Corrine Noel Knapp

University of Wyoming | UW · Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources

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 w...

Earth is experiencing widespread ecological transformation in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems that is attributable to directional environmental changes, especially intensifying climate change. To better steward ecosystems facing unprecedented and lasting change, a new management paradigm is forming, supported by a decision-oriented f...

Ecological transformation creates many challenges for public natural resource management and requires managers to grapple with new relationships to change and new ways to manage it. In the context of unfamiliar trajectories of ecological change, a manager can resist, accept, or direct change, choices that make up the resist-accept-direct (RAD) fram...

While increasing numbers of ranchers are striving to demonstrate sustainable ranching operations geared toward a healthy landscape, companies are seeking to advance sustainability along beef supply chains and consumers are making more environmentally oriented purchasing choices. Yet there is a need for greater clarity on which indicators are most e...

Changing biophysical conditions due to amplified climate change in northern latitudes has significant implications for species' habitat and populations and can dramatically alter interactions between harvesters and local resources. Tribal, regional, and state governments, federal agencies, and other local planning entities have begun documenting ob...

Pastoralists and researchers (and others) are finding new ways of working together worldwide, attempting to sustain pastoral livelihoods and rangelands in the face of rapid and profound changes driven by globalization, growing consumption, land-use change, and climate change. They are doing this partly because of a greater need to address increasin...

Ranching communities in 10 Western states self‐organized to create conservation organizations affiliated with state livestock associations and supporting conservation efforts compatible with agricultural production. These “rangeland trusts” collectively conserve over 2.7 million acres through conservation easements. We identify these efforts as a t...

Many rural communities in the Western United States are surrounded by public lands and are dependent on these landscapes for their livelihoods. Climate change threatens to effect land-based livelihoods, both through direct impacts and public land agency decision-making in response to impacts. This project was designed to understand how Bureau of La...

Many western communities are surrounded by public lands that support land-based and local economies. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) decision-making affects the vulnerability of those land-based livelihoods, especially in the context of climate change. We analyzed Colorado BLM planning documents to evaluate how they are considering climate change,...

Changing disturbance regimes and climate across western North America have the potential to drive major losses and shifts in vegetation types. These changes may collectively be termed “type conversion”, yet lacking a formal definition, this term may be variously interpreted. To better understand how land managers and researchers perceive disturbanc...

Complex sustainability problems (e.g., climate change) are challenging to understand and manage, leading to an increase in approaches that connect scholars to society and research to action (collaborative approaches). The transdisciplinary approach (TDA) represents one such approach. While TDA is new to many, there are several prior collaborative a...

On the Ground •To be successful, producers must interpret environmental stimuli and respond with management actions that help match their production operations to the ecosystem services they depend on. Climate change, and the increased variability that will likely result, may lessen the relevance of historical rules of thumb and management heurist...

This report was created to help the Colorado division of the Bureau of Land Management to better understand how climate-related stressors (e.g., drought, changes in spring runoff, wildfires) impact the livelihoods and daily operations of public land permittees involved in the grazing and special recreation programs. In addition to climate stressors...

Scenario planning is a flexible tool used to assess a broad range of plausible, relevant, divergent, and challenging futures, for short-term responses and long-term planning. Scenario planning has gained popularity in natural resource management for addressing uncertainties associated with climate change, but the literature contains few retrospecti...

In recent years, federal land management agencies in the United States have been tasked to consider climate change vulnerability and adaptation in their planning. Ecological vulnerability approaches have been the dominant framework, but these approaches have significant limitations for fully understanding vulnerability in complex social-ecological...

Unlike much of the contiguous United States, new hydropower development continues in the Far North, where climate models project precipitation will likely increase over the next century. Regional complexities in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, such as glacier recession and permafrost thaw, however, introduce uncertainties about the hydrologic responses...

Unlike much of the contiguous United States, new hydropower development continues in the Far North, where climate models project precipitation will likely increase over the next century. Regional complexities in the Arctic and sub- Arctic, such as glacier recession and permafrost thaw, however, introduce uncertainties about the hydrologic responses...

The call for integrated social–environmental science, complete with outreach to applications and solutions, is escalating worldwide. Drawing on several decades of experience, researchers engaged in such science, completed an assessment of the design and management attributes and impact pathways that lead to successful projects and programs and to u...

This paper describes the integration of social–ecological science with traditional knowledge to address global-change challenges faced by indigenous communities in rural Alaska. The Community Partnership for Self-Reliance is a novel boundary organization that uses community visions for self-reliance, based on local and traditional knowledge, to lin...

Resilience thinking is increasingly used as both a theoretical framework and as a tool for managing and governing social and social–ecological systems. However, resilience may lead to undesirable outcomes if it fails to critically engage with issues of power, justice and equity, or what we call the politics of resilience. This potential pitfall can...

The Gunnison sage-grouse (GUSG) is an iconic species recently proposed for protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In Colorado’s Upper Gunnison River Basin, ranchers own the majority of water rights and productive river bottoms as well as approximately 30% of the most important GUSG habitat. This project used mixed-methods interviews wit...

Alaska residents are already feeling the tangible impacts of climate change and are concerned about future impacts. In response, they have generated a large quantity of documents that describe their climate change-related research needs. This paper reviews and codes 63 stakeholder-generated documents that address climate change research needs in Al...

The Gunnison Sage-grouse (GUSG) is an iconic species recently proposed for protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In Colorado’s Upper Gunnison River Basin, ranchers own the majority of water rights and productive river bottoms, and approximately 30% of the most important GUSG habitat. This project used a mix of survey and interview ques...

Faced with numerous seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, many scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how to actively engage and transform the existing systems holding such problems in place. Although a variety of analytical models have emerged in recent years, most emphasize either the social o...

Climate change challenges the traditional goals and conservation strategies of protected areas, necessitating adaptation to changing conditions. Denali National Park and Preserve (Denali) in south central Alaska, USA, is a vast landscape that is responding to climate change in ways that will impact both ecological resources and local communities. L...

Alaska is warming twice as fast as the global average. These environmental changes interact with social and economic changes and have particularly strong impacts on rural indigenous communities that depend on their biophysical environment for food, access to the land and sea, and their sense of identity. Many of the observations of indigenous hunte...

Building models is an important way of integrating knowledge. Testing and updating models of social-ecological systems can inform management decisions and, ultimately, improve resilience. We report on the outcomes of a six-year, multidisciplinary model development process in the sagebrush steppe, USA. We focused on creating state-and-transition mod...

Background/Question/Methods Both climate and socioeconomic conditions are changing rapidly in Alaska. Rural Alaskan indigenous communities, which are disconnected from the road system and electricity grid, face the highest cost of fuel and other commercial goods in the U.S. but have few jobs and insufficient income to pay these costs. The Alaska...

Successful conservation requires adequate understanding of focal species and ecology, practices that may assist species survival, and a community of people willing and able to conserve the species. For many species at risk, we operate with imperfect knowledge in complex conservation contexts. In this case study involving the Gunnison sage-grouse (C...

Background/Question/Methods Sustainability science has emerged as an interdisciplinary response to the complex challenge of maintaining Earth’s life support functions during the Anthropocene. Recognizing that our most intractable and urgent ecological problems required the explicit consideration of our economies, cultures and institutions, Terry...

State-and-transition models (STMs) are being developed for many areas in the United States and represent an important tool for assessing and managing public and private rangelands. Substantial resources have been invested in model development, yet minimal efforts have been made to evaluate the utility of STMs for rangeland assessment and management...

Current environmental and health challenges require us to identify ways to better align aesthetics, ecology, and health. At the local level, community gardens are increasingly praised for their therapeutic qualities. They also provide a lens through which we can explore relational processes that connect people, ecology and health. Using key-informa...

State-and-transition models (STMs) depict current understanding of vegetation dynamics and are being created for most ecological sites in the United States. Model creation is challenging due to inadequate long-term data, and most STMs rely on expert knowledge. There has been little systematic documentation of how different types of knowledge have b...

The State-and-transition models (STM) require information about how vegetation has changed over time in response to management and environment. However, long-term monitoring data for each ecological site are rarely available. Many recently developed STMs rely on the local knowledge (LK) of natural resource professionals and are supported by monitor...

For more than 150 years, ranchers in the West have gained insight about natural systems through daily interaction and management of landscapes, but this knowledge has never been systematically documented and analyzed. We interviewed 26 ranchers from a single watershed to understand how ranchers acquire their knowledge, document what they know about...

Arid and semiarid rangelands often behave unpredictably in response to management actions and environmental stressors, making it difficult for ranchers to manage for long-term sustainability. State-and-transition models (STMs) depict current understanding of vegetation responses to management and environmental change in box-and-arrow diagrams. They...

Lack of long-term ecological monitoring presents a challenge for sustainable rangeland management in many areas of the western United States. Ranchers and other land managers have local knowledge gained from ongoing experience in specific places that could be useful for understanding ecological change and best management practices. Local knowledge...