Environmental Social Scientist
I'm an interdisciplinary social scientist who uses mixed methods to better understand human perceptions and behaviors in relation to socio-ecological systems, including tourism and outdoor recreation settings.
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Research Projects
Developing a Next Generation Concept Inventory
Collaborators: Chelsie Romulo (PI), Steve Anderson (Co-PI), Amanda Manzanares, Shirley Vincent (Co-PI), Kevin Haudek, Emmy Royse
Anyone who teaches is familiar with the challenge in assessing student content mastery and skill development. While some disciplines have standardized approaches to assessment, environmental programs are diverse and sometimes divergent in their content and skill development. The interdisciplinary nature of environmental programs poses yet another challenge for assessment creation. To address these challenges, we're developing an interdisciplinary assessment tool that can be widely used by environmental educators to evaluate student knowledge and skill development. Here we combine the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus paradigm and Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning to develop a short answer assessment instrument that will use natural language processing (yes, that's AI) to score student responses.
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Our first publication identifies common concepts taught in environmental programs (such as ecology), where these concepts overlap with the FEW Nexus (such as climate change and energy use), and areas that are emerging in environmental courses (like environmental justice).
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Check out our first team publication: Alignment among environmental programs in higher education: What Food-Energy-Water Nexus concepts are covered in introductory courses?
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Community-Based Climate Change Planning
Collaborators: Valeria Briones (Co-PI), Asha DiMatteo-LePape (Co-PI), Alyssa Soucy (Co-PI), Gabriela Wolf-Gonzalez (Co-PI), Sandra De Urioste-Stone, Alf Anderson, Michael Boland, Stephanie Clement & Rich MacDonald
Our climate is changing rapidly! To be successful, nature-based tourism stakeholders need to keep up with and anticipate these changes. Knowing that climate change is happening and being empowered to respond do not always go hand-in-hand though. In this project, I worked with student, faculty, and community partners to center local knowledge and consider challenges and opportunities to tourism on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Through co-developed participatory workshops, we found that:
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Co-production of knowledge can increase collective climate change action on MDI.
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Collaboration and communication across tourism stakeholders (and beyond the tourism industry) would enhance planning efforts.
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In addition to adaptation, MDI has an opportunity to establish itself as a model for sustainable tourism.
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Interested in the results of our participatory planning workshops with tourism stakeholders? Check out the summary report attached below or our journal article publication: Climate change planning in a coastal tourism destination, A participatory approach.
Clockwise: Asha DiMatteo-LePape, Lydia Horne, Valeria Briones, Alyssa Soucy, and Gabriela Wolf-Gonzalez.
Coastal Destination Resilience to Climate Change
Collaborators: Sandra De Urioste-Stone (PI), Parinaz Rahimzadeh-Bajgiran (Co-PI), Erin Seekamp, Laura Rickard & Bridie McGreavy
Undergraduate student researcher Nathaniel Burke surveying a "visitor" (alright, it's me) in Acadia National Park.
Results summary for Machias case study here:
Results summary for Mount Desert Island case study here:
We often think of climate change impacts to the environment, but climate change is also shifting human thinking and behavior. This is true for tourists and their visitation patterns. Resilient tourism destinations will anticipate visitor shifts and adopt climate change adaptations to lessen negative impacts and take advantage of emerging opportunities. I studied how underlying socio-psychological factors influenced visitor perceptions of climate change risk and resulting behavioral substitution intentions in coastal Maine tourism destinations. I also examined what factors bolster or detract from supply-side destination resilience. Here are some key findings:
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Social networks centered around shared values and beliefs and a strong sense of place, engaged local governance, active knowledge sharing, and a sense of self-efficacy all contributed to agency among tourism suppliers in addressing coastal flooding in the Bay of Machias destination.
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Identifying as female, having higher belief in climate change, having more first-hand experience with climate change impacts, and having a higher altruistic values orientation increased climate change risk perceptions in visitors to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park.
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The size of a tourism destination plays a really interesting role in determining what influences resilience. For example, redundancy in a system (such as having several hotels) can increase destination resilience. Should one hotel become flooded due to sea level rise, visitors can still stay at other sites; however, redundancy also creates competition, which can decrease destination resilience if it becomes too high. In the previous example, intense competition may result in the closure of some hotels and therefore decrease climate change resilience in a developing, less established destination
If this summary piqued your interest, check out the following peer reviewed journal articles and stakeholder reports!
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Understanding Tourism Suppliers’ Resilience to Climate Change in a Rural Destination in Maine
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Determinants of Visitor Climate Change Risk Perceptions in Acadia National Park, Maine, USA
Risk Perceptions of Climate Change in Western Maine
Collaborators: Sandra De Urioste-Stone (PI), John Daigle & Caroline Noblet
Climate change poses a huge risk for winter tourism destinations that are reliant on cold weather and snow. The way that tourism suppliers in winter tourism destinations think about climate change can influence their behavioral responses, such as adaptation actions. Through interviews with tourism planners, business owners, and conservation non-profits, I learned about how tourism suppliers in a winter nature-based tourism destination perceived their risk to climate change and how that influenced their behavior, if at all. Here's what I found:
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A key theme that emerged throughout the study was that of uncertainty of the causes of climate change, impacts to the region, which climate change communication sources to trust, and whether or not experienced environmental changes were related to climate change.
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Uncertainty hindered participants’ abilities to implement adaptation and mitigation behaviors.
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I like weird social science methods, so I added something called a pile sort activity into supplier interviews. Pile sorts reveal how people mentally clump or split terms related to a central concept (for this study, that was climate change). Through statistical and interview analysis, I found that suppliers in Western Maine were thinking about climate change using two main criteria: perceived control and drivers and impacts. Perceived control was low and terms in these piles were often out of their individual control to mitigate or manage. Participants distinguished between drivers of climate change and resulting impacts to both the tourism and overall socio-ecological system.
Here are the accompanying reports and publications:
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Multidimensional scaling graph from pile sort with tourism suppliers in Western Maine.
Presenting findings at Tourism Naturally in Kaprun, Austria (2018)
Climate change Adaptation and Mitigation in the face of Local Uncertainty: A phenomenological study
Climate Change Risk Perceptions in Nature-Based Tourism Systems: A Case Study from Western Maine
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Using pile sorts to understand perceptions of climate change
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Reports from Western Maine: