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The Kenya long‐term exclosure experiment (KLEE) was established in 1995 in semi‐arid savanna rangeland to examine the separate and combined effects of livestock, wildlife and megaherbivores on their shared environment. The long‐term nature of this experiment has allowed us to measure these effects and address questions of stability and resilience in the context of multiple drought‐rainy cycles. Here we outline lessons learned over the last 29 years, and how these inform a fundamental tension in long‐term studies: how to balance the need for question‐driven research with the intangible conviction that long‐term data will yield valuable findings. We highlight the value of (1) identifying experimental effects that take many years to manifest, (2) quantifying the effects of different years (including droughts) and (3) capturing the signatures of anthropogenic change. We also highlight the potential for long‐term studies to create a collaborative community of scientists that brings new questions and motivates continued long‐term study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First established in Scotland in the 1870s, civilian Scottish Pipe Bands are now a global intergenerational phenomenon. In Canada, they are a diasporic reminder of the 70,000 Scots who emigrated there in the 19th century. Currently, there are more SPBs per capita in Canada than any country outside of Scotland, with an estimated 240 civilian SPBs located from Nova Scotia to Vancouver. Because Canadian SBPs exist entirely in the community, teaching pipes and drums to beginning members of all ages--adults, teenagers, and children--is done within the confines of each local pipe band. Intertwined with how members of Canadian SPBs learn and teach music are issues of identity and meaning, both of particular importance in the Scottish-Canadian diaspora. In this, the first of a four-part qualitative multi-sited case study, we explored music teaching and learning in one Scots-Canadian Pipe Band located in rural Ontario. Research questions included: How do participants teach, learn, and perform SPB music in a Canadian context? How do Web 2.0 technologies facilitate music learning in the genre? What place does this music hold in participants' lives? What role does a "sense of community" play? How is the local situated within the global and vice versa? Finally, what practices correspond to formal school music education and what are striking differences to consider?

This study considers children's informal musicking and online music teaching, learning, playing, and invention through an analysis of children's clapping games on YouTube. We examined a body of 184 games from 103 separate YouTube postings drawn from North America, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Selected videos were analyzed according to video characteristics, participant attributes, purpose, and teaching and learning aspects. The results of this investigation indicated that pairs of little girls aged 3 to 12 constituted a majority of the participants in these videos, with other participant subcategories including mixed gender, teen, adult, and intergenerational examples. Seventy-one percent of the videos depicted playing episodes, and 40% were intended for pedagogical purposes; however, several categories overlapped. As of June 1, 2016, nearly 50 million individuals had viewed these YouTube postings.

In this article, the authors discuss their attempts to make antiracist multiculturalism a reality in their students' future classrooms. They note that the literature is replete with examples of what not to do in trivializing curriculum, and they attempt here to take theory into praxis/practice by exposing and describing their strategies for engaging their students in antiracist multicultural understandings and activities. (Contains 2 tables and 15 footnotes.)

In this study we consider meaningful, emancipatory, and affirming music-making in Brazil through the lens of five case studies. Each illustrates aspects of transformative theory through music-making in music education as advanced by Mezirow, Freire, and contemporary Brazilian music educators.

Coating seeds with amendments to increase germination, emergence, and establishment is a promising strategy for dryland restoration. Seed coatings containing fungicides offer a potential solution in regions where fungal pathogens cause seed mortality during the winter stratification period between late fall seeding and spring germination. The effectiveness of the fungicide treatment, however, may be dictated by weather and within‐site microenvironment. We tested how fungicide coating influenced seedling emergence of native grasses within sagebrush stands by planting untreated seeds and seeds coated (encrusted) with and without active fungicide ingredients in furrows that extended from the canopy edge of sagebrush plants (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis) into the interspace. This was replicated at four sites across the Intermountain West in two successive years. We planted two native grasses, bottlebrush squirreltail (Elymus elymoides) and bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata). Emergence was extremely low in both years, with a complete seeding failure (i.e. zero emergence) at two sites in the first year and three sites in the second year. At one site where emergence was sufficient for statistical analysis: (1) the coating on the fungicide and blank treatments inhibited emergence under anomalously dry conditions and (2) across seed treatments, proximity to a sagebrush canopy slightly increased seedling emergence. The variable emergence patterns across sites and years (i.e. the highest emergence was for the site–year combination with the lowest precipitation) highlight the sensitivity of seeding outcomes to, and dependence of fungicide seed coatings on, site conditions, and the necessity of repeating experiments across different weather years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restoration success in degraded rangelands often depends on a site's resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasive plants. Because it is more difficult to restore plant communities after they are dominated by invasive species, a potential approach is proactive restoration in sites at risk of crossing degradation thresholds (e.g. initiating restoration prior to invasive grass dominance). When developing a new restoration approach, it is important to consider operational feasibility, including social, budgetary, and environmental factors. Accordingly, we studied influences within land management agencies on the adoption of a specific proactive restoration approach: out‐planting native grass and forb seedlings into sagebrush stands before they are dominated by cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum). Managers from federal and state land management agencies across the Great Basin, U.S.A, were interviewed regarding perceived feasibility of these practices. Twelve in‐depth interviews were conducted, and responses were analyzed using a qualitative method, causal layered analysis, not previously applied in a land management context. In the most superficial (litany) layer, cost and scale were prominent. The next (systemic) layer was framed by policy and bureaucracy limitations as well as technical barriers to implementation. In the third (worldview) layer, lack of a proactive management tradition within agencies represented a principal barrier. In the deepest (myth/metaphor) layer, the central belief is that human intervention should be used to protect ecosystem services only after they are disrupted due to human activity. Based on the different obstacles found at each level, we suggest ways to overcome the barriers detected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In arid and semiarid systems, positive effects of nurse shrubs generally occur immediately underneath and around shrub canopies, creating microsites that can be targeted to promote plant establishment in restoration settings. Alternatively, the best microsites may occur in the interspace zone immediately surrounding nurse shrubs if positive abiotic effects extend beyond nurse shrub canopy boundaries and if competition with nurse shrubs is reduced in that zone. In the Intermountain West, U.S.A., we investigated survival of transplanted herbaceous seedlings at different distances from Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis) canopies. We planted two native perennial forb species, Munro's globemallow (Sphaeralcea munroana) and common yarrow (Achillea millefolium), and two native perennial grass species, bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata) and bottlebrush squirreltail (Elymus elymoides), at four distances from sagebrush canopies at six sites across the Intermountain West, repeated across 2 years. Under above‐normal precipitation, proximity to sagebrush influenced first‐year survival of the forb, but not grass, species. Globemallow and yarrow survival were highest mid‐way between the canopy dripline and maximum interspace distance between neighboring sagebrush plants. Ground cover characteristics and globemallow survival covaried with respect to distance from shrub, suggesting ground cover characteristics as indicators of suitable planting microsites. Under drier conditions, survival of all species was low and unaffected by distance from canopies. Our results demonstrate the value of fine‐tuning the canopy‐interspace paradigm to more carefully consider how plant performance may differ across zones within the interspace region between plants, especially when the goal is to maximize plant establishment in nondrought years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]