Explaining global environmental change requires an understanding of the relationships that exist between social systems and the natural environment. Creating integrative research frameworks capable of explaining these coupled human and natural systems has been a central activity in this long-standing intellectual project. One way to advance framework development is to focus on relationships among people, patterns, and processes. Two fields that have been making simultaneous advances to this triad are landscape ecology and land system architecture. In the introduction to this special issue, we highlight new research streams linking these two fields for a more robust Land System Science. We identify three fruitful avenues where these two fields can be linked to advance our theoretical understanding of the land system and develop broadly applicable mixed methodological tools: a renewed study of social and ecological processes, deeper engagement with this issues surrounding scale, and enhanced analyses of ecosystem services.

解释全球环境变化需要了解社会系统与自然环境之间存在的关系。在这个长期的智力项目中，创建能够解释人类和自然系统耦合的综合研究框架一直是一项中心活动。推进框架开发的一种方法是关注人员，模式和流程之间的关系。同步发展这一三合会的两个领域是景观生态学和土地系统建筑学。在本期特刊的引言中，我们重点介绍了将这两个领域联系在一起的新研究流，以更完善地研究土地系统科学。