Damon M Hall

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Verified

Damon verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Northeastern University

Insect pollinators are becoming visible to societies. Many peer-reviewed papers evidence biophysical and ecological aspects of managed and non-managed insect pollinators. Evidence on stressors of declines yield peer-reviewed calls for action. Yet, iInsect pollinator declines are inherently a human issue, driven by a history of land-use trends, chan...

Transformative research in freshwater ecosystems requires successfully engaging an array of stakeholders. Local community members are experts of the social and ecological systems in which they are embedded and can improve scientific research in many ways. We outline several steps for researchers to engage local experts specifically by focusing on m...

Citizen science is personal. Participation is contingent on the citizens’ connection to a topic or to interpersonal relationships meaningful to them. But from the peer-reviewed literature, scientists appear to have an acquisitive data-centered relationship with citizens. This has spurred ethical and pragmatic criticisms of extractive relationships...

National attention to the severe Missouri River flooding in 2019 led to a joint agreement between Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to engage in a system-wide flood resiliency study: the Lower Missouri River Flood Risk & Resiliency Study (LoMo Study). The LoMo Study authorizes the USACE a unique ra...

Riverine flooding is increasing in frequency and intensity, requiring river management agencies to consider new approaches to working with communities on flood mitigation planning. Communication and information sharing between agencies and communities is complex, and mistrust and misinformation arise quickly when communities perceive that they are...

The places we inhabit are meaningful to us. Through lives lived somewhere, people learn its ecological and social systems. This direct knowing of natural processes and people leads to greater sensitivity and perceptibility to change. This chapter articulates the authority that comes from dwelling in a place and how different meanings of a place man...

Riverine flooding is increasing in frequency and intensity, requiring river management agencies to consider new approaches to working with communities on flood mitigation planning. Communication and information sharing between agencies and communities is complex, and mistrust and misinformation arise quickly when communities perceive that they are...

Although urban greenspace enhances ecological functioning and human well-being through ecosystem services (ES), it is oftentimes inequitably distributed. Environmental justice (EJ) encompasses aspects of distributive, procedural, and interactive justice related to accessibility and allocation of environmental benefits. Vacant land in shrinking citi...

Streamflow droughts are receiving increased attention worldwide due to their impact on the environment and economy. One region of concern is the Midwestern United States, whose agricultural productivity depends on subsurface pipes known as tile drains to improve trafficability and soil conditions for crop growth. Tile drains accomplish this by rapi...

Citizen science yields increased scientific capacity in exchange for science literacy and promises of a more responsive science to society’s needs. Yet, citizen science projects are criticized for producing few scientific outputs and having exploitative relationships with the citizens who participate. In the eagerness to capture new data, scientist...

Nature‐based solutions (NbS, and related concepts like natural infrastructure, Ecosystem‐based Adaptation, and green infrastructure) are increasingly recognized as multi‐benefit strategies for addressing the critical sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene, including the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. Mainstreaming NbS in professi...

Understanding how food systems could change and evolve in the future is essential for scientists and decision-makers across sectors to make informed policy decisions. For effective and salient policy, engaging citizens, especially young generations, who will experience those policies firsthand is crucial. This work aims to define and test new food...

Waste management is a critical sector that needs to co-ordinate its activities with outcomes that impact society. Multi-criteria decision-making methods for waste management have been widely considered using environmental and economic criteria. With the development of new social regulations and concerns, sustainable waste management needs to additi...

In July 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the iconic North American monarch butterflies ( Danaus plexippus ) as Endangered because of population declines of 91% since 1996. Yet, in the United States, there are no national laws protecting monarchs. In 2020, the US Fish and Wildlife Service determined that monarchs are “...

The endangered California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) is negatively affected by lead poisoning from spent lead-based hunting ammunition. Because lead poisoning is the primary mortality factor affecting condors, the California Fish and Game Commission banned lead hunting ammunition during 2008 in the southern California condor range followed by...

The 2019 flooding in the Lower Missouri River and anticipated impacts of future flood events on flood mitigation infrastructure are changing how repetitive-loss communities are thinking about the flood control structures they live with. Recent innovations to address chronic flooding, such as water storage, levee setback realignments, and changing f...

Agroforestry plantings offer a promising ecologically based solution to address agricultural resource concerns while simultaneously achieving conservation goals, because they provide multiple benefits including reduced soil erosion, decreased nutrient runoff, increased biodiversity and greater farm income stability. Despite these benefits, the adop...

Half the world's population resides within 310 transboundary lake and river basins shared among 151 riparian nations. Approximately 60% of these basins lack cooperative frameworks to share water. The complexities of sharing water necessitate identifying approaches for managing transboundary international freshwater resources. While much has been wr...

Agroforestry practices offer a compelling addition to conventional agriculture as they provide a broad range of economic, ecological, and social benefits. Despite its recognized potential, broad on‐the‐ground adoption of U.S. agroforestry remains limited. Factors influencing agroforestry adoption and dissemination bottlenecks by actual practitioner...

Civic engagement in adults may be influenced by their participation as young people in environmental action programs. To assess this hypothesis, we conducted a case study to see if an environmental action program at the St. Louis Zoo impacted participants’ civic engagement in respect to positive youth development practices. During 2019, we surveyed...

Sustainability offers a vision for business and society that benefits Earth. Yet sustainability is often taught in abstract and disconnected ways. With the Yellowstone River Valley of Montana as its setting, this book introduces readers to sustainability issues, theory, and science. It addresses business profitability, physical environment process...

Sustainable production and consumption of food systems cannot be achieved without considering the entirety of the supply chain and the actors involved at each stage along the way. This requires more in-depth analyses of social dimensions often neglected in favor of the environmental and economic ones. Yet, inattention to the social dimension of sus...

Insect pollinator populations, critical to the global food supply, are declining. Research has found robust bee communities in cities, which are supported by diverse urban habitat and foraging resources. Accounting for 35–50% of urban green space, U.S. private residential yards can serve as important forage and nesting sources for pollinators. Inco...

Gilbertz SJ, Emerson MR, Kidd K, Hall DM. 2021. Yellowstone River Cultural Inventory - 2018: Summary Report of all Segments. Co-Sponsored by the Yellowstone River Conservation District Council, with funding from the US Army Corps of Engineers. 468663 Planning Assistance Study MT. 111 pages.

Ongoing and projected changes in climate are expected to alter discharge and water temperature in riverine systems, thus resulting in degraded habitat. Climate adaptation management strategies are proposed to serve as buffers to changes in air temperature and precipitation, with these strategies potentially providing relatively stable protection fo...

Climate change and encroachment of human infrastructure have altered the flow regimes and channel morphology of the world's major rivers. At the same time, expanding pipeline networks continue to transport hazardous materials around and under these changing river systems. The interaction of these phenomena has produced a series of incidents-notably...

Wildlife and human health are at risk of lead exposure from spent hunting ammunition. Lead exposure persists for bald eagles due to bullet fragments in game animal gut piles and unretrieved carcasses, and is also a human health risk when wild game is procured using lead ammunition. Programs encouraging the voluntary use of nonlead ammunition have b...

Hunting is a popular activity but continued use of lead ammunition poses risks to wildlife and human health. To inform adoption of the voluntary use of nonlead ammunition, natural resource professionals were surveyed to understand their attitudes about threats to bald eagles, lead poisoning in bald eagles, human health risks from lead bullet fragme...

Small streams often lack reliable hydrological data. Environmental agencies play a key role in providing such data; however, these agencies are often challenged by the growing monitoring needs and lack of funding. Given the spatial mismatch between observed data and small watersheds/headwaters, local volunteers can act as potentially valuable resea...

“Yellowstone River Cultural Inventory-2012: Summary Report of all Segments.” Co-Sponsored by the Yellowstone River Conservation District Council, with funding from the US Army Corps of Engineers. 468663 Planning Assistance Study MT. 94 pages.

A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: Socio-political evaluation of energy deployment Renewable energy-systems Stakeholder engagement Technology development Wind turbine siting Site assessment tool A B S T R A C T Despite the benefits of renewable energy-including mitigation of climate change, emission-free electricity generation, and public health benef...

This project examines sub-national legislative policy to identify trends and describe policy innovations for addressing insect pollinator declines. Content analysis is used to describe these policies quantitatively (number of policies and frequency per year) and qualitatively (topic, comparison of policy instruments used). The policies selected con...

Citizen science-based approaches to monitor the natural environment tend to be bimodal in maturity. Older and established programs such as the Audubon’s Christmas bird count and Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) have thousands of participants across decades of observations, while less mature citizen science projects ha...

We analyze perspectives on watershed governance articulated by community leaders along the Yellowstone River (Montana, U.S.A.). These leaders framed watershed governance as a process of negotiating tensions between individual rights and equality for all, embracing diverse viewpoints while achieving broad policy agreement, and acknowledging the cons...

Ongoing changes in climate are expected to alter current species’ habitat and potentially result in shifts in species distributions. While climatic conditions are important to a species’ ability to persist in an area, for many taxa, other environmental factors, such as geology, land cover, and topography, are also important for providing suitable h...

Global insect pollinator declines are caused by human behaviors of land uses, habitat alteration, pesticides, and others. Policies—as mutually agreed-upon limits to behaviors to achieve shared values—are necessary for addressing complex social-ecological problems like declines of insect pollinator diversity and abundance. Despite scientific calls a...

In 2013, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation engaged twenty citizens with diverse water interests as the Yellowstone Basin Advisory Council (YBAC). The purpose of the YBAC was to provide basin-specific recommendations for an updated water plan. Our research group documented the degree to which the YBAC incorporated scientif...

Although lead poisoning in North American waterfowl has been reduced, it persists among other wildlife. To address this issue, we review lead poisoning in wildlife and threats to human health, describe the recent socio‐political landscape, and develop a framework for reducing lead exposure related to hunting ammunition and fishing tackle. Despite s...

In the United States, residential yards are typically overlooked for biodiversity conservation, yet they account for a significant portion of urban green space. Yard vegetation can serve as valuable habitat patches for insect pollinator populations in cities, providing important foraging and nesting resources. Based on long-term native bee sampling...

Google Street View and geospatial video mapping have been successfully employed to inventory neighborhood environments in a variety of disciplines. However, virtual survey approaches have yet to be leveraged fully for fine-scale auditing of ecological characteristics in urban contexts. Here we propose a method combining Google Street View and geosp...

Finding viable solutions to complex problems in sustainability science requires efforts to understand relationships between societies and physical environments. Ecosystem models and social-ecological systems models for decision making can be improved by integrating informed citizen and practitioner expertise into model building. Participatory model...

This study deepens our understanding of the institutional limitations of participatory water planning. Based on an analysis of a participatory planning effort in Montana, U.S.A., we examine the ways in which prior appropriation (PA), an established legal doctrine based on privatized water rights, both constrains and enables the effective functionin...

This paper uses the case of recent efforts in the Yellowstone River watershed to illuminate how the implementation of Integrated Water Resources (IWRM)-styled activities by a Montana state agency is best understood as an exercise in practical expediency that indirectly, but consequentially, supports hegemonic neo-liberalism. We present an innovativ...

Sustainability science is a solution-oriented discipline. Yet, there are few theory-rich discussions about how this orientation structures the efforts of sustainability science. We argue that Niklas Luhmann’s social system theory, which explains how societies communicate problems, conceptualize solutions, and identify pathways towards implementatio...

To transition towards sustainability and increase low-impact transportation, city planners are integrating bicycle infrastructure in urban landscapes. Yet, this infrastructure only promotes cycling according to how well it is sited within a specific city. How to best site bicycle facilities is essential for sustainability planning. We review approa...

Urban ecology research is changing how we view the biological value and ecological importance of cities. Lagging behind this revised image of the city are natural resource management agencies' urban conservation programs that historically have invested in education and outreach rather than programs designed to achieve high-priority species conserva...

Pollinator health (species richness and abundance) is in decline globally and recognized as a crisis by governments, scientists, and the public. Specifically, bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) are critical both ecologically and economically to wild and managed crops worldwide. The potential causes of reduced pollinator richness and abundance are linked t...

Bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) are critical to crop production globally. In the last decade, significant declines in managed and native bee health have been documented, and it is now widely considered a “crisis.” The potential causes of reduced wild bee health (species richness and abundance) relate to land-use decisions, practices, and management inc...

This paper chronicles the rhetorical mechanisms that fostered a potentially radical re-thinking of water rights and property in a most unlikely place: the libertarian Western U.S., and mobilized by the least likely of actors: state officials. There is growing interest, in geography and beyond, in the question of what constitutes the ‘‘properly poli...

The role of a particular aspect of collaboration, dissensus, in stimulating critical reconsideration of ‘prior appropriation’, a historically hegemonic condition related to water rights in the western United States, is examined via a collaborative planning effort in Montana. Consensual support for a water-use measuring proposal was undermined by st...

We explored the communicative construction of a conservationist identity among primary producers by excavating voices of agriculturalists operating along the Yellowstone River (Montana, USA). We used a cultural inventory approach to discover and then listen to informants’ voices as they constructed their conservation identity. Those who selfidentif...

Shaping policy for environmental sustainability depends upon decision-makers conceptualizing problems in ways that are either shared or similar enough to communicate about, diagnose, and act. The quality of this shared mental model of a social–ecological system (SES) is paramount to its effectiveness. Fundamentally, the mental model must integrate...

Shaping policy for environmental sustainability depends upon decision-makers conceptualizing problems in ways that are either shared or similar enough to communicate about, diagnose, and act. The quality of this shared mental model of a social–ecological system (SES) is paramount to its effectiveness. Fundamentally, the mental model must integrate...

While dealing with weather variability has always been a source of stress for farmers, a generally warmer, wetter climate with the potential for increasingly intensive precipitation poses a threat to long-term farm viability. Knowing how farmers think about increasingly variable weather patterns (IVWP) is important for educators, agency staff, and...

Places are specific locations within a landscape that humans have bound, ordered, and defined by communication. Conflict arises when groups must reconcile different ways they socially represent a shared place. Because land managers cannot control the spectrum of meaningful representations of a managed site, they need to understand how representatio...

Based on the inputs of nearly 150 public participants, the Yellowstone Basin Advisory Council (BAC) presents the findings of their scoping efforts in this report. Having engaged roundtable discussions, demographic surveys, Q Sort surveys, and written comments as their primary means of collecting public inputs, the Yellowstone BAC was able to discer...

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has received abundant federal support in the USA as an energy technology to mitigate climate change, yet its position within the energy system remains uncertain. Because media play a significant role in shaping public conversations about science and technology, we analyzed media portrayal of CCS in newspapers from f...

Over the past decade, the United States (US) has demonstrated strong and evolving interest in the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS), an emerging set of technologies with potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Given the many technical, economic, and environmental uncertainties about the future of CCS...

Community-engaged decision-making and management mark a change in philosophy and practice of shared-resource governance. Moving from national to local scales of agency coordination and public engagement requires equivalent change in the scale of useful social science data. Upon recognizing landowners and resource users as allies in policy implement...

Community-engaged decision-making and management mark a change in philosophy and practice of shared-resource governance. Moving from national to local scales of agency coordination and public engagement requires equivalent change in the scale of useful social science data. Upon recognizing landowners and resource users as allies in policy implement...

Environmental communication scholarship is critical to the success of sustainability science. This essay outlines three pressing areas of intersection between the two fields. First, environmental communication scholarship on public participation processes is essential for sustainability science's efforts to link knowledge with action. Second, susta...

An overview of how research carried out through Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI) improves traditional models of science by providing a fuller picture of the interaction between social and ecological systems. They provide examples of university-community research partnerships, where there is a continuous communication and feedback p...

The Yellowstone River is the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 states. Traveling unfettered for more than 600 before its confluence with the Missouri River, the river and its basin support wide ranging natural resource based economic activities, including mining, oil and gas production, extensive wildlife habitat, ranching, farming and tou...

Perceptions of the potential of emerging technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) are constructed not just through technical and economic processes but also through discourse, i.e. through compelling narratives about what a technology is, what a technology might become and why it is needed and preferable to competing technologies. The inf...

As climate change mitigation gains attention in the United States, low-carbon energy technologies such as wind power encounter both opportunities and barriers en route to deployment. This paper provides a state-level context for examining wind power deployment and presents research on how policy stakeholders perceive wind energy in four states: Mas...

Conservationists commonly have framed ecological concerns in economic terms to garner political support for conservation and to increase public interest in preserving global biodiversity. Beginning in the early 1980s, conservation biologists adapted neoliberal economics to reframe ecosystem functions and related biodiversity as ecosystem services t...

Los conservacionistas com´unmente han enmarcado las preocupaciones ecol´ogicas en t´erminos econ´omicos para recabar apoyo pol´ıtico para la conservaci´on y para incrementar el inter´es p´ublico en la preservaci´on de la biodiversidad. A inicios de la d´ecada de 1980, los bi´ologos de la conservaci´on adoptaron la econom´ıa neoliberal para enmarcar...

The Yellowstone River Cultural Inventory — 2006 documents the variety and intensity of different perspectives and values held by people who share the Yellowstone River. Between May and November of 2006, a total of 313 individuals participated in the study. They represented agricultural, civic, recreational, or residential interest groups. Also, ind...

Rocky Mountain Communication Research

This paper highlights a unique approach to infusing formal training and practice in oral and written communication and teamwork development in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Utah. Faculty and graduate (Ph.D.) students from the College of Humanities have teamed up with faculty from engineering to dev...

Tell your students at the beginning of the semester that they need to prepare a speech and deliver it before an off-campus audience, and they will not exactly be leaping out of their seats with joy. Remind them a week in advance that their speech is coming up, and you will inevitably have a student or two in your office nearly in hives about speaki...