The climate change agenda is populated by actors and agencies with different objectives, values, and motivations, yet many seek decision scale climate information to inform policy and adaptation responses. A central element of this network of activity is the climate information website (CIW) that has seen a rapid and organic growth, yet with variable content and quality, and unfettered by any code of practice. This builds an ethical–epistemic dilemma that warrants assessment as the presence of CIWs contribute to real‐world consequences and commitment. This study considers the context of CIW growth, and reviews a representative sample of CIWs to draw out key issues for consideration in CIW development. We assess content, function, and use‐case value through a dual approach of a typology and user experience narratives to evaluate the general efficacy of a CIW. The typology reveals strong contrasts in content, complicated interfaces, and an overload of choice making it difficult to converge on a stable outcome. The narratives capture user experience and highlight barriers that include navigation difficulties, jargon laden content, minimal or opaque guidance, and inferred information without context about uncertainty and limits to skill. This illuminates four concerns: (1) the ethics of information provision in a context of real‐world consequences; (2) interfaces that present barriers to achieving robust solutions; (3) weak capacity of both users and providers to identify information of value from the multimodel and multimethod data; and (4) inclusion of data that infer skill. Nonetheless, results provide a positive indication of a community of practice that is still maturing. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e470. doi: 10.1002/wcc.470 This article is categorized under: Climate Models and Modeling > Knowledge Generation with Models Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Scenario Development and Application
Despite extensive evidence that African buffalo Syncerus caffer are grazers, De Graaff et al. using rumen content analysis of animals that had starved to death proposed that buffalo in grass-limited Eastern Cape thicket should be considered browsers. Although these anomalous findings were initially accepted, but later challenged, the browse-dominated diet continues to be used as a foundation for hypotheses on the diet of healthy animals. Consequently, the debate around buffalo as browsers or grazers in thicket has not yet been settled. We describe the diet of buffalo in the Addo Elephant National Park and include data from other published work from the region to test the importance of grass in buffalo diet. We show that the diet is dominated by grasses, even in grass-limited thicket, and that browse species are seldom dominant foods. Thus, there is no empirical evidence to corroborate the notion that buffalo switch their diet to browse when grass availability is low. In an attempt to advance our understanding of buffalo foraging in thicket, we reiterate that De Graaff’s work is not a valid measure of buffalo diet in succulent thicket and that additional testing of the browser–grazer hypothesis is not needed.Conservation implications: Our results confirm that buffalo are grazers, rather than browsers, in grass-limited Eastern Cape thicket. Thus, additional testing of the browser–grazer hypothesis for buffalo in the region is not needed.
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