About

Peter S. Alagona is associated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specializes in Environmental Studies. His work focuses on ecological and environmental issues, as indicated by his affiliation and the context of his professional profile. The page provides a brief overview of his academic background and contributions, emphasizing his role in exploring environmental ecosystems and related topics. His research and scholarly activities are centered around understanding and addressing ecological challenges, contributing to the broader field of environmental studies.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Environmental resource management
• Geography
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Environmental science
• Engineering
• Environmental planning
• Engineering ethics
• Environmental ethics
• History
• Public relations
• Law
• Art history
• Classics

Selected publications

• The socio‐ecological niche

  People and Nature · 2025-04-10

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Ecologists recognise that we live on an increasingly human‐dominated planet, yet most of the field's foundational concepts remain essentially biophysical, with little reference to human society. There are few better examples of this divide between ecological and social theory than the niche concept. During its century‐long history, the niche concept has been defined in many ways, including to describe the ecological roles of humans. To date, however, it has not incorporated human influences into its various descriptions of other species' ecological roles. In this essay, we present the socio‐ecological niche (SEN) concept, which builds on the literature in niche theory by contributing insights from the social sciences and humanities to better understand the roles of non‐human species in modern socio‐ecological systems. We argue that the SEN enriches the niche concept and offers a point of connection between ecology and justice. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Genomic data from the extinct California brown bear suggests a source population for reintroduction to California

  Journal of Heredity · 2025-04-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  California brown bears, also known as California grizzlies or golden bears, are an extinct group that once thrived in North America's western coastal habitats. Despite being common in the region as recently as the early 19th century, intense poisoning, trapping, and hunting led to their extinction by 1924. Today, California is emerging as a candidate for brown bear reintroduction as a component of larger ecosystem restoration efforts. Questions remain, however, about whether living brown bears are suitable proxies for the bears that once inhabited California. While recent work suggests that brown bears from California were similar in size and overall diet to brown bears living today in continental North America, the 1) extent to which California bears were genetically differentiated from other populations, and 2) what this means for proposed reintroductions, remain outstanding questions. We generated genomes from two of the last living California brown bears and compared them to genomes from living brown bears. Genomic estimates of divergence time combined with radiocarbon dating points towards brown bears arriving recently in California, having diverged within the last 10,000 years from a common ancestor with brown bears found today in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. This timeline, the overall genetic similarity between the California and Yellowstone populations, and the strong pattern of isolation-by-distance we observe all suggest that no closer living relatives are likely to be found. If genetic background is to be a consideration for reintroduction efforts in California, brown bears from Yellowstone might serve as a source population.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coexistence beyond disciplinary silos: Five dimensions of analysis for more convivial human-predator interactions

  Biological Conservation · 2025-05-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Understanding human-predator interactions has been a central goal of conservation for decades, yet many previous efforts have approached this challenge from disciplinary perspectives focused on single case studies. There is a need for more transdisciplinary and multi-sited research to enrich our understandings of the complexity of human-nonhuman interactions and to design ways to make them more convivial. The multi-year CONVIVA “convivial conservation” research project addressed this gap, involving scholars from natural sciences, social sciences and humanities to promote coexistence, biodiversity and justice in conservation across four diverse case studies of apex predators: jaguars in Brazil, wolves in Finland, lions in Tanzania, and brown bears in California, United States. In this article, we set out two key contributions. First, we highlight how our project created iterative, dialogue-based reflections amongst different disciplines and perspectives to inform research questions, methods and units of analysis, fulfilling what we see as a key need in the literature. Second, we operationalise our collaboration beyond disciplinary silos into a novel framework of five interconnected dimensions of analysis, that characterise human-predator interactions, drawing on a range of lenses and including a series of guiding questions. We also showcase empirical material from our cases across wildlife, environment, interactions, institutions and justice dimensions. We present our approach, framework and findings with collective reflections and an invitation for adaptation and further research on their suitability to other contexts and species.

  PublisherDOI

• Triangulating habitat suitability for the locally extirpated California grizzly bear

  Biological Conservation · 2025-02-07 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Electronic Supplementary Data File from Coupled social and ecological change drove the historical extinction of the California grizzly bear (<i>Ursus arctos californicus</i>)

  Figshare · 2024-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Excel data file containing multiple tabs including: historical food quotes, original radiocarbon and stable isotope data for grizzly bears, original stable isotope values for food items and competitors (including from the literature), references for trophic discrimination factors and other tissue conversions, MRPP B-H complete unformatted results, and body size data.

  PublisherDOI

• Coupled social and ecological change drove the historical extinction of the California grizzly bear ( <i>Ursus arctos californicus</i> )

  Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2024-01-10 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Large carnivores (order Carnivora) are among the world's most threatened mammals due to a confluence of ecological and social forces that have unfolded over centuries. Combining specimens from natural history collections with documents from archival records, we reconstructed the factors surrounding the extinction of the California grizzly bear ( Ursus arctos californicus ), a once-abundant brown bear subspecies last seen in 1924. Historical documents portrayed California grizzlies as massive hypercarnivores that endangered public safety. Yet, morphological measurements on skulls and teeth generate smaller body size estimates in alignment with extant North American grizzly populations (approx. 200 kg). Stable isotope analysis ( δ 13 C, δ 15 N) of pelts and bones ( n = 57) revealed that grizzlies derived less than 10% of their nutrition from terrestrial animal sources and were therefore largely herbivorous for millennia prior to the first European arrival in this region in 1542. Later colonial land uses, beginning in 1769 with the Mission era, led grizzlies to moderately increase animal protein consumption (up to 26% of diet), but grizzlies still consumed far less livestock than otherwise claimed by contemporary accounts. We show how human activities can provoke short-term behavioural shifts, such as heightened levels of carnivory, that in turn can lead to exaggerated predation narratives and incentivize persecution, triggering rapid loss of an otherwise widespread and ecologically flexible animal.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Better Together? The Values, Obstacles, Opportunities, and Prospects for Collaborative Research in Environmental History

  Environmental History · 2023-03-21 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Environmental historians have long argued for the value of collaborative research, many have called for more of it, and some have experimented with new forms of teamwork. Yet data gathered from three prominent journals—Environmental History, Environment and History, and the Journal of Historical Geography—show that, over the fifteen-year period from 2006 through 2020, coauthorship on published research remained remarkably rare, with no discernible trend over time. Why do environmental historians still collaborate so infrequently on published research? What are the causes and consequences of this failure to work together? And how can we help better fulfill long-standing calls in our field for a more collaborative research culture? This essay answers these questions, and it offers practical remedies for fostering a culture of greater collaboration in environmental history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The production-protection nexus: How political-economic processes influence prospects for transformative change in human-wildlife interactions

  Global Environmental Change · 2023-06-28 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  This article advances a novel analytical framework for investigating the influence of political-economic processes in human-wildlife interactions (HWI) to support efforts to transform wildlife conservation governance. To date, the majority of research and advocacy addressing HWI focuses on micro-level processes, while even the small body of existing literature exploring social dimensions of such interactions has largely neglected attention to political-economic forces. This is consonant with efforts to transform conservation policy and practice more broadly, which tend to emphasize “circular” change within current political-economic structures rather than “axial” transformation aiming to transcend these structures themselves. Our analysis thus advances understanding of potential for axial transformation in HWI via confrontation with, and “unmaking” of, constraining political-economic structures. It does so through cross-site analysis of conservation policy and practice in relation to three apex predator species (lions, jaguars and wolves) in varied geographic and socio-political contexts, grounded in qualitative ethnographic study within the different sites by members of an international research team. We explore how the relative power of different political-economic interests within each case influences how the animals are perceived and valued, and how this in turn influences conservation interventions and their impact on HWI within these spaces. We term this analysis of the “production-protection nexus” (the interrelation between process of resource extraction and conservation, respectively) in rural landscapes. We emphasize importance of attention to this formative nexus both within and across specific locales in growing global efforts to transform situations of human-wildlife conflict into less contentious coexistence.

  PublisherDOI

• Assisting adaptation in a changing world

  Frontiers in Environmental Science · 2023-09-18 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Today, all ecosystems are undergoing environmental change due to human activity, and in many cases the rate of change is accelerating due to climate change. Consequently, conservation programs are increasingly focused on the response of organisms, populations, and ecosystems to novel conditions. In parallel, the field of conservation biology is developing and deploying new tools to assist adaptation, which we define as aiming to increase the probability that organisms, populations, and ecosystems successfully adapt to ongoing change in biotic and abiotic conditions. Practitioners are aiming to assist a suite of adaptive processes, including acclimatization, range shifts, and evolution, at the individual and population level, while influencing the aggregate of these responses to assist ecosystem reorganization. The practice of assisting adaptation holds promise for environmental conservation, but effective policy and implementation will require thoughtful consideration of potential social and biological benefits and risks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Wild Urban Injustice: A Critical POET Model to Advance Environmental Justice

  Environmental Justice · 2023-02-17 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Background: People and wildlife can both be the subjects of environmental injustice. Although their experiences are clearly not the same, shared logics of oppression often impose harms through the environment on vulnerable and marginalized people and free-living nonhuman animals. Critical environmental justice provides a matrix for analyzing and addressing arrangements of power across categories of difference, whereas human ecology approaches offer frameworks for analyzing interactions across human and environmental systems in urban contexts. We develop a new analytical model—critical population, organization, environment, technology (POET)—to strengthen approaches to studying human–environmental problems by integrating the four pillars of critical environmental justice with the four dimensions of the human ecology POET model. Methods: This article uses a case study approach of coyotes living in urban areas to demonstrate one use of the critical POET model to analyze linkages between injustices across humans, wildlife, and the environment. Results: Urbanization as a core spatial logic—through the twin forces of institutional racism and speciesism—has perpetrated harms against people of color and coyotes. Discussion: Identifying shared logics of oppression is a key step toward the realization of a robust multispecies approach to environmental justice. Conclusion: The critical POET model provides a matrix for analyzing interactions and relationships that produce and maintain social and environmental injustices for historically and contemporarily marginalized groups, both human and nonhuman.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER - The University of California's Natural Reserve System and the Role of Biological Field Stations in American Environmental History

  NSF · $400k · 2011–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Alexis M. Mychajliw

  Middlebury College

  10 shared

• Philippe Cohen

  9 shared

• Lisa K. Anderson

  Princess Alexandra Hospital

  9 shared

• Moun- Tain Morning

  Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

  9 shared

• M. Hamilton

  Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

  9 shared

• Jonathan L. Kratz

  Glenn Research Center

  9 shared

• Mark A. Chappell

  Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory

  9 shared

• Ammon Corl

  Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

  9 shared