William & Mary ScholarWorks

Welcome! William & Mary ScholarWorks preserves and provides access to the research and creative output of William & Mary's faculty, staff, and students.

UPDATE 18th JUNE 2025: Our repository has migrated from Digital Commons to Open Repository DSpace as of this summer. Additional updates and improvements will continue through the Fall semester. Thank you for your patience during this transition.

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 11

Recent Submissions

Open Access
The Politics, Policy, and International Relations Section Companion Document to the Framework: Process and Outcomes
(Association of College and Research Libraries, 2025-09-24) Oberlies, Mary; Cloyd, Brett; Ackerman, Erin; Crowe, Stephanie; Lemery, Christopher; MacVaugh, Kimberly; Nesvig, Chelsea; Wasson, Winn
The Politics, Policy, and International Relations (PPIRS) section of ACRL is a forum for librarians to exchange information and ideas relevant to disciplines such as political science, law, international relations, security studies, public policy, and related fields. From 2018-2021, an ad hoc committee of section members worked to develop an addition to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education focused on the Framework’s applications to PPIRS disciplines, now known as the Companion Document to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Politics, Policy, and International Relations (the PPIRS Companion Document). In this chapter, we provide an overview of the process by which we developed this document, as well as some early outcomes and future opportunities this document provides.
Open Access
The Road to Connectivity: Designing a Framework for Actor Engagement in Wildlife-Vehicle Conflict Mitigation
(William & Mary, 2025) Santella, Cayley; Politte, Sofia; Green, Jordan; Swaddle, John
Wildlife-vehicle conflict (WVC) impacts wildlife conservation efforts, driver safety, and has costly economic implications. For successful mitigation of WVCs, coordination is required among various actors which can be challenging due to the lack of a clear framework for effectively engaging those actors. My goal is to understand and document the best practices for engaging diverse actors in WVC mitigation, using Loudoun County (Virginia, USA) as a case study. We conducted interviews of key state and local actors, along with background research and a literature review on successful implementation, to identify the best methods of actor engagement. Research findings are incorporated into a translational framework model. My findings include the primary barriers and motivators of key actors with funding and public support being the most crucial. This report aims to increase local knowledge and accessibility of information related to local level decision making related to WVC mitigation strategy implementation.
Open Access
How Light Affects Flight: Understanding Where and When Offshore Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) Poses Challenges for Migratory Birds in the US
(William & Mary, 2024) Otto, Ali; Swaddle, John
Millions of birds migrate nocturnally over offshore environments every year, yet little is known about how maritime activities influence migratory bird populations. There is increasing concern about how maritime lighting might influence bird populations, especially given the extensive evidence that artificial light at night (ALAN) impacts bird populations. The effects on these bird populations have ecological and economic implications for communities across the United States. Working in collaboration with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, we identified areas in the Gulf of Mexico and the US East Coast where there are overlaps between sources of artificial light at night (from oil and gas platforms and from cruise ships) and avian migratory pathways (from tracked birds). To highlight hotspots where maritime routes and bird migration overlap, we produced a map that illustrates the greatest degrees of overlap of ALAN and bird migratory routes. One outcome of this research is a set of recommendations that provide information on how offshore industries can reduce ALAN and its associated ecological and economic impacts on migratory birds while still maintaining the necessary functions of lighting associated with human safety and maritime navigation.
Open Access
Hurdles and opportunities for conservation of native fish biodiversity in Nepal
(Fisheries, 2025-08-01) Fabrizio, Mary; Nepal, Vaskar; Tuckey, Troy; Ranjan, Rahul; Dhakal, Hemanta; Edds, David R.; Gillette, David P.; Burchett, Patton; Sritharan, Narayani; Lohani, Sapana; Singh, Kunwar K.; Malik, Ammar; Paudel, Krishna
A steep north–south elevational gradient in Nepal supports a diverse freshwater fish fauna ranging from coldwater to tropical species. About 23% of the land area of Nepal is protected, but the conservation of water resources and aquatic species, which provides critical ecosystem services, has yet to be a primary goal. Threats to native fishes include habitat alteration, nonnative species, dams, unregulated exploitation, and climate change. Additionally, the fishes of Nepal are undersampled and inadequately known, with high levels of taxonomic uncertainty, potential cryptic species, and species that are likely unknown to science. Opportunities for effective conservation of native fish biodiversity are emerging, however, and center on the co-production of knowledge and co-development of conservation strategies with local communities. A multifaceted approach that integrates conservation with sustainable development is needed to protect Nepal's unique ichthyofauna and to promote a sustainable future for aquatic resources that are crucial to Nepal's ecology, economy, and culture.
Open Access
Reconciling scale using the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) Framework to improve management of woody encroachment in grasslands
(Journal of Environmental Management, 2025-07) Scholtz, Rheinhardt; Uden, Daniel R.; Allred, Brady W.; Donovan, Victoria M.; Maestas, Jeremy D.; Morford, Scott L.; Jones, Matthew O.; Naugle, David E.; Cady, Samantha M.; Fogarty, Dillon T.; Metcalf, Alexander L.; Brian, Chaffin; Allen, Craig; Roberts, Caleb; Rowen, Emily; Meredith, Gwendwr; Nesbitt, Holly K.; Williamson, Matthew A.; Gulab, Sabrina; Hamlin, Samantha; Lohani, Sapana; Twidwell, Dirac
Implementing strategies to navigate large-scale ecological transitions in grasslands is one of this century's greatest conservation challenges. In the US Great Plains, managing areas impacted by woody transitions have been reactive, short-lived, costly, and ineffective. Along with current technological innovation in rangeland monitoring, the promise of early warning science is to provide managers with sufficient time to be better prepared for novel signals of ecological change. Combining the science of early warning signals and frameworks such as the Resist – Accept – Direct (RAD) can provide land managers with guidelines to identify proactive strategies when facing ecological change. Using this approach, we found that opportunities to resist woody transitions decreased from 84 % to 60 % between 1990 and 2020 over the entire biome but remained highest in the northern and western Great Plains, which contributes to large scale conservation targets. These are key areas to prioritize resist opportunities. In contrast, 11 % of the biome exhibited early warning transition signals across all hierarchical scales by 2020, a fourfold increase since 1990. Lastly by 2020, 30 % of the biome exhibited early warning signals across multiple but not all scales. Here, efforts may be more effective when management is directed to conserve fragmented grassland legacies within a woody-dominated matrix and avoid large-scale monocultures of problematic encroaching woody species. Our multi-scale study indicates that 1) anchoring to the last remaining grassland core areas with no early warning of transitions and 2) strategically investing in these intact grasslands may provide the best results for grassland conservation.