COS 45-4 - Mapping socioecological regions in the Pacific Northwest: a socioecological typology for understanding relationships between biophysical settings and economic outcomes

Monday, August 7, 2023

4:15 PM – 4:30 PM PDT

Location: E142

Presenting Author(s)

ET

E. Jamie Trammell, PhD

Associate Professor and Chair
Environmental Science, Policy, and Sustainability, Southern Oregon University, 1250 Siskiyou Blvd, Ashland OR 97520
Ashland, Oregon, United States

Coauthor(s)

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Jeffrey Evans

Global Lands Science, The Nature Conservancy, United States
JR

Jesse Jo Rego

Environmental Science, Policy & Sustainability, Southern Oregon University, United States
AB

Alec Bayarsky

Environmental Science, Policy & Sustainability, Southern Oregon University, United States

Abstract: Effective conservation cannot happen without support from all people involved or impacted. While there are many tools to encourage better communication and collaboration (i.e. stakeholder engagement, ecoregional planning, etc), many of these approaches are not always feasible or equitable, especially across broad landscapes. We propose a typology to assess how people may interact with their environment as a first step to hypothesizing specific relationships between communities and their broader environmental context. Utilizing socioeconomic data from the U.S. census and ecoregional data from the U.S. Geological Survey, we model this relationship between biophysical setting and socioeconomics in the Pacific Northwest using Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection and Random Forest models. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that ecoregional settings easily explain variance observed in variables like income, poverty, and employment across the census-defined boundaries. Through this work, we illustrate the ability to hierarchically nest socioeconomic indicators within biophysical systems to create socioecological regions useful for connecting conservation to the people of the place.