July 2013: Biennial International Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), Baltimore, MD

Re: Call for oral presentation abstracts for the ICCB 2013 meeting (July 21-25 – Baltimore, MD, USA) related to the Symposium Title: – Mobilizing Inter-disciplinary complex systems approaches for the study and management of conservation conflicts.

Summary:

Environmental, wildlife or other conservation-related conflicts are often complex non-linear phenomena that are frequently composed of many interrelated issues and factors. These disputes may also become conjoined with, nested in, or surrogates for entrenched broader socio-economic struggles between stakeholder groups, making their resolution particularly challenging. Because of the complexity in these conflict systems, which frequently include multiple reciprocal feedbacks and time lags, their analysis and management are by necessity multidisciplinary, and also require a departure from the traditional linear short-term cause and effect reductionist paradigms that have historically defined our frameworks of understanding, investigating, and managing threats to biodiversity conservation. This symposium focuses on and advocates for complex systems perspectives in environmental and biodiversity conservation-related conflict analysis, and aims to illuminate the emerging methodological and modeling techniques for understanding and managing conservation conflicts.

We encourage practitioners and researchers involved in cutting-edge science or practice using critical systems perspectives, conflict mapping, and dynamical systems theory (among other) approaches for the analysis and management of environmental/biodiversity related conflicts to participate through oral paper presentations. We also encourage professionals from outside the conservation field whose methods and approaches may inform conservation science to also submit abstracts for consideration for the symposium, in addition to informing the synthesis manuscript that will form an output of the symposium. This symposium aims to deepen our understanding of the complex causes, effects and approaches to the study and management of conflicts affecting biodiversity conservation. We aim to involve academics, managers, decision makers, and conservation practitioner audiences to foster new approaches able to inform research design, decision-making, programs and policies important for conservation conflict management.

Kindly send potential oral presentation abstracts to lrd2107@columbia.edu by Friday October 19th. Abstracts must be limited to no more than 250 words. The abstract should include a brief description of the purpose of the work, how the issue/problem was studied/investigated, the principal findings, including the implications of the work. The organizing committee will choose the 6 most relevant abstracts received for participation and contact all those submitting abstracts by October 25th. We look forward to hearing from you and encourage you to contact us should you have questions or require further information!

Organizers:

1. Leo Douglas, Ph.D. – Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), New York City.
2. Francine Madden – Human-Wildlife Conflict Collaboration (HWCC), Washington DC.
3. Joshua Fisher, Ph.D. – Advanced Consortium for Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4), Columbia University, New York City.

Key Words:

system dynamics; interdisciplinary conservation research; environmental conflicts.