Human Dimensions of Research in the Sonoran Desert: Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers

Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers (N-Gen) is a growing community of researchers dedicated to the study of society, culture, geography, and ecology in the Sonoran Desert. It was formed to facilitate communication and collaboration among early-career researchers in the region, as well as to support connections and build bridges between this new group and later-career researchers. In April 2012 N-Gen hosted an inaugural summit in Tucson, Arizona. Participants came from Mexico and the United States, representing 16 different disciplines and 37 different institutions, including nongovernmental organizations, academia, indigenous communities, and government agencies. The overarching goal of the summit was to establish lasting connections and develop a network of collaborators from a group that was previously largely unconnected. Before N-Gen there was no organized network for Sonoran Desert researchers. Further, our understanding of the networks connecting those working in the region was limited. With few exceptions (see Marcos-Iga’s 2004 master’s thesis looking at networks of conservation organizations in the Colorado River Delta and Laird-Benner and Ingram’s 2011 study of network “weavers” in the U.S.-Mexico border region of Arizona and Sonora), little is known about how researchers in the Sonoran Desert are connected. Here we use social network analysis and cluster analysis to examine the patterns of connections between N-Gen summit participants (for a more detailed explanation of social network analysis and how it relates to natural resource management, see Bodin et al. 2006; Carlsson and