Julia Baird’s research interests centre around water. She agrees with the notion that water issues are ultimately issues of governance, and so her research focuses on human dimensions of water resources. Within this broad area, she is particularly interested in:
- building an understanding of how (and why) people engage in water management and governance, and how the qualities of these processes relate to social and ecological outcomes;
- how the concept of resilience relates to water governance, and how it is operationalized and applied in practice; and,
- applying the notion of social-ecological systems to agriculture, how these kinds of systems can be modeled, and how those models can be used to improve decision making about practices that influence water resources on agricultural landscapes.
Julia’s research is situated within the field of sustainability science. She collaborates with researchers from diverse disciplines to pursue research questions. Her research is influenced by her many years on the family farm, her educational background in the natural sciences, and her keen interest in how people make decisions and take action to impact the sustainability of our water resources. She uses mixed methods – with a quantitative bent – and has a particular affinity for social network analysis. Her research tends to have both scholarly and applied outcomes.
Ryan Plummer’s multi-faceted program of research broadly concerns the governance of social-ecological systems. In striving to advance knowledge of collaboration and adaptation within complex systems, he has focused on the exploring their theoretical underpinnings and ethical implications, modeling their processes, examining the roles of social capital, and investigating the influences of social learning. Water resources are the context in which his research mainly occurs and he is a Faculty Investigator in the Water Policy and Governance Group.
Findings from his research have been published in leading international journals such as Ecological Economics, Ecology and Society, Environmental Management, Frontiers in Ecology and Society, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Environmental Management, Society and Natural Resources and the UN journal, Natural Resources Forum. In addition, he is the author of Outdoor Recreation (Routledge, 2010), and co-editor of Adaptive Capacity and the Making of Environmental Governance (with D. Armitage, Springer, 2010) and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education (with M.E. Krasny and C. Lundholm, Routledge, 2011). He serves as a Subject Editor for Ecology and Society.
The scholarly quality of his research program was formally recognized in 2008 with the awarding of a Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence. In 2004 he received the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence and in 2008 he was selected as one of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) Excellence in Education Award winners for Promotion of Sustainable Practices.
