9 pages., via online journal., Cross-property cooperation has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of environmental management actions that cut across property boundaries. Online tools can facilitate this and overcome barriers to landholder engagement in collaborative management. However, collaborative online tools need to be designed and tailored to users' needs and values, and landholder participation in the development process is critical to ensuring uptake and long-term use.
This article presents a case study from the Central Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia, where landholders have been involved in participatory development of a new online collaboration tool. The case study results highlight the significance of issues such as internet access, privacy, technical proficiency and differing stakeholder objectives. A landholder survey identified mapping and the uploading of monitoring data as important functions for the online tool, but these were not rated as highly as functions relating to data security, sharing settings and key term searches. Consequently, we recommend that a future online collaboration tool for the region is not framed specifically as a mapping or citizen science tool, but rather as an adaptive collaboration and communication tool that can incorporate a variety of data types and formats and be modified over time in line with changing landholder needs.
14 pages., via online journal., This research aims to identify and communicate water-related vulnerabilities in transport infrastructure, specifically flood risk of road/rail-stream intersections, based on watershed characteristics. This was done using flooding in Värmland and Västra Götaland, Sweden in August 2014 as case studies on which risk models are built. Three different statistical modelling approaches were considered: a partial least square regression, a binomial logistic regression, and artificial neural networks. Using the results of the different modelling approaches together in an ensemble makes it possible to cross-validate their results. To help visualize this and provide a tool for communication with stakeholders (e.g., the Swedish Transport Administration - Trafikverket), a flood ‘thermometer’ indicating the level of flooding risk at a given point was developed. This tool improved stakeholder interaction and helped highlight the need for better data collection in order to increase the accuracy and generalizability of modelling approaches.
