DialectikSocial Ecological Intelligence

Evidence

Published research

Our methodology is grounded in peer-reviewed work published in Environmental Science and Policy (Elsevier) — a leading journal in environmental governance and policy research.

Environmental Science & Policy2026
Peer-reviewed · Elsevier

Social Network Performance Indicators (SNPI): A review of key concepts and indicators of social process and outcomes in environmental management

Daniel Teodoro, Bridget McGlynn, Julia Baird

This systematic review synthesises fifty-one peer-reviewed articles to introduce a framework for measuring the quality of stakeholder collaboration in environmental governance. The SNPI links five social indicators — relationship building, power sharing, social learning, trust building, and potential for collective action — to quantitative network metrics such as density, centrality, and reciprocity. It provides the social measurement backbone for all of Dialectik's integrated assessment work.

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Environmental Science & Policy2024
Peer-reviewed · Elsevier

Co-designing a research agenda for climate adaptation in El Salvador's coffee sector: A transdisciplinary perspective

Daniel Teodoro, Suzanne Marselis, Antonella Maiello, Achim Hager

This paper documents a transdisciplinary field study in El Salvador's coffee sector, bringing together farmers, government officials, NGOs, and researchers to co-design a climate adaptation research agenda. It maps thirty-nine stakeholder organizations across five categories and demonstrates how local knowledge and scientific methods can be integrated through stakeholder encounters. The methodology tested here provides the blueprint for The Coffee Initiative's country-level case studies.

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Procedia Engineering2016
Peer-reviewed · Elsevier

Spatio-temporal Analysis of Hydrological Drought at Catchment Scale Using a Spatially-distributed Hydrological Model

Vitali Diaz Mercado, Gerald Corzo Perez, Dimitri Solomatine, Henny A.J. van Lanen

Using daily evaporation and runoff simulations from a distributed hydrological model of a catchment in southeast Mexico, this study evaluates how well different meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological drought indicators — including SPI, SPEI, ETDI, SEDI, and SRI — identify drought onset and duration across time steps. The results show meteorological indicators alone miss or lag many drought events, and recommend combining them with hydrological and agricultural indicators for reliable catchment-scale drought monitoring.

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Dialectik Technical Report2026
Dialectik technical report · 2026

Climate Risk Analysis for Coffee Systems in Latin America

Vitali Diaz

A technical synthesis of the environmental data pipeline that underpins The Coffee Initiative. Building on three peer-reviewed foundations — the STRIVIng toolbox for spatiotemporal climate projections (Diaz et al., 2019), spatial drought-area modelling as input for machine-learning crop-yield prediction (Diaz et al., 2026), and the Lempa transboundary basin climate-risk index (Koshnazar et al., 2021) — the report walks through how precipitation and temperature variability, spatial drought characterisation, and integrated hazard-vulnerability-resilience analysis combine into a decision-ready risk index, with agroforestry management scenarios layered on top.

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Participatory field report · CC BY 4.02023
Participatory field report · CC BY 4.0 · Spanish

Adaptaciones a los impactos del cambio climático en el sector cafetalero salvadoreño — Un proceso participativo

Daniel Teodoro, Suzanne Marselis, Achim Häger, Antonella Maiello · Illustrations: Alazne Echaniz

Spanish-language field report (2023) documenting the participatory method, stakeholder encounters, and co-designed adaptation research agenda that emerged from fieldwork in El Salvador's coffee sector. Released under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence so that Salvadoran institutions, cooperatives, and researchers can reuse the material directly. It is the practitioner-facing companion to the 2024 peer-reviewed paper in Environmental Science & Policy.

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Tracks / Puentes · Innovation for Social Welfare, No. 142026
Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs · bilingual feature

Visualizing drought: from the physical phenomenon to predicting impacts

Vitali Díaz

A bilingual feature setting out why drought has to be read spatially rather than as a series of index values: when an event actually begins and ends, how far it reaches, and how it moves across a territory. It walks through the spatio-temporal method behind Dialectik's drought analysis and its extension into machine-learning prediction of agricultural impact. Tracks is published by Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where Mexican embassies propose articles highlighting the work of the diaspora.

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Advanced Hydroinformatics (AGU / Wiley), ch. 112023
Peer-reviewed book chapter · AGU / Wiley

Three-dimensional clustering in the characterization of spatiotemporal drought dynamics: cluster size filter and drought indicator threshold optimization

Vitali Diaz, Gerald A. Corzo Perez, Henny A. J. Van Lanen, Dimitri P. Solomatine

The methodological core of treating drought as a three-dimensional object in space and time. Each event has an onset, an end, a location, a magnitude, and a spatial trajectory — characteristics a conventional index cannot express. The chapter sets out how clusters are filtered by size and how the drought-indicator threshold is optimised, which is what makes event-by-event comparison defensible.

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Scientific Reports 13, 3145 (Nature Portfolio)2023
Peer-reviewed · Nature Portfolio

An event-oriented database of meteorological droughts in Europe based on spatio-temporal clustering

Carmelo Cammalleri, Juan Camilo Acosta Navarro, Davide Bavera, Vitali Diaz, Chiara Di Ciollo, Willem Maetens, Diego Magni, Dario Masante, Jonathan Spinoni, Andrea Toreti

The spatio-temporal clustering approach applied at continental scale: roughly 200 drought events detected across Europe between 1981 and 2020, using three-month Standardized Precipitation Index maps derived from ERA5 reanalysis. The largest European meteorological droughts in that period were 1996, 2003, 2002 and 2018. Evidence that the method holds up against independent expert characterisation of past events.

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Dialectik Intelligence Brief · GRULAC2026
Dialectik Intelligence Brief · GRULAC

LAC–EU Coffee Intelligence Brief 2026: regulation, climate risk, and the social dimension of a €28.8B market

Dialectik

A concise intelligence brief prepared for the Group of Latin American and Caribbean States (GRULAC). It maps the four regulatory shifts reshaping coffee trade with Europe — EUDR, CBAM, EU–Mercosur, and EU–Central America — against projected climate risk across LAC coffee-producing zones, and argues why social fragility is the variable most often missing from compliance and risk assessments.

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Current research frontiers

Large-scale application of the SNPI framework across five LAC coffee-producing countries · integration with 10–30 year environmental projections · cross-country comparison of governance network performance.

For researchers

Collaborate with us

We are building a network of Latin American and Caribbean researchers to conduct country-level case studies. If you work in environmental science, social network analysis, or climate adaptation research in any of our five focus countries, we would welcome a conversation.