Wilson, T. Kristin

Antarctica is a significant component of the global commons (Chan et al., 2019; Rockström et al., 2024). Information on ecological conditions is an essential component of commons governance (Berkes and Folke, 1998; Dietz et al., 2003; Ostrom, 1990). Information loss has been identified as a barrier to sustainability (Crabtree et al., 2022), so there is a need to better understand its dynamics. Acquiring field data from Antarctica is financially and logistically costly (Lynch et al., 2016), suggesting the need for institutional infrastructure (Janssen and Anderies, 2023). Additional challenges are a lack of environmental monitoring and increasing human footprint in the region (Summerson and Tin, 2018; Tin et al., 2014), and preferences for a low cost political system (Liggett et al., 2017). This interdisciplinary research explores the relationship between researchers' environmental attitudes and the perceived balance between scientific fieldwork activity and environmental protection across the greater McMurdo Dry Valleys region in Antarctica. Specifically, the influence of researchers' perception limitations (Crabtree et al., 2022), and sensitivity to group norms is explored. An agent-based model is used to simulate researchers conducting seasonal fieldwork across an empirically informed landscape. Decision-making for fieldwork planning is based on the theory of planned behaviour and attitudes are updated as field observations are made. I explore the impact of information flows, heterogeneity in researchers' environmental attitudes, and variations in the weight placed on group norms. Antarctica is a remote and contested environmental commons (Collis, 2017). While governance is undertaken for 'mankind' (Rabitz, 2023; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 1991), Antarctica is often "out of sight, out of mind” (Chan et al., 2019). This research contributes to understanding the influence of information flow on the environmental attitudes of the primary visitor to this commons and prompts reflection on the environmental cost of scientific research (Dupont et al., 2024).