An integrated conceptual framework for long-term social–ecological research

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org O the past 50 years, ecosystems have been altered by humans more than at any other time in recorded history (Vitousek et al. 1997; Chapin et al. 2010), and those changes have resulted in reciprocal effects on human wellbeing (MA 2005). Although health and wealth have, on average, improved, in part as a consequence of these ecosystem changes, the social and geographic distribution of benefits to human populations remains uneven. Furthermore, such improvements are often limited by the inability of ecosystem services to keep pace with human demand and unequal opportunity for different people to access these services (MA 2005). Learning how to manage feedbacks between ecosystems and humans is vital if we are to move toward a more sustainable world, in which the health of ecosystems and human well-being are improved and ecosystem services are distributed more equitably for current and future generations. As ecological research expands from site-based science to regional and global scales (Peters et al. 2008), the conceptual scope of ecology must also expand to embrace not only other scientific disciplines, but also the pervasive human dimensions of environmental structure and change. Every ecosystem on Earth is influenced by human actions (Vitousek et al. 1997; Palmer et al. 2005), and the consensus view now holds that, for many of today’s most pressing issues, the environment is best understood and studied as a social–ecological system (Liu et al. 2007). As recognition of the importance of social–ecological science increases, new interdisciplinary linkages are evolving. Global research programs, such as the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (Steffen et al. 2004; Carpenter and Folke 2006), have driven important advances. Collaborations between physical scientists and biologists have occurred with the advent of regionaland globalscale science, whereas in applied sciences, such as agronomy and fisheries, collaborations between ecologists and social scientists are more recent. For example, studies on how ecosystem services benefit society formed the core of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005), the first interdisciplinary global assessment of Earth’s ecosystems conducted at the behest of world leaders. Many early advances in social–ecological research were driven by coalitions of ecologists and economists (Goulder and CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS