Differences in life history strategy influence the ecological roles of plant species, including their susceptibility to disturbance events. According to Grime's CSR model, plants exhibit three primary strategies, which reflect tradeoffs between stress and disturbance. Here we classify eastern North American tree species into life history strategies on the basis of the CSR model. Then, using data on ice storm damage to trees, we investigate how the level of damage varied among the different CSR categories. We used tree damage data for almost 2000 individual trees representing 30 species collected during two ice storms in the Appalachian Mountains. We augmented the study with ice damage data gleaned from nine published ice-storm studies containing over 30 000 individuals representing 22 species. The trees we identified as stress-tolerators (S) consistently sustained less damage than the other species. This finding matches the stress-tolerant strategy: damageresistance is imperative for the persistence of trees that exhibit slow growth, low reproductive capacity and long lifespan. Our analyses also suggest that competitors (C) suffer widespread damage, particularly branch breakage, but experience low mortality. This pattern likely reflects features of the competitive strategy, such as wood strength and canopy form, which preclude resistance to damage but facilitate rapid recovery. The ice damage datasets did not contain trees that we classified as ruderals (R). Competitive ruderals (C-R) and stress-tolerant ruderals (S-R), however, sustained heavy damage and high mortality, consistent with low investment in tree defense and a prioritization of reproduction. Our analyses suggest the usefulness of the CSR model for interpreting forest dynamics and understanding the implications of tree life-history strategies for forest disturbance responses.

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Narratives and discourses on issues such as water management and other complex social-ecological systems respond partly to people's worldviews or social perspectives. Knowledge of these perspectives might help increase the rate of success of specific initiatives related to water conservation and could be an important tool to improve water governance. A study performed in the city of Salta, Argentina, revealed the existence of four social perspectives on issues related to water management. Perspectives were obtained with Q methodology by interviewing 29 local stakeholders. Participants sorted 68 statements organized around four themes (service provider; water rights; public participation; water availability) according to their degree of agreement or disagreement. The findings support our contention that there are clear links between social perspectives and the rate of success of some water policies implemented by the local water utility in the past 15 years, in particular the promotion and use of household water meters and awareness campaigns launched to reduce water consumption. We show that the limited success of these initiatives was partly due to ignorance or disregard of social perspectives on water management.

I analyze participant interviews at two levels, first at the single-valley scale of Garden Park, a small valley in the northern part of the county, and second at the countywide scale, to explore how residents define what it means to live in their changing landscape. Results suggest that residents from across traditional oldtimer/newcomer divides often share meanings of community and that these meanings are reflected in resident interaction at both the single valley and county levels.Even though residents respond to common social and physical environments, their understandings of those environments and their ideas of how those environments should look are often very different. Nevertheless most community residents express a common theme of paired cooperation and competition as they redefine what community means to them in this changing social and physical landscape. Consequently, this study suggests that a multi-layered, local approach to understanding community interaction might provide insight for future exurban community well-being.