Projects


Data Science for Social Good


Pine Ridge Reforestation

A Lean Six Sigma approach to improving the survival of Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine seedlings planted on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Done in collaboration with Trees, Water & People, PrintReleaf, Village Earth, and Lakota Solar Enterprises and the Oglala Lakota Tribe.



Science Communication & Outreach


Beasts Evolve!

A free game for the classroom and home, designed to help understand the theory of evolution by natural selection by creating fictional “beasts” and observing evolution in action.


Academic

Teaching


n(R) 592

A course designed to introduce graduate-level students in natural resources and conservation social sciences to applied statistical computing with the R programming language.


Current Projects

The Social Habitat for Wildlife
PI: Michael Manfredo, Colorado State University
Co-Investigator: Tara Teel, Colorado State University

The notion of habitat is commonly used to convey the biophysical conditions necessary for survival of a wildlife species. Yet, in the era of the Anthropocene, it is generally recognized that the actual presence or absence of a species in a place is largely contingent on human factors. The traditional habitat concept also implicitly supports the idea of human-nature separation, while recent efforts in conservation advance social-ecological approaches that recognize the interrelationship of humans and the natural environment. Based on the concept of wildlife values, we advance the notion of social habitat for wildlife in the United States.


Organizational Change for Effective Adaptation in State Fish and Wildlife Agencies
PIs: Michael Manfredo, Colorado State University and Mark Gasta, University of Colorado, Boulder
Co-Investigator: Leeann Sullivan, Colorado State University

Many state fish and wildlife agencies in the U.S. face a changing social climate noted in declining hunter populations and agency revenues, shifting social values, and agency values that are not widely representative of the general public. The Roadmap to Relevancy initiative is a noteworthy attempt to broaden agency’s stakeholder base and the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (H.R. 4647) aims to expand the funding base for wildlife management. A broader question, which we hope to address, asks how agencies can embrace organizational change to facilitate effective adaptation.


Recent and Ongoing Projects

The Effects of Social Transmission Biases on Human Cultural Evolution
PIs: Michael Gavin, Colorado State University and Fiona Jordan, University of Bristol
Co-Investigator: Alarna Samarasinghe, University of Bristol

How influential are the personal characteristics of those we choose to learn from (model biases) and the characteristics of the information itself (content biases) in determining what and how people learn? We intend to examine this from cultural evolutionary and sociolinguistic contexts to identify the relative effect of prestige on cultural transmission and its interactions with narrative content.


Demography, Subsistence, Culture, and Genetic Variation of the Chabu Hunter-Gatherers of Southwest Ethiopia
Co-PIs: Barry Hewlett and Bonnie Hewlett, Washington State University, Vancouver, and Samuel Jilo Dira, University of West Florida
Co-Investigators: Zachary Garfield, Washington State University, Vancouver, Brenna Henn, University of California, Davis, Shyamalika Gopalan, Stony Brook University, Marc Feldman, Stanford University, and Chris Gignoux, University of Colorado

The Chabu are one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies in Africa. They are thought to be a linguistic isolate, are ethnographically unknown, and are not recognized as a legitimate ethnic group by the Ethiopian government. We are working to understand who the Chabu are and their relationships with other groups across Ethiopia and East Africa, with the aim of preserving their culture, their human rights, and their way of life, which are under threat from encroaching settlers and coffee plantations.


Recent Presentations

Adaptive Opportunities for State Fish & Wildlife Agencies
March 11, 2020
North American Wildlife & Natural Resources Conference, Omaha, NE

Social Habitats for Wildlife in the U.S. with an Application to Wolf Reintroduction in Colorado
September 23, 2019
Pathways 2019: Human Dimensions of Wildlife Conference, Estes Park, CO

Prestige: Concept, Measurement, and the Transmission of Culture (Video)
May 15, 2019
Doctoral Defense Public Seminar, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO

Past Presentations


Publications

* Co-first authors

Peer Reviewed

Manfredo, M.J., Berl, R.E.W., Teel, T.L., & Bruskotter, J.T. (in press). Bringing social values to wildlife conservation decisions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Manfredo, M.J., Teel, T.L., Berl, R.E.W., Bruskotter, J.T., & Kitayama, S. (2020). Social value shift in favour of biodiversity conservation in the United States. Nature Sustainability 3(12). doi: 10.1038/s41893-020-00655-6   

Berl, R.E.W., Samarasinghe, A.N., Jordan, F.M., & Gavin, M.C. (2020). The Position-Reputation-Information (PRI) scale of individual prestige. PLOS ONE 15(6): e0234428. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234428         

Niemiec, R.M., Berl, R.E.W., Gonzalez, M., Teel, T., Camara, C., Collins, M., Salerno, J., Crooks, K., Schultz, C., Breck, S., & Hoag, D. (2020). Public perspectives and media reporting of wolf reintroduction in Colorado. PeerJ 8:e9074. doi: 10.7717/peerj.9074      

Berl, R.E.W. & Hewlett, B.S. 2015. Cultural variation in the use of overimitation by the Aka and Ngandu of the Congo Basin. PLOS ONE 10(3): e0120180. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120180      

Berl, R.E.W.*, Samarasinghe, A.N.*, Roberts, S.G., Jordan, F.M., & Gavin, M.C. (in review). Prestige and content biases together shape the cultural transmission of narratives. Preprint: SocArXiv      

Samarasinghe, A.N., Berl, R.E.W., Gavin, M.C., & Jordan, F.M. (in review). Evaluations of accents can be used as a measure of prestige. Preprint: SocArXiv      

Gopalan, S.*, Berl, R.E.W.*, Belbin, G., Negash, A.N., Gignoux, C.R., Feldman, M.W., Hewlett, B.S., & Henn, B.M. (in review). Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories following the rise of farming in Eastern Africa. Preprint: bioRxiv, 517730      

Non-Peer Reviewed

Niemiec, R.M., Berl, R.E.W., Gonzalez, M., Teel, T., Camara, C., Collins, M., Salerno, J., Crooks, K., Schultz, C., Breck, S., & Hoag, D. 2020. Working report: Public perspectives on wolf reintroduction and management in Colorado. Fort Collins, CO: Colorado State University, Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources.   

Hewlett, B.S., Berl, R.E.W., & Roulette, C.J. 2016. Teaching and overimitation among Aka hunter-gatherers. In: Terashima, H. & Hewlett, B.S., editors. Social learning and innovation in contemporary hunter-gatherers. Springer. pp. 35–45. doi: 10.1007/978-4-431-55997-9_3   

Berl, R.E.W. 2015. On the value of conserving human cultural diversity. Northwest Science 89(1): 100-101. doi: 10.3955/046.089.0110