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With continued pressure on biodiversity and ever-growing conflicts with human development, qualified systems for scenario modelling, impact assessment and decision support are urgently needed. Such systems must be able to integrate complex models and information from many sources and do so in a flexible and transparent way. To that end, as well as for other complicated and data-intensive biodiversity research purposes, the concept of LifeWatch has emerged. The idea of LifeWatch is to construct e-infrastructure and virtual laboratories by integrating large data sources, computational capacities, and tools for analysis and modelling in an open, serviceoriented architecture. To be efficient and accurate, a continuous inflow of large quantities of data is essential. However, even with new techniques, government-funded monitoring data and research data will not feed the system with up-to-date species information of sufficient scale and resolution. To fill this void, skilled amateur observers (citizen scientists) can contribute to a very valuable extent. After a preparatory phase, a Swedish LifeWatch (SLW) consortium was initiated in 2011. Swedish LifeWatch developed an infrastructure where all components are accessible through open web services. At the SLW Analysis portal, different formats of species and environmental data can be accessed instantly, and integrated, analysed, visualized and downloaded at selected temporal, spatial or taxonomic scales. Swedish LifeWatch currently provides 46 million species observations from eight different databases, all harmonized according to standardized formats and the Dyntaxa taxonomic backbone database. Almost 40 million of these observations were provided by citizens through the online reporting system named the Species Observation System (SOS) or Artportalen. This paper describes this system, as well as the incentives that make it so successful. The citizen science data in the SOS are accessible, together with data from research and monitoring, in the SLW infrastructure, making the latter a powerful instrument for large-scale data extraction, visualization and analysis.

An interview with Gunnel Gustafsson, vice general director of the Swedish Research Council, on equality in research. The Swedish Research Council's main equality goal is an equal distribution of males and females in academic positions and research grants. According to Gustafsson, this policy has already achieved limited success, but the male dominated hard sciences remain a challenge. L. Pitkaniemi

Lawns have a significant influence on the cityscape as one of the essential elements of green spaces and an important part of people's everyday lives. Most people in the Western world view lawns as a compulsory element of the urban landscape, almost an icon, without questioning their social, symbolic, ecological or aesthetic values. This research is a part of the conceptual framework and methodological approaches that are being used in an ongoing transdisciplinary collaboration project to study lawns in Sweden as a social and ecological phenomenon.The overall aim of this study was to investigate social and cultural perceptions of lawns, as well as motives behind decisions about the establishment and management of lawns in Sweden. Two multifamily housing typologies, the 'Million Programme' and People's Homes', were examined due to their dominance in Swedish cities. We also studied how an alternative vision of conventional lawns can be applied and accepted by urban residents. We estimated lawn cover in multi-family housing areas and links to people's perception and use of lawns. Questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observational studies were used (N = 300). Our results showed that people like lawns even if they do not always directly use them. Lawns cover the most significant amount of outdoor spaces in all multi-family residential areas and accompany people everywhere from the house to the schoolyard or park. The total lawn cover in the study areas was 27.8%. Lawns were particularly valued as important places for different outdoor activities (playing, resting, picnicking, walking, socialising) and enjoying the green colour. However people do not want to use a vast monotonous lawn, but a variety of spaces that provide good conditions for different senses (sound, smell, touch and sight) and activities. Alternative lawns were also appreciated by many citizens, politicians, planners and managers. The implementation of new types of lawns requires special planning and design solutions adjusted for each particular neighbourhood.

Adaptation research and practice too often overlooks the wider social context within which climate change is experienced. Mainstream approaches frame adaptation problems in terms of the consequences that flow from biophysical impacts and as a result, we argue, ask the wrong questions. A complementary approach gaining ground in the field, foregrounding the social, economic and political context, reveals differentiation in adaptation need, and how climate impacts interconnect with wider processes of change. In this paper, we illustrate how this kind of approach frames a different set of questions about adaptation using the case of Nepal. Drawing on fieldwork and a review of literature, we contrast the questions that emerge from adaptation research and practice that take climate risk as a starting point with the questions that emerge from examination of contemporary rural livelihoods. We find that while adaptation efforts are often centred around securing agricultural production and are predicated on climate risk management, rural livelihoods are caught in a wider process of transformation. The numbers of people involved in farming are declining, and households are experiencing the effects of rising education, abandonment of rural land, increasing wages, burgeoning mechanisation, and high levels of migration into the global labour market. We find the epistemological framing of adaptation too narrow to account for these changes, as it understands the experiences of rural communities through the lens of climate risk. We propose that rather than seeking to integrate local understandings into a fixed, impacts-orientated epistemology, it is necessary to premise adaptation on an epistemology capable of exploring how change occurs. Asking the right questions thus means opening up adaptation by asking: 'what are the most significant changes taking place in people's lives?', along with the more standard: 'what are the impacts of climate change?' Viewing adaptation as occurring between and within these two perspectives has the potential to reveal new vulnerabilities and opportunities for adaptation practice to act upon.

Scholarship in international law aims at addressing global forest governance comprehensively. This article reviews the recent contribution Global Forest Governance - Legal Concepts and Policy Trends by Rowena Maguire and puts it into the perspective of recent political and policy science research on global forests. While finding Maguire's volume being a very timely and valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary discussions on international forest governance, we identify some weaknesses which are mostly rooted in methodological critique and a lack of a systematic framework for analysis.

Wild animals are used for research and management purposes in Sweden and throughout the world. Animals are often subjected to similar procedures and risks of compromised welfare from capture, anesthesia, handling, sampling, marking, and sometimes selective removal. The interpretation of the protection of animals used for scientific purposes in Sweden is based on the EU Directive 2010/63/EU. The purpose of animal use, irrespective if the animal is suffering or not, decides the classification as a research animal, according to Swedish legislation. In Sweden, like in several other European countries, the legislation differs between research and management. Whereas, animal research is generally well-defined and covered in the legislation, wildlife management is not. The protection of wild animals differs depending on the procedure they are subjected to, and how they are classified. In contrast to wildlife management activities, research projects have to implement the 3Rs and must undergo ethical reviews and official animal welfare controls. It is often difficult to define the dividing line between the two categories, e.g., when marking for identification purposes. This gray area creates uncertainty and problems beyond animal welfare, e.g., in Sweden, information that has been collected during management without ethical approval should not be published. The legislation therefore needs to be harmonized. To ensure consistent ethical and welfare assessments for wild animals at the hands of humans, and for the benefit of science and management, we suggest that both research and management procedures are assessed by one single Animal Ethics Committee with expertise in the 3Rs, animal welfare, wildlife population health and One Health. We emphasize the need for increased and improved official animal welfare control, facilitated by compatible legislation and a similar ethical authorization process for all wild animal procedures.

The evaluation of organizational climate is a critical factor in business management, and its importance is even greater in military higher education institutions, due to the high motivation and commitment expected from their members. However, research on this topic in Ecuador is scarce. The present study validates a scale to measure organizational climate in Ecuadorian military higher education institutions. The instrument proposed by Hernández, Garrido & Rico (2016) was applied to an intentional sample of 44 Military Engineering School (ESINGM) members. Its reliability was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient, obtaining values above 0.960, indicating high internal consistency. The dimensions of the organizational climate present in the institution were identified, and the results of the first-level statistical validation were presented. It is concluded that the scale is valid and reliable for measuring the organizational climate in this institution. In addition, this study contributes to the understanding of the organizational climate in military higher education institutions in Ecuador and may have implications for the management and improvement of educational quality in the context of higher education in Ecuador.

Social sustainability in urban places is undervalued in urban planning due to the intangible nature of the concept. By valuing lived experiences of place, this research connects social and environmental sustainability pillars to support planning for socioenvironmental justice from a citizen's perspective. The quality of the urban outdoor environment is explored in relation to safety and individual and collective efficacy for social wellbeing which contextualises the role of urban green space. This study suggests socio-environmental sustainability is related at an individual and collective level. Safe social environments can support place attachment processes and safe green spaces can support self-regulation of emotions that influences behaviours. The urban outdoors can be viewed as a social learning environment. An inductive interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) led enquiry has been conducted which suggests urban places for social wellbeing can be explained by a framework that integrates social and environmental psychology and spatial politics theories. This study suggests that place attachment is at the heart of dynamic social environments and influences social learning behaviours through vicarious learning and the manifestation of social spaces as framed by Scannell and Gifford's Tripartite Framework of Place Attachment, Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory and Lefebvre's Theory of Produced Social Space. Designing for socio-environmental justice is associated with understanding human irrationality due to poor social and environmental quality. This research suggests the right to feeling safe and the quality of the urban environment, including safe green spaces, becomes an issue for the operation of democracy and facilitating self and collective efficacy, by recognising the invisible bricks that form urban places for social wellbeing.

Argues that because of its international status, the English speaking world has an overly dominant position in formulating theories, models and research problems, which the Swedish political science merely copies. Repeating studies and applying the same methods is hardly a sign of a mature and cumulative science. Swedish political science could offer much more by studying fields such as Nordic social democracy, Swedish criminal policy or Nordic far right parties with unique theories and methods. L. Pitkaniemi

Within urban design there is increasing interest in the close relationshipbetween social, economic and political processes and the production of public spaces. Thisrelationship, however, often remains abstract and is rarely illustrated in empirical studies.This paper introduces an institutionalist understanding to the production of public spaces,whereby emphasis is placed on the analysis of structuring forces and actors as a way toapprehend the complexity of the social processes guiding and influencing the planning,design and management of public spaces. The institutionalist understanding is illustratedin the case study of an urban renewal project in Barcelona. The results of the case studyshow the contrasts and tensions between the structuring forces and the different actorsoperating in the project, how structuring forces favoured the interest and claims of someactors over those of others, and the potential risks and challenges that this has for the useand value of the public spaces produced by the project.