There is widespread recognition that ecosystems are socioecological in nature, as well as an impetus to assess ecosystem status against explicit socially defined goals and objectives using indicators of performance. Recognizing that management must focus not only on ecological aspects, but also on the social, cultural, and economic outcomes, the concept of Ecosystem-based Management is expanding to include social systems. Nonetheless, there are few studies that operationalize management outcomes as social objectives in ways that are quantitatively comparable to ecological outcomes such as threshold analyses. While stakeholder engagement can help identify social goals and objectives, quantitative indicator-based metrics to assess attainment of, and trade-offs between, these goals and objectives are rarely included in social-ecological system assessments.
This special issue will highlight quantitative methods for identifying and analyzing thresholds, or “tipping points”, in social-ecological systems using indicators of economic and broader social outcomes, particularly for communities dependent on ecosystem services. Our goal is to develop and showcase state-of-the-art techniques to improve the quantitative assessment of social outcomes associated with ecosystem dynamics, including trade-offs across objectives. Our expectation is that this will advance Ecosystem-based Management by more holistically assessing system performance using social indicator-based approaches that can be coupled with ecological models. We welcome all papers aimed at better describing ecosystem status through the use of the social sciences.
Specifically, the SI is inviting contributions on (but not limited to) the following:
- Do ecological regime shifts and threshold effects propagate through the social system, and/or vice-versa?
- How should we rank multidimensional outcomes in a meaningful manner for management purposes?
- How can social tipping points and trade-off analysis be operationalized in the context of Management Strategy Evaluations?
- What theoretical or empirical guidance exists for multivariate techniques to collapse the dimensionality of a problem, and/or when should this simplification be avoided?
- How sensitive are social indicators and analyses to issues of scale and/or temporal frequency?
- What are best practices around the integration of qualitative data into indicator-based assessments?
Expiry Date: July 18th 2022
More information, follow this link.