Advanced Training Courses focusing on scientific skills
ATC 1: Assessing Flows of Land-based Products
Introduced how land-based products flow between systems via trade and how to capture and measure such flows quantitatively. Topics: footprint analyses; virtual land, water, and biomass trade; socio-ecological metabolism; material and energy flow analysis (MEFA); flow-based sustainability indicators; commodity chain analysis.
ATC 2: Place-based Assessments of Land Systems
Explored how local-scale case studies allow for an exploration of underlying causes of land change. ESRs learned how to assess land systems spatially by GIS/remote sensing, ascribe agency and causality via quasi-experimental setups and agent-based models, and combine qualitative and quantitative research. Topics: case studies; place-based sustainability indicators; driver chains & causality; environmental systems; unit of analysis.
ATC 3: Advanced Network Science
Introduced ESRs to different network analyses and how these add to and differ from telecoupling research. This included quantifying network typologies, how they change over time, inter-connectedness in networks, and correlation among sub-networks (e.g. to detect telecoupling) and networks of different kinds (e.g. to detect cause-effect relationships). Topics: Network science and methodologies; trade networks; actor-network theory.
ATC 4: Justice, Governance and Sustainability Analysis
Discussed the concepts of justice, governance and sustainability, and critical thinking on these terms to understand how telecoupled systems include, and emerge from, relations of power, competition, and inequality. ESRs learned how to address unequal distributions of power to obtain social and ecological sustainable land systems. Topics: global justice and governance; political-ecology; social sustainability.
ATC 5: Modelling Telecoupled Land Systems
Introduced spatial modelling of telecoupled land systems, emphasising models dealing with human-environment interactions across scales and sectors. ESRs learned how to incorporate agency in land system models, how to assess displacement explicitly, and how to explore impacts of land change under a range of scenarios. Topics: Land system modelling; multi-agent models; down-scaling techniques; uncertainty; input and boundary choices.
ATC 11: Qualitative Methods
Knowledge: Positionality, representations, and knowledge production in social science, Methods: Interviews and participant observation, Approaches: Qualitative research in a globalized world: Multi-sited ethnography, case studies, zooming techniques and progressive contextualization, Production and analysis: The 1000-page question – field notes, triangulation and hypothesis testing in the field.