Automatic Acquisition and Sustainable Use of Political-Ecological Data

Abstract

The sustainable management of anthropogenically-impacted ecosystems will require ongoing monitoring and advocacy by people across the globe. To this end, automatic methods are developed herein for acquiring several types of such political-ecological data. On the political side, a method is developed for gathering news articles about human actions that affect the ecosystem along with a method for identifying themes in social media that concern the consumption of an ecosystem's products. On the ecosystem side, a method is derived for estimating wildlife abundance from purchasable high-resolution satellite images. A simple website architecture is described for holding this data and enabling its use in developing sustainable conservation policies. A rhino conservation website illustrates this architecture. A fundamental contradiction between the desire for open data on the locations of endangered flora and fauna versus the need to hide these locations from poachers is addressed through a new security protocol that enables the secure distribution of sensitive ecosystem data to trusted data consumers.

Developing political-ecological theory: The need for Many-Task Computing

“…This regular activity is made more convenient if automatically-acquired streams of political-ecological data are continuously available. See [37] for techniques to create and read such streams.…”

“…An automatic data acquisition system has been gathering data since January, 2007 on this political-ecological system (see [37]). This data set contains 1555 actions observed from the year 2002 to 2019.…”

“…The central argument of this article is that for simulators to effectively contribute to the development of political-ecological theory and ecosystem management policies, the following three activities need to be performed in sequence: (1) statistically fitting the simulator’s parameters to data sets of political-ecological actions [37], (2) assessing the credibility of this fitted simulator, and (3) running computations on this (now) credible simulator to find politically feasible and sustainable ecosystem management policies.…”

Developing political-ecological theory: The need for many-task computing

“…An automatic data acquisition system has been gathering data since January, 2007 on this political-ecological system (see [ 20 ]). This data set contains 1555 actions observed from the year 2002 to 2019.…”

“…This article’s central argument is that for simulators to effectively contribute to the development of political-ecological theory and ecosystem management policies, the following three activities need to be performed in sequence: (1) statistically fitting the simulator’s parameters to data sets of political-ecological actions [ 20 ], (2) assessing the credibility of this fitted simulator, and (3) running computations on this (now) credible simulator to find politically feasible and sustainable ecosystem management policies.…”