Awarded by the OSU College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program, the Eleanor Ruffington McMahon Award supports undergraduate women honors scholars’ travel to present at conferences. Annalee receives more than the usual cap of $500 to present her research  at the April 2019 Society for Ethnobiology. Congratulations Annalee!

Congratulations Abby! Abby has mentored six undergraduates in McCorriston’s laboratory, and several have gone on to great achievements–Anna and Craig to graduate study, Drew to scholarships and an honors’ thesis, Annalee to win scholarships and travel awards. Accolades and all our appreciation to Abby.

ASOM researcher Annalee Sekulic was among 26 students selected to present at the Second Ohio State Undergraduate Research Day at Capitol Square. Here’s Annalee next to her poster on the macroremains from hyrax middens in Oman:

Mark Moritz, Ian Hamilton and colleagues published their paper Emergent Sustainability in Open Property Regimes in PNAS. In the paper, they compared eight cases with more or less open access to common-pool resources to develop a theoretical model that explains under what conditions one can expect the emergence of sustainability in open property regimes. Here is a link to the paper and here is the abstract:

Current theoretical models of the commons assert that common-pool resources can only be managed sustainably with clearly defined boundaries around both communities and the resources they use. In these theoretical models, open access inevitably leads to a tragedy of the commons. However, in many open-access systems, use of common-pool resources appears to be sustainable over the long term, i.e., current resource use does not threaten use of common-pool resources for future generations. In this paper, we outline the conditions that support sustainable resource use in open property regimes. We use the conceptual framework of complex adaptive systems to explain how processes within and couplings between human and natural systems can lead to the emergence of efficient, equitable and sustainable resource use. We illustrate these dynamics in eight case studies of different social-ecological systems including mobile pastoralism, marine and freshwater fisheries, swidden agriculture, and desert foraging. Our theoretical framework identifies eight conditions that are critical for the emergence of sustainable use of common-pool resources in open property regimes. In addition, we explain how changes in boundary conditions may push open property regimes either to common property regimes or a tragedy of the commons. Our theoretical model of emergent sustainability helps to understand the diversity and dynamics of property regimes across a wide range of social-ecological systems and explains the enigma of open access without a tragedy. We recommend that policy interventions in such self-organizing systems should focus on managing the conditions that are critical for the emergence and persistence of sustainability.

Hi, I’m Lawrence and I’ve recently joined the ASOM team as a post-doctoral researcher within the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology. I am joining the team to assist with the agent-based modelling – specifically to inform a model of the present-day pastoral system.

I have been conducting research in Dhofar for a few years. Initially, I was involved in research expeditions to study the biodiversity in a wadi system in western Dhofar. Our Anglo-Omani team worked their socks off and were rewarded with this stunning footage of several large mammal species including the critically endangered Arabian leopard. Read about the expeditions here.

For my MSc and PhD my research addressed the issue of overstocking of camels, cattle and goats – the impacts of which are apparent throughout Dhofar. More specifically, I looked at the socio-ecological system driving overstocking, and its impacts on the drought deciduous cloud forest habitat.

It’s great to be surrounded by so many enthusiastic individuals involved in research in Dhofar, and I look forward to my time here at OSU (provided Arctic blasts are limited to one per year, brrr).

The ASOM team is hard at work, developing an agent-based model in Netlogo to simulate the emergence of territoriality in the Dhufar region of Oman. The theoretical environmental model (shown here) provides a preview of group transhumance from the plateau (south) to the desert (north) based on shifting environmental conditions such as monsoons, biting flies, and energy and protein needs of cattle. Recently, the ASOM team has developed a model of agent behavior, in which groups form attachments to each other and the landscape. This leads to the formation of larger cultural groups. Soon, agent behaviors will be integrated into the environmental model, giving us an idea of how these complex social-ecological systems have impacted our world!

Our research team recently visited the Innovation Lab at the PAST Foundation to run a workshop for middle-school students on systems thinking using NetLogo agent-based modeling software. We experimented with the flocking, wolf-sheep, and traffic models before we moved on to a zombie model that Daniel Peart designed for the workshop. The plan is to use the workshops with the middle-school students to develop modules for a half-day summer camp The Big Game Theory at the PAST Foundation.

Annalee Sekulic recently traveled to Pennsylvania State University where she met with (now Professor) Sarah Ivory. The goal of the work weekend was to begin disaggregation of the Hyrax middens collected during the February 2018 and Autumn 2018 field seasons. She sorted, sized, and smelled a new step of the process which will assist her in producing her comparative macrobotanical data set. Sarah coached and mentored Annalee with her undergraduate senior

thesis and post-graduation options!

Annalee disaggregating in the Geosciences lab Penn State

Joy McCorriston, Mark Moritz, Abigail Buffington,
Konstantin Pustovoytov, Sarah Ivory, Wael AbuAzizeh
pp. 119-133