Christine Biermann’s research while affiliated with University of Colorado and other places

Despite ongoing debates about its origins, the Anthropocene—a new epoch characterized by significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems—is widely acknowledged. Our environment is increasingly a product of interacting biophysical and social forces, shaped by climate change, colonial legacies, gender norms, hydrological processes, and more. Understanding these intricate interactions requires a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative, biophysical and social research. However, mixed-methods environmental research remains rare, hindered by academic boundaries, limited training, and the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. Time, funding, and the integration of diverse data further complicate this research, whilst the dynamics and ethics of interdisciplinary teams add another layer of complexity. Despite these challenges, mixed-methods research offers a more robust and ultimately transformative understanding of environmental questions. This Field Guide aims to inspire and equip researchers to undertake such studies. Organized like a recipe book, it assists researchers in the preparation of their field work, as well as offering entry points to key methods and providing examples of successful mixed-methods projects. This book will be of interest to scholars wishing to tackle environmental research in a more holistic manner, spanning ‘sister’ disciplines such as anthropology, statistics, political science, public health, archaeology, geography, history, ecology, and Earth science.

Ecological restoration increasingly relies on genetic tools and technologies to identify distinct populations, monitor populations, and even modify organisms to improve fitness. In this article, we review the role of genetic and genomic technologies in restoration and conservation, using the restoration of cutthroat trout in the Western United States as one example. Reducing restoration and conservation directives to the molecular scale often relies on a view of genes as discrete bits of information that produce controllable and predictable traits. This leads to life-and-death decisions about wildlife populations, even as measures of “pure” genes for organisms are constantly changing. We review the implications of a reductionistic approach centered on genetic composition of organisms and consider the broader relevance of these issues to the future of ecological restoration.

As molecular techniques become more advanced, scientists and practitioners are calling for restoration to leverage genetic and genomic approaches. We address the role of genetics in the restoration and conservation of cutthroat trout in the western U.S., where new genetic insights have upended previous assumptions about trout diversity and distribution. Drawing on a series of examples, we examine how genetically pure trout populations are identified, protected, and produced through restoration practices. In landscapes that have been profoundly impacted by human activities, genetics can offer seemingly objective metrics for restoration projects. Our case studies, however, indicate that (1) genetic purity is fragile and contingent, with notions of what genetics are “pure” for a given species or subspecies continually changing, and (2) restoration focused on achieving “genetically pure” native populations can deliberately or inadvertently obscure the socio-ecological histories of particular sites and species, even as (3) many “genetically pure” trout populations have endured on the landscape as a result of human modifications such as roads and dams. In addition to raising conceptual questions, designations of genetic purity influence policy. These include tensions between restoring connectivity and restoring genetic purity, influencing Wild and Scenic River Act designations, and the securing of water rights. Cutthroat trout restoration would benefit from adopting a broader, more holistic framework rather than fixating exclusively or primarily on genetic purity and hybridization threats. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Advances in genetics and genomics have raised new questions in trout restoration and management, specifically about species identity and purity, which fish to value, and where these fish belong. This paper examines how this molecular turn in fisheries management is influencing wild and native trout policy in Colorado. Examples from two small Colorado watersheds, Bear Creek and Sand Creek, illustrate how framing trout as genetic bodies can guide managers to care for or kill trout populations in the interest of rectifying decades of genetic disruption caused by human activity. While trout management has typically relied on human intervention, the turn to genetic science is prompting new classifications of lineage and taxa, altering long-standing conservation priorities, and reorienting the manipulation of biological processes such as reproduction and dispersal. As a result, other social and ecological factors may be pushed to the margins of management decisions. These changes warrant greater conversation about the consequences of molecular analyses and the values embedded in trout science and conservation more broadly.

The foundational premise of the Anthropocene, constant across the range of proposed definitions, is that the biophysical world is now profoundly social. This carries substantive methodological implications: If the environment is ecosocial, surely the way it is studied must be, too. Yet, as our bibliometric analysis demonstrates, the bulk of academic articles on the Anthropocene published between 2002 and 2019 focus on its conceptual implications rather than embracing its analytical consequences. Further, of the subset of articles that engage the Anthropocene empirically, fewer than a quarter employ interdisciplinary methods at even a cursory level. In response, we outline an alternative approach, critical physical geography (CPG), which enables researchers to pick up the methodological and conceptual gauntlet thrown down by the Anthropocene. Work in CPG begins from the premise that all biophysical questions are also social, but it goes beyond a simple mixed methods approach to emphasize the politics both of how knowledge is produced and of how it is taken up outside academia. We illustrate the utility of a CPG approach for analysis of the Anthropocene via succinct examples of research in critical dendrochronology, geomorphology, and remote sensing.

Tree‐ring records provide global high‐resolution information on tree‐species responses to global change, forest carbon and water dynamics, and past climate variability and extremes. The underlying assumption is a stationary (time‐stable), quasi‐linear relationship between tree growth and environment, which however conflicts with basic ecological and evolutionary theory. Indeed, our global assessment of the relevant tree‐ring literature demonstrates non‐stationarity in the majority of tested cases, not limited to specific proxies, environmental parameters, regions or species. Non‐stationarity likely represents the general nature of the relationship between tree‐growth proxies and environment. Studies assuming stationarity however score 2 times more citations influencing other fields of science and the science‐policy interface. To reconcile ecological reality with the application of tree‐ring proxies for climate or environmental estimates, we provide a clarification of the stationarity concept, propose a simple confidence framework for the re‐evaluation of existing studies and recommend the use of a new statistical tool to detect non‐stationarity in tree‐ring proxies. Our contribution is meant to stimulate and facilitate discussion in light of our results to help increase confidence in tree‐ring based climate and environmental estimates for science, the public and policymakers.