
Patrick BixlerUniversity of Texas at Austin | UT · School of Public Affairs
Patrick Bixler
PhD
About
69
Publications
25,814
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,590
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2016 - present
October 2014 - July 2015
October 2014 - August 2015
Publications
Publications (69)
Various scientific assessments conclude that flooding, often exacerbated by meteorological changes and human activities such as land-use and land-cover, poses significant vulnerability to coastal regions such as the U.S. Gulf Coast. This study investigates stakeholder perceptions of flood vulnerability and governance in two Gulf Coast communities a...
Collaborative governance has become a prominent, if not dominant, framework for thinking about multi-scalar and cross-jurisdictional environmental management. The literature broadly and consistently suggests that collaborative capacity and inter-organizational networks provide the institutional framework for addressing social-ecological system chal...
In efforts to address the far-reaching effects of climate change and associated impacts in communities, research on environmental philanthropy suggests that more resources are being allocated to environmental societal challenges. However, understandings about which environmental nonprofits benefit from these funding flows is limited. This study int...
Numerous government and non-governmental agencies are increasing their efforts to better quantify the disproportionate effects of climate risk on vulnerable populations with the goal of creating more resilient communities. Sociodemographic based indices have been the primary source of vulnerability information the past few decades. However, using t...
Where landowners, non-profit organizations, and government agencies prioritize conservation activities has significant implications for people, ecosystems, and climate resilience. Our study builds on conservation decision-making scholarship by analyzing the relationships between biodiversity priorities, social vulnerability,
climate risks, and proj...
Climate change impacts are intensifying existing social inequalities locally and globally. Exposure to climate risks, as well as the ability to prepare for and recover from them, are affected by complex power structures. An expanding body of literature uses an intersectional lens to explicate a more nuanced understanding of how co-constituted power...
Collaborative adaptive governance has become a prominent, if not dominant, framework for thinking about multi-scalar and cross-jurisdictional environmental management. The literature broadly and consistently suggests that learning and collaboration are two key dimensions for adaptive governance and that inter-organizational networks provide the ins...
Many contemporary social and ecological challenges in forested ecosystems (climate change, invasive species, wildland-urban interface development, and wildfires) span multiple jurisdictions and are characterized by complex patterns of social and ecological interdependencies. Increasing evidence suggests that interdependent risk can best be addresse...
The growing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have placed cities at the forefront of the human, social, economic, and ecological impacts of climate change. Extreme heat, extended freeze, excessive precipitation, and/or prolong drought impacts neighborhoods disproportionately across heterogenous urban geographies. Underserved, underr...
Opportunities for innovation in urban expansion research abound given the emergence of longitudinal and spatially explicit data. Scholars now use a broad array of data when analyzing expansion, yet the conceptual approach remains limited. Toward this end, this work extends conceptualization of expansion beyond the relatively simple economic approac...
Social vulnerability, hazard exposure and adaptive capacity are three sets of indicators that provide insights into community resilience. Climate vulnerability, a combination of social vulnerability and climate-related hazard exposure, is a socio-spatial index of neighborhoods and communities most at risk of climate-related hazards. Adaptive capaci...
Urban watersheds can play a critical role in supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services in a rapidly changing world. However, managing for multiple environmental and social objectives in urban landscapes is challenging, especially if the optimization of one ecosystem service conflicts with another. Urban ecology research has frequently been lim...
Urban sustainability challenges are complex, impacting a wide range of stakeholders. It is commonly accepted that sustainable solutions must integrate scientific knowledge from a variety of disciplines, coupled with community stakeholder ideas, norms, and practices in ways that link knowledge to decision-making and action. Jointly researching probl...
Increased interest in combining compound flood hazards and social vulnerability has driven recent advances in flood impact mapping. However, current methods to estimate event-specific compound flooding at the household level require high-performance computing resources frequently not available to local stakeholders. Government and non-governmental...
Increased interest in combining compound flood hazards and social vulnerability has driven recent advances in flood impact mapping. However, current methods to estimate event specific compound flooding at the household level require high-performance computing resources frequently not available to local stakeholders. Government and non-government ag...
Urban community exposure to natural hazards continues to increase, driven by changes in land use, climate, and demographics. Socially vulnerable populations disproportionately inhabit hazard-prone areas and are more exposed and have less capacity to cope with adverse hazard impacts. One approach to address the convergence of increased urban hazard...
To effectively cope with the impacts of climate change and increase urban resilience, households and neighborhoods must adapt in ways that reduce vulnerability to climate-related natural hazards. Communities in the United States and elsewhere are exposed to more frequent extreme heat, wildfires, cyclones, extreme precipitation, and flooding events....
Urban sustainability challenges are complex, impacting a wide range of stakeholders. In seeking solutions to sustainability problems, we ask in this case study: does team formation–specifically, single-, multi- or trans-disciplinary teams– impact the process and perceived efficacy of outcomes? It is commonly accepted that sustainable solutions must...
Networks have a key role to play in bridging the knowledge-implementation gap in conservation science. Although scholars have contributed to the theoretical and conceptual framings of the links between knowledge and governance strategies, our empirical understanding remains limited, and little is known on the attributes that lead to effective knowl...
Where do public sociology and the study of natural resources meet? One promising intersection is at community-based natural resource management. At this juncture there are multiple opportunities for rural sociologists to embrace the tenets of public sociology, as espoused by Michael Burawoy. By working with an active, thick, and local ‘civil societ...
Given the available scientific understanding regarding the environmental impacts of everyday behaviors, individuals should be both concerned and motivated to act in environmentally responsible ways. Yet, the connection between environmental awareness, concern, attitude, and behavior is neither direct nor clear. Various factors have been demonstrate...
The concept of urban resilience, particularly through a systems framework, has advanced tremendously over the past decade. Relatedly, collaborative and network governance is increasingly considered essential for the sustainability of urban social-ecological-technical systems. However, empirical evidence explicitly linking metropolitan networks to r...
The concept of forest landscape restoration (FLR) is being widely adopted around the globe by governmental, non‐governmental agencies, and the private sector, all of whom see FLR as an approach that contributes to multiple global sustainability goals. Originally, FLR was designed with a clearly integrative dimension across sectors, stakeholders, sp...
Global environmental challenges are increasingly complex and interdependent and the sentiment that sustainability requires new approaches to integrating science and policy is ubiquitous. This is the domain of sustainability science. Yet, major gaps exist in our understanding of the relationships between researchers from different disciplines and be...
In Texas and elsewhere, the looming realities of rapid population growth and intensifying effects of climate change mean that the things we rely on to live—water, energy, dependable infrastructure, social cohesion, and an ecosystem to support them—are exposed to unprecedented risk. Limited resources will be in ever greater demand and the environmen...
Nonprofit social capital refers to the trust, norms, and networks that can improve organizational performance to fulfill a mission. Research on social capital within organizations, and specifically with nonprofits, is relatively widespread; however, the notion that we can quantify, measure, and incentivize its growth across a sector is novel. Nonpr...
The concept of forest landscape restoration (FLR) is being widely adopted around the globe by governmental and non-governmental agencies, and the private sector, all of whom see FLR as an approach that contributes to multiple global sustainability goals. Originally, FLR was designed with a clearly integrative dimension, across sectors, stakeholders...
The US National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy emphasizes the importance of resilient forests and local community capacity in preparation for and response to wildfires. Despite this emphasis, it is unclear whether local business capacity is a predictor of local participation in federally managed wildfire response. Drawing on concepts fr...
Climate change is one of the most pressing social and
environmental issues of the 21st century, and will require
innovative thinking to understand its complexity. The Paris
Agreement, negotiated at the 2015 21st Conference of Parties,
marked a monumental international agreement toward
collective action on climate change. Through world systems
theor...
The Crown of the Continent is a large and intact ecosystem situated in the Rocky Mountain area around Glacier National Park (United States) and Waterton Lakes National Park (Canada). The 7.3 million hectare region serves as the headwaters for three continental rivers systems and is home to a number of threatened and endangered species, two countrie...
This research was conducted in conjunction with the Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation
Cooperative with the goals of (1) identifying stakeholders and their roles in the conservation
social network and characterizing the relationships between them; (2) making
recommendations for strategic networking to strengthen linkages between organizations...
Social network analysis may benefit regional conservation efforts in the Texas Hill Country and help mitigate other challenging societal issues.
To realize more sustainable and resilient urban social-ecological systems, there is great need for active engagement from diverse public agencies, non-profit organizations, businesses, natural resource managers, scientists, and other actors. Cities present unique challenges and opportunities for sustainability and resilience, as issues and organiza...
The Intermountain West's rapid changes in population growth and land use may be welcome to some, but others perceive such changes as threats to sense of place. The objective of this study is to assess whether New West and Old West contextual variables predict how agricultural landowners view threats to agricultural lifestyles and sense of place. We...
Large-scale natural resource conservation initiatives are increasingly adopting a network governance framework to respond to the ecological, social, and political challenges of contemporary environmental governance. A network approach offers new modes of management that allow resource managers and others to transcend a single institution, organizat...
The objective of large landscape conservation is to mitigate complex ecological problems through interventions at multiple and overlapping scales. Implementation requires coordination among a diverse network of individuals and organizations to integrate local-scale conservation activities with broad-scale goals. This requires an understanding of th...
This report describes the joint research and practitioner-based effort to understand the network and narrative that shapes Hill Country conservation opportunities and outcomes. From April 2015-July 2016, we collected and analyzed over 40 hours of interview data and developed an extensive database of information in an attempt to better understand th...
Forest Conservation in the Anthropocene provides thought-provoking insight into the ongoing environmental crises that climate change is generating and raises critical questions about how public and private land managers in North America will adapt to the climatological disruptions that are already transforming the ecological structures of these for...
In 2013, a national survey of forestry employers was conducted to assess the extent to which forestry degree programs at US universities and colleges are providing students with the knowledge and skills needed for contemporary professional practice in forestry. Results were compared with similar surveys dating as far back as 1911, with particular r...
The Crown of the Continent is a special place where people, nations, and ecology meet. Spanning the boundaries of the U.S. and Canada, the Salish Kootenai, Ktunaxa, and Blackfeet nations, and four distinct ecoregions, the 18 million acre Crown ecosystem is also the meeting point of three continental river systems–the Missouri, Saskatchewan and Colu...
This meta-analysis identifies a growing body of research addressing a variety of topics. The most studied topics to date include: issues of governance including structure and process, desired future conditions, monitoring, and learning. Conversely, there appears to be a gap in the current research related to leadership, the function of trust, the n...
Increasingly, natural resource conservation programs refer to participation and local community involvement as one of the necessary prerequisites for sustainable resource management. In frameworks of adaptive comanagement, the theory of participatory conservation plays a central role in the democratization of decisionmaking authority and equitable...
The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem that surrounds Waterton Lakes-Glacier International Peace Park is the poster landscape of climate change in the US and Canadian Rockies. By 2025, all glaciers in Glacier National Parks are projected to completely disappear. In light of these changes, the Roundtable of the Crown of the Continent was created to as...
Residential development is a leading driver of land-use change, with important implications for biodiversity,
ecosystem processes, and human well-being. We reviewed over 500 published scientific articles on the biophysical, economic, and social effects of residential development and open space in the US. We concluded that current knowledge of the e...
Despite incredible strides in transboundary collaborative conservation, many challenges remain. A networked governance approach recognizes a diverse pool of participants, linkages across multiple levels of organization and the diffusion of authority horizontally across spatial scales. Much is understood about the basic form and function of networke...
Over the past century, wildland fire management has been core to the mission of federal land management agencies. In recent decades, however, federal spending on wildfire suppression has increased dramatically; suppression spending that on average accounted for less than 20 percent of the USFS’s discretionary funds prior to 2000 had grown to 43 per...
Despite incredible strides in transboundary collaborative conservation, many challenges remain.
A networked governance approach recognizes a diverse pool of participants, linkages
across multiple levels of organization and the diffusion of authority horizontally across spatial
scales. Much is understood about the basic form and function of networke...
Working effectively across boundaries is a critical skill for researchers focused on environmental governance in complex social–ecological systems, but challenges remain in the acquisition of such skills given the current structure of traditional disciplinary training. In an effort to contribute to improved coordination of research across disciplin...
Abstract: Climate change is but one aspect of the Anthropocene, a new epoch in which the effects of human activities have become the predominant force in the global biosphere. More than just an overlay on the traditional concerns of sustainable natural resource management, the uncertainties associated with these effects are creating a “no-analog fu...
Decentralization of governance is an emerging trend in many natural resource sectors in both developed and developing countries. Despite the normative agenda of community-based natural resource management for social and ecological outcomes, a shift to multilevel or polycentric theorizing is warranted. Polycentric governance recognizes the importanc...
Political ecology seeks to address notable weaknesses in the social sciences that consider how human society and the environment shape each other over time. Considering questions of ideology and scientific discourse, power and knowledge, and issues of conservation and environmental history, political ecology offers an alternative to technocratic ap...
Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is an environmental governance approach that deals with complex and interwoven ecological problems through a participatory environmental management framework. Practitioner, donor, and academic interest in this strategy is on the rise, and successful CBNRM organizations are experiencing internal an...
Background/Question/Methods
Successful Earth Stewardship is dependent upon local landscape initiatives where residents have cultivated a strong sense of place. Governance arrangements that aim to preserve and enhance the earth’s life support systems can take a number of institutional forms depending on the ecological context and historical social...