Qualifying Exam Topic Areas

How does agricultural management influence carbon and nitrogen cycling in ecosystems? Which ecological processes can be managed to promote long-term carbon sequestration?

How do climatic disturbances influence land management, and how does this feedback to change ecosystem processes? How do land managers respond to ecological disturbances, such as forest insect outbreaks, and how does this impact ecosystems?

• Compare three different interdisciplinary traditions for studying human-nature interactions. What are the primary methods used within each of these scholarly traditions? What are their main strengths and criticisms?
• Compare three different methodological approaches to the analysis of human-nature interactions. Describe the approaches, citing examples, and critique each approach in the context of the following study system.

What is Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) AKA Indigenous Knowledge and how does it function within indigenous communities? What are some of the pitfalls and strategies for engaging TEK in scientific research?

Define the term complexity and explain how complex systems differ from complicated systems. How has the concept of complexity been applied in the literature from ecology? How has it been applied to social-ecological systems? Describe three major theoretical questions associated with complexity in coupled human and natural systems. Propose methods for answering these questions in a topical area of interest to you.

Putnam (1988) described diplomacy as a two-level game. Explain what he meant by the term. How do two-level games play out in negotiations of international environmental agreements (IEA)? How can linking natural systems to human systems improve our understanding of global environmental governance? Illustrate your answer by describing how environment or resource shifts affected the five stages of a specific IEA.

• The United States has a hierarchical system of government, where many environmental laws are established at the federal level but implemented at the state level. What are the environmental benefits of such a system? What are the environmental costs? Be sure to address problems of perception, scale, political power, economic clout, and environmental justice in your answer.
• Time is an important factor in most bioeconomic models of resource use. Explain how time is represented in these models. What underlying assumptions are inherent in the logic of these models? What disconnects exist between economic representations of temporal preferences and understanding of human perceptions of time from the psychological literature? How can economists represent and measure temporal preferences more accurately? What philosophical implications would these changes have for environmental policy?

International aid agencies have targeted multiple environmental problems in developing countries. Which methods have been most successful at solving those problems? Which methods have been least effective? Use concrete examples to explain why some methods work better than others.

Compare the strengths and weaknesses of empirical vs. observational social-ecological research. When is one or the other more appropriate? When would mixed methods be the better choice?

• Much of the literature on the governance of the environmental commons has criticized the use of highly simplified models of governance to diverse contexts. This has been referred to as the panacea approach to environmental governance. Using specific examples, describe this criticism and the extent to which you think that it is justified, and what the most promising responses to it have been.
• What are the main factors that have been shown to affect the likelihood that communities of natural resource users will effectively manage a shared resource? Describe the extent to which such factors have been integrated into coherent theories of environmental governance or not, and whether this is problematic for the field.
• What is a collective-action problem, and why is it important? How does it relate to theories of human behavior, environmental governance, evolutionary processes, and concepts such as bounded rationality?
• What does it mean to conduct an institutional analysis of a social-ecological system? Provide a detailed description illustrated with real-world examples.

Temperate forests provide a diverse array of ecosystem services including carbon uptake and storage, support for rare species and biodiversity, and the provisioning of timber, fuel, and fiber. In addition, forest management practices can influence climate through impacts on surface albedo and the hydrological cycle. Understanding and valuing these services in monetary and non-monetary terms is essential in the design of policies and institutions, requiring the integration of observational science and integrated assessment modeling. Past research has developed a set of tools and data sets for a range of sites in the region, including Dartmouth's Second College Grant, a 11,000 hectare managed landscape in Northeastern New Hampshire.