Format/Structure

Traditional presentations and discussion of the critical political ecology of statistical and geospatial modeling approached to the study of people and the environment

Long Abstract

Ecological and environmental sciences have evolved in close relation with capitalism and colonialism (Grove, 1996; Lewontin and Levins, 2007; Liboiron, 2021; Tilley, 2011). Political ecologists have a long history of drawing knowledges of ecology, environment, and the politics of this knowledge into question (Butt and Turner, 2012; Blaikie, 1985; Goldman, 2007; Lave et al., 2014; Turner, 1993). This work has shown how scientific epistemologies can be reductive of how they consider scale, land use, livelihood systems, political boundaries, and ecosystem dynamics, and in doing so can provide empirical support to the interests of dominant actors (Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Davis, 2016). Given the proliferation of new types and amounts of data, together with both increased computational capacity and machine learning approaches, there is a need for increased scrutiny to track how statistical and geospatial modeling can become laden with values. These approaches can create a sense of unprecedented generality, rigor, and certainty, but can also mask and compound errors and uncertainties, and “misread” landscapes and livelihoods in new ways. The outputs of these analyses can have profound implications for local communities: they can support crisis narratives that override local decision-making processes, legitimize top-down planning, and justify forced exclusions and other more subtle configurations of access to land. Beyond understanding the implications of ecological data and analysis for extending power, there is also a need for alternative analyses that highlight relationships between people and non-human nature that dominant approaches obscure. Recent examples include Schell et al. (2020), Sze et al. (2022), and Xu and Butt (2024).

We welcome a range of contributions, including but not limited to:

- biodiversity threat mapping

- remote sensing and earth observation

- ecosystem dynamics and change

- landscape connectivity and corridors

- community and population ecology

- drivers of wildlife population dynamics

- climate change

This Panel has 7 pending paper proposals.
Propose paper