Integrating social and ecological approaches for sustainable food production and biodiversity management: the case of Orkney farmers and Greylag Goose

Under the current scenario of human population increase, reconciling resilient and sustainable food production and biodiversity conservation, two of the pillars of sustainable development, remains a global challenge. On the one hand, increasing food demands involves intensification practices which can lead to biodiversity degradation. On the other hand, biodiversity management involves protection statuses (for species or habitats) to comply with international agreements (EU Habitats and Birds Directives, global Sustainable Development Goals). Such protection figures have impacts in other sympatric species and human activities, such food production. For instance, causing crop damage or increased damage mitigation costs. Because an integrated social-ecological perspective is lacking, we are forced to play expensive and dangerous catch-up games when supporting sustainable agriculture, empowering small farmers and promoting biodiversity conservation. To overcome this problem, in partnership with Nature Scot we will develop a novel social-ecological approach that integrates species dynamics with stakeholder social information while accounting for uncertainty (Reid 2018, Duthie 2018) in a well monitored system: Orkney farmers and Greylag Goose. During the last 30 years, Greylag Goose populations overwintering in Scotland have steadily shifted northward their distribution and increased their numbers, leading to conflicts with local farmers due to crop damage and raising concerns about potential effects on sympatric species (Mitchell 2014). Strategic transboundary management is needed to mitigate food production damage and potential effects in sympatric species whilst maintaining goose populations. This will be implemented through a multidisciplinary approach, combining state-of-the-art quantitative methods and computational tools from ecology and stakeholder participatory approaches from social sciences. Project objectives are-
-To review existing methods integrating social-ecological information.
-To influence and shape stakeholder participatory processes aiming towards a shared vision for
greylag goose population management.
-To expand and inform existing models (e.g. GMSE) by including: stakeholder feedback, transboundary multi agent user model, multi species resource model and/or partially migratory resource model.
To develop novel ways of communicating integrated social-ecological management complexity to academics, stakeholders, policy makers and general public