Progress 01/15/22 to 01/14/25
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this reporting period was researchers and educators in agriculture and ecological sciences. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
During the 2024 reporting period, work continued synthesizing the research into publishable manuscripts. The first manuscript under development introduces the integrated framework on themes, principles, and concepts on agroecological complexity, That manuscript used the topic models and sentence embeddings to map where "complexity" actually appears in agroecology literature (even when authors do not have shared vocabulary), and links place-based practices (e.g., rotations, cover crops, nutrient cycling) to the soil security framework. The second manuscript in development conceptually argues for "justice-as-complexity," showing how justice/equity talk in agroecology often omits emergence, dynamics, open boundaries, and adaptivity, and why reframing justice as a process can potentially shift what we measure and reward (referencing soil security framework concepts of agency, access, and stewardship).
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Progress 01/15/23 to 01/14/24
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this reporting period was researchers and educators in agriculture and ecological sciences. Changes/Problems:The major challenge for goal one was failing the receive any survey responses and pivoting towards literature review only. This proved to be insufficient to draw concrete conclusions. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?During the 2023 reporting period, I developed and delivered a graduate-level special topics class on systems thinking skills in agriculture sciences. Students practiced core systems-thinking competencies (definition, visualization, complexity reasoning, modeling) on their own research problems, producing transferable artifacts (research journals, leverage-point maps, brief talks/models) that advanced their capacity to frame agroecological questions, select appropriate methods, and communicate systems insights to committees and stakeholders. The course focused on four core competencies: 1) "Defining systems" and using a systems lens, 2) visual problem-structuring, (3) principles/characteristics underlying complexity, and 4) hands-on system-dynamics modeling. Pedagogically, I emphasized reflective practice through weekly research journals tying readings from the students' own thesis problems, with in-class peer dialogue, and assignments that explicitly mapped complexity features and leverage points in each student's system of interest. The capstone deliverable was a rapid-fire, five-minute showcase of a brief system dynamics model articulating how students' thinking changed and how systems tools sharpened their research framing. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Preliminary findings of project goals three and four were communicated at the annual meeting of the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America. Additionally, research from this fellowship informed the course I developed. Furthermore, collaboration with Utah State University's Center for Anticipatory Intelligence continued, where systems thinking skills have been integrated into the program curriculum. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The plan for the next reporting period was to finalize all research and progress towards writing full manuscripts for publication.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Project goal 1. At the beginning of the 2023 reporting period, the survey for agriculture faculty was completed and participation from members of the American Association of Agriculture Educators was solicited, but no responses were received. I shifted to analyzing previously collected course descriptions as an alternative to gain understanding of how systems skills are taught, preserving the goal of mapping agroecology-based curriculum while changing the source material. Project goal 2. During the 2023 reporting period, I compiled an agroecological justice bibliography and notes connecting complexity ethics (Cilliers/Preiser) to the formal principles of social justice in agroecology. This work focused on clarifying how complexity reframed best practices for social equality in agroecology to justice as a relational, ongoing process tied to knowledge and identity rather than a fixed rulebook. I found that together, the soil-security framework with the concept of "complexity of justice" helps justify why agroecology outcomes must be context-specific and co-produced as it validates community-anchored governance and circular-economy efforts that regenerate resources and align equity with long-run soil care. Project goal 3. During the 2023 reporting period, acting on the noted changes from the previous reporting period that a methods paper was identified, I adopted the framework of Arnold and Wade's Systems Thinking Skills to bridge vocabularies across disciplines. The framework was used to evaluate systems-based thinking skills in published abstracts and compare fields of study in agriculture and sustainability. To accomplish this, I collected papers from the Agronomy Journal, Crop Science Society of America Journal, and the Soil Science Society of America Journal, in addition to a comparative corpus of abstracts from other journals that used the term "agroecology". I ran term frequency-inverse document frequency and co-word tests to identify whether author's phrases in each of the journals/collections aligned with systems-thinking vocabulary and to determine whether there was a difference across the journal groupings. Project goal 4. Moving away from just using "complexity" keywords, I continued worked on synthesizing an integrated framework of ideas that communicated complexity in agriculture-related systems. From social-ecological/complex adaptive system organizing principles (Preiser et al. 2019), ecological-complexity themes (Vandermeer & Perfecto, 2017), and systems agriculture (Drinkwater, 2016). The synthesis afforded comparison across disparate fields of study such as SES, agroecology, and systems-research without relying on vocabulary from a single tradition. Additionally, the framework was intended to support sentence-level text modeling of published abstracts to identify complexity-based thinking (goal 3) without over-relying on literal keywords.
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Progress 01/15/22 to 01/14/23
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for this reporting period was researchers and educators in agriculture and ecological sciences. Changes/Problems:The first major problem encountered was that authors in differing fields of study rarely use shared vocabulary such that many of the fields represented in the collected abstracts exhibited only an implicit "systems sensibility". The change I made to be used in the next reporting period was a move from counting "complexity" phrases to the integrated framework-anchored coding (i.e, Arnold & Wade, Preiser, Vandermeer & Perfecto, Soil Security) and co-word/topic models to surface latent constructs. The second major challenge was avoiding duplication with Social-Ecological Systems methods review. Ifound a high-quality SES methods syntheses already exist (Preiser et al., 2019). Therefore, I intended to reframe the review to an analysis of systems thinking skills present in the papers already collected. The third major challenge was that the initial search collected thousands of abstracts, making full review untenable. Rather, it was determined to focus on a subsection of articles output by a specific community of researchers for the subsequent analyses. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?As a result of the guest lecture (see results disseminated to communities of interest) to the students at Utah State University's Center for Anticipatory Intelligence (CAI), my professional interactions with the Center Director and it's faculty increased. We had approximately four meetings during the reporting period to discuss teaching principles of simplifying complex problems with visualization tools, systems thinking skills, and system dynamics modeling. These themes and concepts gathered from my research in agroecological complexity were applied directly the CAI curriculum, giving students the tools for better understanding unfamiliar complex problems. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?I prepared and delivered an ESA 2022 presentation (See Other Products) communicating the early course-text analysis findings, plus the planned bibliometric/methods synthesis. During this time, I also presented key ideas on simplifying complex problems during a guest lecture to students at Utah State University's Center for Anticipatory Intelligence (CAI) in March 2022. The curriculum in CIA is uniquely situated at the nexus of national security and addressing interdisciplinary challenges facing the next generation of working professionals. After the semester projects were completed, the course instructor related that the lecture on simplifying complex problems was pivotal in how students began to understand the problems and complex systems they were independently studying. This later lead to program-wide curriculum changes in the CIA program (see opportunities for professional development section). What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The plan for the next reporting period was to finalize the survey instrument and recruit respondents for project goal one. Additionally, the plan was to conclude the literature reviews of project goals two, three, and four, culminating in publishable manuscripts.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Project Goal 1) During this project period, I compiled a national dataset of agroecology/sustainable-ag courses (95 course and program descriptions across 26 land-grant universities) and ran an LDA topic model to identify latent recurrent themes (e.g., "interactions," systems orientation, urban/food-systems angles). I also begin drafting survey instrument for agriculture-related faculty. The survey was Likert -based item to assess systems-thinking skill maturity, prepared recruitment and IRB plan. Project goals 2, 3, and 4)During this project period, the research examined the inquiry space at the nexus of agroecology, sustainability transitions, and complexity/SES, and expanded search syntax from narrow "complexity" keywords to inclusive terms (CAS, SES, transitions, resilience, etc.), growing the candidate corpus from hundreds to approximately six thousand published abstracts and then scoping to 2017-2021 for tractability. Additionally research during this period, lead to an integrative coding framework that bridges systems-thinking skills (Arnold & Wade), CAS organizing principles (Preiser et al.), ecological-complexity themes (Vandermeer & Perfecto), and soil Security (capability, condition, capital, connectivity, codification). This provided a lexicon for latent concept detection when papers don't use common terminology ("implicit systems sensibility" problem). As well, I collected and annotated key literature items across sustainable transitions, SES, agroecology pedagogy, and assessment methods, and wrote working notes translating these into the coding lexicon and rubrics for future literature analyses. Finally, during this period I selected and documented analysis tools: Bibliometrix (R) for co-word/co-citation networks, RPYS (CRExplorer) for historical roots, and LDA/topic modeling for course texts.
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