Stephen Chignell

University of Bristol | UB · Department of History

Co-authorship networks can provide key insights into the production of scientific knowledge. This is particularly interesting in Antarctica, where most human activity relates to scientific research. Bibliometric studies of Antarctic science have provided a useful understanding of international and interdisciplinary collaboration, yet most research...

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as ma...

Natural and social scientists everywhere are struggling to understand how to proceed in the face of continued biodiversity loss and the injustices brought upon people living in and around conservation landscapes. This has resulted in increasing calls for critical reflection on the narratives driving conservation research and practice. Narratives ca...

The categories we use to make sense of a place are never neutral. Scientific classifications can maintain ignorance about some aspects of a landscape, even as they create knowledge about others. This article considers this in the context of Ethiopia's Bale Mountains National Park, a landscape whose hydrologic and socio-cultural characteristics have...

This tutorial is the result of a couple of years of trying different software packages and reference manager setups. After some trial and error, I’ve settled on a system that is smooth, efficient, and free. The key is to use Zotero in conjunction with a cloud-based storage service. With this setup you will be able to: 1) Download, rename, and org...

The Belgrade Forest Project explores the history of a 5,550-ha forest in the northern suburbs of European Istanbul. The first stage of the project involved creating a reproducible strategy for extracting place names and their geographic locations from 100+ travel narratives that reference the forest area. In this article, we share the initial outco...

Antarctic and Southern Ocean environments are facing increasing pressure from multiple threats. The Antarctic Treaty System regularly looks to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) for the provision of independent and objective advice based on the best available science to support decision- making, policy development and effective e...

As in many parts of the world, the management of environmental science research in Antarctica relies on cost-benefit analysis of negative environmental impact versus positive scientific gain. Several studies have examined the environmental impact of Antarctic field camps, but very little work looks at how the placement of these camps influences sci...

This article uses the history of New Zealand's Vanda Station in Antarctica as a case study of the inseparability of human history and environmental change in the age of the Anthropocene. Vanda Station was built in the late 1960s to promote New Zealand's sovereignty claims to Antarctica and to promote scientific research in the predominantly ice-fre...

Over the last half century, the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV) of East Antarctica have become a globally important site for scientific research and environmental monitoring. Historical data can make important contributions to current research activities and environmental management in Antarctica but tend to be widely scattered and difficult to access. W...

Abstract. Over the last half century, the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV) of East Antarctica have become a globally important site for scientific research and environmental monitoring. Historical data can make important contributions to current research activities and environmental management in Antarctica, but tend to be widely scattered and difficult t...

The Bale Mountains of Ethiopia contain the largest contiguous area of alpine habitat in Africa. The region provides critical water resources and other essential environmental services to highland communities, endemic wildlife, and millions of downstream people in East Africa. Increasing land use change has created concern over degradation to headwa...

Demand for traditional medicine ingredients is causing species declines globally. Due to this trade, Himalayan caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) has become one of the world's most valuable biological commodities, providing a crucial source of income for hundreds of thousands of collectors. However, the resulting harvesting boom has gener...

Accurate maps of wetlands and riparian areas are critical for targeting conservation and monitoring efforts. However, detailed inventories in mountain regions are largely non-existent, as conventional mapping approaches are hindered by high costs, remoteness, and landscape variability. Contemporary modeling techniques can circumvent many of these i...

Landsat data are increasingly used for ecological monitoring and research. These data often require preprocessing prior to analysis to account for sensor, solar, atmospheric, and topographic effects. However, ecologists using these data are faced with a literature containing inconsistent terminology, outdated methods, and a vast number of approache...

We use reach-scale stream gradient as an indicator of longitudinal connectivity for water, sediment, and organic matter in a mountainous watershed in Colorado. Stream reaches with the highest gradient tend to have narrow valley bottoms with limited storage space and attenuation of downstream fluxes, whereas stream reaches with progressively lower g...

Among the most pressing concerns of land managers in post-wildfire landscapes are the establishment and spread of invasive species. Land managers need accurate maps of invasive species cover for targeted management post-disturbance that are easily transferable across space and time. In this study, we sought to develop an iterative, replicable metho...

Water access, sanitation, and security remain key foci of international aid and development. However, the increasing interconnectedness of hydrologic and social systems can cause water initiatives to have unexpected and cascading effects across geographic scales. This presents new challenges for geoscientists working in water development, as distan...

Maximum flood extent--a key data need for disaster response and mitigation--is rarely quantified due to storm-related cloud cover and the low temporal resolution of optical sensors. While change detection approaches can circumvent these issues through the identification of inundated land and soil from post-flood imagery, their accuracy can suffer i...