Social-Ecological System of La Parguera Finally, in delving into this process we also decided to “translate” the mined data into maps depicting the complexity of the social-ecological system. For that process, we used the cartographic data on the submerged habitats of La Parguera produced by NOAA’s Biogeography group, and placed the information produced by this analysis in a geographical and ecological context, producing a view of the La Parguera’s seascape and its complex network of processes.
impact the habitats and a ranking of those habitats and activities, as per their importance. We employed this method, devised by Chuenpagdee et al. (2001 a,b), and applied them to La Parguera. In this section we present the results of the damage schedule, indicating the habitats that the respondents felt were affected the most by anthropogenic activities, and a ranking of those activities, in order of importance. Data from the damage schedule is also used in the development of a composite of the conservation goals and objectives.
1.2 The People in the social-ecological system
This method measured the perceptions of 121 stakeholders interviewed in La Parguera (2005-2006) regarding the impacts upon a set of habitat types and the threats that impact them. The damage schedule method utilizes a paired comparison to elicit a choice of which of the two options is most important in order to value judgments of local stakeholders that could be used to gauge the significance of potential environmental damage (Chuenpagdee et al. 2001 a,b). The first set of comparisons was specific towards choosing the most impacted or degraded of 7 habitat types (Figure 1). The second set of questions was designed to identify the activities that posed the greatest threat to marine ecosystems of La Parguera (Figure 2). The stakeholders interviewed for this exercise included permanent residents, business owners, scientific community, commercial fishers, and a group considered part of the ‘floating population’ of La Parguera.
The human agency, central to the analysis of the system (as a force that shapes landscapes and seascapes over time, and put into motion the stressors that contribute to the current status of the system), is also responsible for producing two critical processes: social legacies and social memory. Social legacies are “the lasting effects of past events affecting current conditions”, and social memory refers to “the collective memory of past experiences that is retained by the groups” (Chapin et al. 2009). Here we argue that the current system of responses to the current status of the system, the governance, is conditioned by the obstacles imposed by an adversarial legacy of contested visions and actions, among the stakeholders that is capable of derailing conservation efforts. Ironically, the social memory, interpreted as the knowledge built by humans and conceptualized as traditional and local ecological knowledge, also has the potential of contributing to the resilience of resource users and their communities, and could build the appropriate mechanisms for local collaborative forms governance, such as co-management. In La Parguera, for example, fishers, and their network-based community (as opposed to a placed-based community, are threatened by social change and development, that take the form of coastal gentrification, or the displacement of the local population by new forms of living, social classes, and architecture (Brusi 2008, Griffith et al. 2007). In facing that pervasive process in all coastal areas of the United States and its territories (Jacob et al. 2010, ValdésPizzini et al. 2010), the fishers and local residents may be able to keep their coastal and piscatorial identity, through the local ecological knowledge they assembled and shared over three centuries (Valdés-Pizzini and García-Quijano 2009).
1.3 The stakeholders’ perceptions of the ecosystem: A methodological note on the Damage Schedule The social-ecological system provides backdrop based on the notion that we are dealing with “complex adaptive systems” that “enable us to study the integrated nature of the system but recognizes legacies of past events and path dependence of human agency as fundamental properties of the model (Chapin et al. 2009). Such approach is also flexible in terms of the use (and value) of both, quantitative and qualitative data. Humans are an essential component of the system that also provides assessments (based on research, opinions, experiences, observations) of the status and conditions of the environment. In this document we use all the available information on the conditions of the habitats and species at La Parguera, but also include the perceptions of the stakeholders, in relation to those “habitats” impacted the most, and their stressors, through the use of the damage schedule technique developed by Ratana Chuenpagdee et al. (Chuenpagdee et al. 2001 a, b). Consultation with stakeholders to identify a manageable number of variables and processes is essential to define the social-ecological system. Damage schedule allows us to have a clear view of the perceptions that the stakeholders have of the human activities that 6
Social-Ecological System of La Parguera
BB=bioluminescent bay NR=near shore reefs WQ=water quality SG= seagrass FM=fringing mangroves MC=mangroves on keys DR=deep reefs
Figure 1. Proportional representation of the ranking of habitats that were most impacted in La Parguera (abbreviations are listed in order of importance).
WD=waste disposal BT=boat traffic UD=urban development CF=commercial fishing RF=recreational fishing SD=SCUBA diving RA=research activities
Figure 2. Proportional representation of the threats that ranked highest in La Parguera (abbreviations are listed in order of importance).
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