives, alongside instrumental values. The chapter concludes with takeaways for decision-makers, managers, and those who hold CES knowledge and seek to convey plural CES values to inform decision-making.

Book chapter↗
USGS2024

Facilitating psychological safety in science and research teams

Science is increasingly dependent on large teams working well together. Co-creating knowledge in this way, usually across disciplines and institutions, requires team members to feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks with each other; in other words, to have what is known as “psychological safety”. Although the importance of psychological safety for team functioning is increasingly well understood, the behaviours necessary to foster psychological safety are harder to define. We suggest that science facilitation expertise offers a path forward for scientific teams – particularly through the integration of outside facilitators or team members taking on the facilitation role – to identify dynamics that can promote or curtail psychological safety, interpret those dynamics accurately, and intervene appropriately to shift a group towards greater psychological safety. We describe how specific practices can support this cycle of observation, interpretation, and action to promote psychological safety across the team process and at key moments. We conclude with recommendations for how research teams might embed these facilitation practices into their work, and how institutions can drive more widespread recognition and development of the expertise needed to cultivate psychologically safe scientific teams.

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications↗
USGS2024

Community for Data Integration 2020 project report

The U.S. Geological Survey Community for Data Integration annually funds small projects focusing on data integration for interdisciplinary research, innovative data management, and demonstration of new technologies. This report provides a summary of the 12 projects funded in fiscal year 2020, outlining their goals, activities, and accomplishments.

Open-File Report↗
USGS2024

The dynamic feasibility of resisting (R), accepting (A), or directing (D) ecological change

Ecological transformations are occurring as a result of climate change, challenging traditional approaches to land management decision-making. The resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework helps managers consider how to respond to this challenge. We examined how the feasibility of the choices to resist, accept, and direct shifts in complex and dynamic ways through time. We considered 4 distinct types of social feasibility: regulatory, financial, public, and organizational. Our commentary is grounded in literature review and the examples that exist but necessarily has speculative elements because empirical evidence on this newly emerging management strategy is scarce. We expect that resist strategies will become less feasible over time as managers encounter situations where resisting is ecologically, by regulation, financially, or publicly not feasible. Similarly, we expect that as regulatory frameworks increasingly permit their use, if costs decrease, and if the public accepts them, managers will increasingly view accept and direct strategies as more viable options than they do at present. Exploring multiple types of feasibility over time allows consideration of both social and ecological trajectories of change in tandem. Our theorizing suggested that deepening the time horizon of decision-making allows one to think carefully about when one should adopt different approaches and how to combine them over time.

Conservation Biology↗
USGS2024

A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation

The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that is organized around ecological conditions, capacity to act, and motivation to use fire and can integrate and expand intentional fire use as a tool. This result emerges from more considered collaboration and communication of values and needs to address the negative consequences of contemporary fire use. When applied as a communication and translation tool, there is potential to lower barriers to faster and more successful collaboration among stakeholders. Such improvements are a vital part of strategies to address climate adaptation, wildfire mitigation, and the well-being of ecosystems.

Cell Reports Sustainability↗
USGS2024

Flash drought: A state of the science review

In the two decades, since the advent of the term “flash drought,” considerable research has been directed toward the topic. Within the scientific community, we have actively forged a new paradigm that has avoided a chaotic evolution of conventional drought but instead recognizes that flash droughts have distinct dynamics and, particularly, impacts. We have moved beyond the initial debate over the definition of flash drought to a centralized focus on the triad of rapid onset, drought development, and associated impacts. The refinement toward this general set of principles has led to significant progress in determining key variables for monitoring flash drought development, identifying notable case studies, and compiling fundamental physical characteristics of flash drought. However, critical focus areas still remain, including advancing our knowledge on the atmospheric and oceanic drivers of flash drought; developing flash drought-specific detection indices and monitoring systems tailored to practitioners; improving subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction of these events; constraining uncertainty in flash drought and impact projections; and using social science to further our understanding of impacts, particularly with regard to sectors that lie outside of our traditional hydroclimatological focus, such as wildfire management and food-security monitoring. Researchers and stakeholders working together on these critical topics will assure society is resilient to flash drought in a changing climate.

Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota↗
USGS2024

Opportunities for improved consideration of cultural benefits in environmental decision-making

Many cultural benefits of ecosystem services (ES) are difficult to capture in standard ES assessments. Scholars and practitioners often respond to this gap by seeking to develop new scientific methods to capture and integrate the plural values associated with diverse cultural benefits categories. This increasing emphasis on value pluralism represents an essential step toward recognitional justice within ES theory and practice. However, current approaches continue to rest on the assumption that ES-knowledge is only made available to decision-makers through scientific documentation. As a result, scholars and decision-makers fail to account for the role of knowledge pluralism as a core element of recognitional justice, and a key enabling factor for meaningful consideration of the plural values linked to cultural benefits of ES. In this paper, we contribute to a pluralist theory of cultural-benefits-knowledge, and ES-knowledge more broadly. Using a critical interpretive synthesis of environmental management literature, we conceptualize a wider range of knowledge forms that convey cultural benefits, based on the knowledge-as-practice concept in addition to the knowledge-as-product concept more familiar to Western actors. As part of the synthesis, we explore when and how diverse forms of cultural-benefits-knowledge intersect with decision-making processes, and the value aspects and categories of cultural benefits most frequently conveyed by each form of knowledge. Our synthesizing argument offers a critique of the concept of “ES-knowledge-use,” proposing a shift in focus toward “learning opportunities” that exist across phases of decision-making. We demonstrate that attention to a greater diversity of knowledge forms (knowledge pluralism), and a fuller spectrum of opportunities to integrate them (learning opportunities) can support more meaningful consideration of the plural values associated with cultural benefits of ES (value pluralism). In combination, attention to knowledge pluralism and value pluralism can help bring the ES approach into alignment with environmental justice through the recognition and legitimization of multiple identities, well-beings, and human-nature relationships, as reflected in meaningful consideration of the diverse cultural benefits of ES.

Ecosystem Services↗
USGS2023

Critical stakeholder engagement: The road to actionable science Is paved with scientists’ good intentions

To help stakeholders such as planners, resource managers, policymakers, and decision makers address environmental challenges in the Anthropocene, scientists are increasingly creating actionable science—science that is useful, usable, and used. Critical physical geography encourages the engagement of stakeholders in the creation of scientific knowledge to conduct actionable science and produce outputs that are directly relevant to stakeholder plans, decisions, or actions. Many scientists, however, lack formal training in how to partner with stakeholders using effective and ethical practices. In this article, we use the core principles for ethical research of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice from the Belmont Report (1979) as a suggested framework to examine the perspectives of stakeholders engaged in climate adaptation science projects. We argue that this framework aligns with the principles of critical physical geography and provides guidance for scientists to make their research more actionable while placing necessary emphasis on ethical considerations. We also challenge scientists to consider the broader ethical implications of engaging with these partners.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers↗
USGS2023

The patchwork governance of ecologically available water: A case study in the Upper Missouri Headwaters, Montana, United States

Institutional authority and responsibility for allocating water to ecosystems (“ecologically available water” [EAW]) is spread across local, state, and federal agencies, which operate under a range of statutes, mandates, and planning processes. We use a case study of the Upper Missouri Headwaters Basin in southwestern Montana, United States, to illustrate this fragmented institutional landscape. Our goals are to (a) describe the patchwork of agencies and institutional actors whose intersecting authorities and actions influence the EAW in the study basin; (b) describe the range of governance mechanisms these agencies use, including laws, policies, administrative programs, and planning processes; and (c) assess the extent to which the collective governance regime creates gaps in responsibility. We find the water governance regime includes a range of nested mechanisms that in various ways facilitate or hinder the governance of EAW. We conclude the current multilevel governance regime leaves certain aspects of EAW unaddressed and does not adequately account for the interconnections between water in different parts of the ecosystem, creating integrative gaps. We suggest that more intentional and robust coordination could provide a means to address these gaps.

Montana↗
USGS2023

So, you want to build a decision-support tool? Assessing successes, barriers, and lessons learned for tool design and development

The purpose of this study is to increase understanding of how the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is developing decision-support tools (DSTs) by documenting successes and barriers across all levels of USGS scientific tool creation and outreach. These findings will help streamline future tool design and development processes. We provide a synthesis of lessons learned and best practices across a spectrum of USGS decision-support efforts to, A, provide guidance to future efforts and, B, identify knowledge gaps and opportunities for knowledge transfer and integration. We present this information as five guiding principles for those striving to create effective DSTs. These principles are: (1) use an adaptive, iterative design process, (2) collaborate across disciplines and organizations, (3) engage with the target users of the tool, (4) develop an empirical understanding of use and usability, and (5) plan for the tool’s full life span. By providing guidance on how effective DSTs are realized at every phase of development (from planning to maintenance), these principles provide a starting point to improve the process of designing DSTs and thus help further the USGS mission of delivering actionable science.

Scientific Investigations Report↗
USGS2023

Becoming an actionable scientist: Challenges, competency, and the development of expertise

Demand has grown for actionable science to support real-world decision-making around climate change and related environmental management challenges. Producing actionable science requires scientists to hold a distinct set of competencies, yet relatively little is known about what these competencies are or how to train scientists to develop them. We conducted interviews with mid- and late-career scientists to empirically identify competencies they used when producing actionable science and to understand how they developed those competencies. We describe expertise in terms of 18 competencies—categorised as cognitive, interpersonal, or intrapersonal—that scientists integrated and applied to address the challenges associated with actionable science. We argue that scientists must engage in the social process of producing actionable science (i.e., learning by doing) to become an expert. Expert actionable scientists discussed the importance of learning through different contexts, processes, interactions, and relationships. By naming the competencies that constitute expertise, as well as methods for expertise development, our findings facilitate greater conscious awareness of the process of becoming an actionable scientist, a gradual process that starts during graduate training and continues as a career proceeds. Our results can inform the development of formal learning opportunities as well as the informal learning process that occurs whereby scientists take charge of their own learning.

Environmental Management↗