Although subsistence poaching is a large threat to wildlife conservation in Southern Africa, this behavior is seldom researched. Our understanding of individual and community level factors that drive such behavior is limited because of both lack of data and the literature’s predominant focus on commercial poaching. The main objective of this study is to contribute to this scanty literature by examining

Indigenous Peoples and salmon in the lands now called Alaska have been closely entwined for at least 12,000 years. Salmon continue to be central to the ways of life of Alaska Natives, contributing to physical, social, economic, cultural, spiritual, psychological, and emotional well-being. Salmon have also become important to Alaskan settlers. Our research and advisory team conducted a synthesis of

A generalized knowledge of social-ecological relationships is needed to address current environmental challenges. Broadly comparative and synthetic research is a key method for establishing this type of knowledge. To date, however, most work on social-ecological systems has applied idiosyncratic methods to specific systems. Several projects, each based on the frameworks developed by Elinor Ostrom and

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is nowadays recognized as a major anthropogenic pressure on the environment on a global scale and as such is called light pollution. Through its attractive or deterrent effects, and its disruption of the biological clock for many animal and plant taxa, ALAN is increasingly recognized as a major threat to global biodiversity, which ultimately alters the amount, the quality

The predicted future shortfall in seafood production from tropical small-scale fisheries demands support to help diversify income streams and food production for coastal communities. Livelihood diversification can comprise the enhancement or addition of components to existing fisheries, yet the likely socioeconomic impacts are unclear. With a long history of nondeleterious introductions, the marine

This Special Feature is motivated by the rigorous, and growing, theoretical and empirical body of literature on social-ecological traps. Building on the foundational literature, which describes the context in many of the places where we work, we now look forward and ask how we can better understand and enable the breaking and escaping of social-ecological traps. In this Special Feature we focus on

Nature’s contributions to human well-being within social-ecological systems have been widely studied using multiple conceptual frameworks, yet there is a growing need to better articulate how both humans and nature contribute to quality of life. We present an operationalization of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) conceptual framework with an in-depth analysis

Urgency and deliberateness are often at odds when executing conservation projects, especially as the scale and complexity of objectives increases. The pace of environmental degradation supports immediate and measurable action. However, best practices for adaptive governance and building resilient social-ecological systems call for more deliberate efforts and participatory processes, which can be slow

Achieving sustainable development as an inclusive societal process in rural landscapes, and sustainability in terms of functional green infrastructures for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, are wicked challenges. Competing claims from various sectors call for evidence-based adaptive collaborative governance. Leveraging such approaches requires maintenance of several forms of social

Agricultural production provides food, feed, and renewable energy, generates economic profits, and contributes to social welfare in many ways. However, intensive farming is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity. Although current market forces and regulations such as the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, seem to foster agricultural intensification, a socially and ecologically optimal

Wetlands are complex social-ecological systems, which provide both important habitat for species, and multiple tangible and intangible benefits for people. Sustaining long-term benefits through restoration, conservation, and sustainable use is often linked to integrative and adaptive approaches to wetlands management. Such approaches assume democratic ideals, and require multilevel, multisector, and

Federal land managers in the United States are tasked with managing a vast array of resources for current and future generations. However, coordinating action among multiple stakeholders across diverse landscapes is challenging given that the organizations and institutions set up to govern federal lands are often unable to overcome scale-related challenges. Unconventional oil and gas development is

As large migratory caribou herds decline globally and regional climate trends point to a warmer future, there is a need and a legislative requirement to ensure impacts of industrial development are fully assessed, particularly with respect to cumulative effects. In this paper we use a current proposal, the potential leasing of the 1002 lands on the Alaskan Arctic coastal plain of the Arctic National

We review and contrast three frameworks for analyzing human-land interactions in the Holocene: the traditional concept of favored and disfavored landscapes, the new concept of ResourceCultures from researchers at University of T?bingen, and complex adaptive systems, which is a well-established contemporary approach in interdisciplinary research. Following a theoretical integration of fundamental concepts

Despite wide recognition of the role of social learning in building community resilience, few studies have thus far analyzed how the power–knowledge–institution matrix shapes social learning processes that in turn foster resilience outcomes. Drawing insights from the biopolitical lens of resilience, we take a critical stance on programmatic interventions for community resilience and social learning

Agriculture is a major economic driver in Aotearoa-New Zealand (New Zealand), led by export earnings from dairy farming. Dairying is uniquely exposed to climatic- and nonclimatic socioeconomic stressors, which have their greatest effects on production and yield. The growing need to consider these and other changes is accelerating efforts aimed at ensuring greater resilience, adaptability, and flexibility

While Pacific salmon are economically and culturally important worldwide, Alaska, USA is one of the few remaining places on earth where sustainable management of salmon is possible, even in the face of wide-ranging threats, including overharvesting and the impacts of climate change. A continuing challenge that we face is to understand the ecological processes that result in sustainable salmon populations

To date, methods for assessing community resilience have focused predominantly on disaster recovery. Those that do focus on broader social-ecological and psychological contexts tend to be qualitative and have not been validated at the community scale. This situation reveals a need for quantitative measurement tools for assessing community resilience to slow-moving change such as rural depopulation

Telecoupling is an integrative social-ecological framework that has made important contributions to understanding land change processes in a hyperconnected world. Visualizations are a powerful tool to communicate knowledge about telecoupling phenomena. However, little is known about current practices of telecoupling visualization and the challenges involved in visually displaying connections between

Since the 1990s, many of neoliberalism’s policies for growth and development have contributed to the deterioration of living conditions for rural peasants who are marginalized and unwilling or unable to abandon their lands. In every nation in which this phenomenon is prevalent, the resulting impoverishment of rural peasants has motivated numerous academic studies and poverty-alleviation programs. Concurrently

Machine learning models have proven to be very successful in many fields of research. Yet, in natural resource management, modeling with algorithms such as gradient boosting or artificial neural networks is virtually nonexistent. The current state of research on existing applications of machine learning in the field of social-ecological systems is outlined in a systematic literature review. For this

National parks in mountain areas are biodiversity hotspots in which implementing the sustainability goals of Agenda 2030 is particularly urgent. Ecotourism provides an opportunity to convey bio-ecological and economic sustainability principles to the public, focusing on nature conservation and a reduction of the negative impacts of tourism. We investigated four national parks in the Apennines, Italy

We apply the concept of threat points in game theory to explore the stability of current joint management arrangements for shared transboundary fish stocks between Canada and the United States. We use three examples to explore the effects of projected impacts of climate change on the productivity and distribution of these stocks between the exclusive economic zones of the two countries. The three stocks

Climate change is shifting the distribution of fish stocks that straddle between exclusive economic zones (EEZ), challenging transboundary fisheries management. Here, we examine the projected sharing of jointly managed transboundary fish stocks between Canada and the United States. We hypothesize that ocean warming will alter the sharing of fish stocks between the two countries, and that such changes

Climate change is affecting physical and biological components and processes of marine ecosystems in many ways. Resulting changes in abundance and distribution of commercially valuable species are anticipated to create or exacerbate challenges for fisheries management across national boundaries by raising questions around catch allocation, membership in the management organizations, and forms of cooperation

The ecosystem approach to fisheries management is a conceptual and practical framework consistent with, and supportive of, climate change adaptation at the national and regional level. Implementing an ecosystem approach can contribute to climate change adaptation by improving ecosystem resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change, by providing planning strategies and tools to monitor and

This article is the Introduction to the Special Feature entitled: Canada and Transboundary Fisheries Management in Changing Oceans: Taking Stock, Future Scenarios. We summarize the research context of the four papers in the Special Feature.

The latest global assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns that biodiversity loss can make ecosystems more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and other stressors. Economic growth has been identified as one of the key drivers of these losses, however, the impact pathway may depend on how society organizes economic activity

Governments around the world are beginning to plan for the effects of climate change. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, the city is implementing a variety of green infrastructure practices through the program Green Cities, Clean Waters to meet state and federal stormwater regulations. Though not a current goal of the program, when implemented effectively, a cobenefit of green infrastructure is increased

Agricultural transitions from subsistence to export-oriented production make households more reliant on volatile agricultural commodity markets and can increase households’ exposure to crop price and yield shocks. At the same time, subsistence farming is also highly vulnerable to crop failures. In this work, we define household livelihood vulnerability as the probability of falling under an income

The impact of ecosystem disservices is among the issues that farmers have to consider in management of livelihoods and local landscapes. We investigated distinct practices developed within local communities in tree–crop integration and strategies to offset disservices. Forty-eight transects (24 at ≤1 km and 24 at ≥3 km from forest edges) were laid in the study sites. Woody and crop species were recorded

Water quality policy for agricultural lands seeks to improve water quality by changing farmer behavior. We investigate farmer behavior in three water quality regimes that differ by rule structure to examine the fit and interplay of each policy within its social-ecological context, important aspects for improving water quality. Vermont, USA’s practice-based policy requires the adoption of specific practices

We used the adaptive cycle as a heuristic to conceptualize the changes in ecosystem services between its phases (growth, conservation, collapse, and reorganization) for Chilo? Island (southern Chile), analyzed as a social-ecological system. We generated hypothetical relationships between services and phases based on literature articles, testing them with secondary databases for 1826–2016 and interviews

Access mechanisms can determine the benefits that people derive from a given ecosystem service supply. However, compared to ecosystem service availability, access has received little research attention. The relative importance of availability compared to access in limiting ecosystem service benefits is even less well understood. In cities, the observed disconnect between people and nature might result

Rapidly developing and complex climate change impacts have profound implications for coastal communities, demanding adaptation actions for both social and ecological systems. Along the coast of British Columbia, Canada, Indigenous peoples developed a tightly coupled social-ecological system that was interrupted by the arrival of settler colonialism in the 1800s. Although both climate change adaptation

Values of the public are a key and dynamic component of bushfire governance SES. Learning to work with these values is a significant challenge for government and environmental managers and an important aspect of policy transition in many contexts. During such transitions, collaborative research can play a key role in social learning, but this may be particularly challenging for agencies with dominant

Growing evidence suggests that constraints to the availability and quality of tree seed can undermine the success of forest and landscape restoration efforts and the delivery of associated benefits such as mitigating climate change and halting biodiversity loss. Past experiences to promote tree seed supply have frequently shown limited outcomes over time, partly because of unexpected, deleterious dynamics

The water-energy-food nexus concept is criticized as not yet fit for deeply integrated and contested governance agendas. One problem is how to achieve equitable risk governance and management where there is low consensus on priorities, poor inclusion and coordination of risk assessment procedures, and a weak emphasis placed on cross-scale and sectoral interactions over time. Participatory system dynamics

Network analysis has emerged as a useful practice for characterizing governance relationships and providing insights to the power relations that affect landscapes. We applied actor network analysis in two rural Cambodian landscapes to examine decision-making structures that affect conservation and development systems. Using questionnaire data, we analyze structural features of networks of cooperation

Local ecological knowledge (LEK) has been increasingly invoked in biodiversity monitoring and conservation efforts. Although methods involving LEK have become more widespread in ecology, it remains an undervalued source of information in understanding the ecology of wildlife in the context of human-wildlife conflict. People who regularly interact with wildlife, and often with notable consequences,

Where people and elephants share space, the chance of human-elephant interactions (HEI) shape how people make livelihood decisions, including where and when to harvest resources. In the Eastern Panhandle of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, elephant populations have doubled in the past 10 years. Currently 16,000 men and women from different ethnic backgrounds share woodlands with 18,000 elephants. People

Rampant increase and diversification of synthetic pesticides poses health, environmental, and livelihood risks especially to smallholder farmers who dominate agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Legal mechanisms for regulating pesticides, although important, have not fully addressed the dangers of ecological services disruptions due to accumulation of different pesticides over time. Legal mechanisms

Decision making in complex contexts such as disaster risk management requires collaborative approaches to knowledge production. Evidence-based disaster risk management and pre-event planning relies on robust and relevant disaster risk knowledge. We report on a case study of Project AF8, a “cocreation” collaboration involving local- and central-government disaster risk management agencies and groups

There are many calls to use the COVID 19 crisis as an opportunity for transforming to a future trajectory that is more equitable and environmentally sustainable. What is lacking is a cohesive framework for bringing these calls together. We propose that such transitions could be informed by lessons from three decades of scholarship on abrupt and surprising change in systems of humans and nature. Over

Livelihood diversification has been the heartbeat of rural development projects over the past two decades. Many livelihood diversification programs are based on the often implicit assumption that introducing livelihood activities will translate into improved livelihood outcomes. In this study we analyze survey data from 235 households in Langalanga Lagoon, Solomon Islands. We explore relationships

This article synthesizes and compares environmental governance theories. For each theory we outline its main tenets, claims, origin, and supporting literature. We then group the theories into focused versus combinatory frameworks for comparison. The analysis resonates with many types of ecosystems; however, to make it more tangible, we focus on coastal systems. First, we characterize coastal governance

Based on a case study from rural Mozambique, we stress that ecosystem services research may be enriched through gendered livelihood approaches, particularly in terms of experienced ecosystem services. Ecosystem services studies have been accused of being gender blind. We argue for the value of open narratives that are attentive to the gender dynamics underpinning the production and reproduction of

Telecoupling constitutes a particular class of globalized environmental issues that are neither local-cumulative, nor transboundary, nor concerning global commons, but that arise because of specific linkages between distal regions. Such telecoupled issues, e.g., associated with global commodity chains, waste flows, or migration patterns, have been receiving increasing attention from scholars of global

The emerging field of socio-hydrology is a special case of social-ecological systems research that focuses on coupled human-water systems, exploring how the hydrologic cycle and human cultural traits coevolve and how such coevolutions lead to phenomena of relevance to water security and sustainability. As such, most problems tackled by socio-hydrology involve some aspects of engineering design, such

We outline preliminary results of an ongoing research project conducted in collaboration with traditional erva-mate (yerba mate) producers in Southern Paran? and Northern Santa Catarina, Brazil. The multidisciplinary project includes researchers in the natural and social sciences, forest engineers, historians, rural outreach workers, and farmers and is the result of a long-term engagement with smallholder

One of the greatest challenges when addressing issues in complex social-ecological systems (SES), is the need for an efficient interdisciplinary framework when large-magnitude social and ecological disturbances occur. Teams comprising of scientists from different backgrounds and disciplines are frequently called upon to propose research methods and results that can be useful for policy and decision

Globally, an increasing recognition of the importance of ecosystem-based management (EBM), Indigenous resource management (IRM), and Indigenous-led research and management is emerging; yet, case studies within scholarly literature illustrating comprehensive application of these theories and philosophies are scarce. We present the collaborative management model for the Heʻeia National Estuarine Research

Collisions with and disturbance from watercraft represent significant threats to endangered North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis). Although several studies have investigated whale cooccurrence with commercial vessels, none has considered recreational vessels. We estimated an index between relative encounter risk of North Atlantic right whales and recreational vessel traffic in the southeastern

Indigenous peoples are experiencing a wide range of negative impacts due to climate change and should have the right to determine for themselves how to adapt to these changes and define successful adaptation. These adaptations can then be culturally appropriate and grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems; however, the accelerating rate of change in social-ecological systems can be a challenge for

Culture influences how fire is perceived and managed in societies. An increasing risk of catastrophic wildfire has shifted political and academic attention on the use of Indigenous fire management (IFM) as an alternative to the common fire suppression paradigm. However, what is IFM? Here we conduct a conceptual framework analysis of scientific and scholarly literature to enhance our understanding of

In an era where farmers face considerable levels of intertwined risks and uncertainties, farm resilience is developing into a focal point for agricultural policies. Using survey data from 916 Dutch farmers, we explore how risk behavior relates to perceived resilience. We capture the dynamics of resilience thinking by investigating past risk-management portfolios, current risk preferences, future risk

Communities of Alaska’s North Slope are affected by concurrent, rapid changes due to climate change and industrial activities. Because these impacts are expected to shape community planning agendas into the foreseeable future, increased attention has been paid to decision-making processes that support adaptation. The planning and development decisions that shape adaptation outcomes in North Slope communities

Urban agriculture has received considerable attention for its role in supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services, and health and well-being for growing urban populations. Urban gardens managed with agroecological practices and higher plant diversity support more biodiversity and may support higher crop production. Plant selection in gardens is a function of temperature and environmental conditions

Climate change is still addressed largely through expert-driven processes that rely on large-scale scenarios to transmit knowledge of anticipated trends to land managers and the lay public who are forced to confront and adapt to impacts at the local level. Thus, there is a disconnect between large-scale scenarios and the top-down management paradigm that decision-makers use, and local scenarios and

Poverty alleviation for smallholders must consider the increasingly varied and intertwined impacts of climate change and globalization. This calls for a resilience perspective that includes eradication of poverty and resilience enhancement under extreme events and shocks. Applying the framework of development resilience, we constructed an agent-based model based on small farming households in the Amazon