Citation:

Felipe-Lucia, M., A. Guerrero, S. Alexander, J. Ashander, J. Baggio, M. Barnes, &. Bodin, A. Bonn, M. Fortin, R. Friedman, J. Gephart, K. Helmstedt, A. Keyes, K. Kroetz, F. Massol, M. Pocock, J. Sayles, R. Thompson, S. Wood, AND L. Dee. Conceptualizing ecosystem services using social-ecological networks. TRENDS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. Elsevier Science Ltd, New York, NY, 37(3):211-222, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.11.012

Impact/Purpose:

Humanity receives many benefits from nature. These benefits are often called ecosystem services and there are many different types: there are provisioning services such as food and clean water, cultural services such as recreation and aesthetic value, and regulating services such as carbon sequestration and water purification. Understanding how to manage the environment for the delivery of ecosystem services, while also enabling socio-political systems that facilitate equal access and benefit from these services, is a vital area of research. Because ecosystem services can be thought of as collection of interconnected environmental and societal elements (e.g., fish, coral reef habitats, larval distribution, fisherman, fishing policies and norms about sharing and fishing access) there has been a growing interest in studying ecosystem services and their management using network sciences. Such network approaches analyze the patterns of connections between the social and environmental things that create the conditions for people to receive ecosystem services. Network approaches seek to understand both the outcomes and opportunities for better management of these social and environmental connections. Research using networks to study ecosystem services is in its infancy and there is no consensus on benefits and tradeoffs of different approaches. This likely limits the accessibility of network approaches for studying ecosystem services. In this paper, we present a typology of four different approaches for using networks to study ecosystem services. We outline how each approach can be used to answer different types of questions about ecosystem services, as well as the kinds of data needed for each approach. We also compare the benefits and costs of using these network approaches to other more traditional methods for studying ecosystem services. Our research advances how we think about and study ecosystem services, their management, and the equitable delivery of benefits to societies. This work will interest researchers and practitioners interested in learning about new methods to study and manage ecosystem services. 

Description:

Social–ecological networks (SENs) represent the complex relationships between ecological and social systems and are a useful tool for analyzing and managing ecosystem services. However, mainstreaming the application of SENs in ecosystem service research has been hindered by a lack of clarity about how to match research questions to ecosystem service conceptualizations in SEN (i.e., as nodes, links, attributes, or emergent properties). Building from different disciplines, we propose a typology to represent ecosystem service in SENs and identify opportunities and challenges of using SENs in ecosystem service research. Our typology provides guidance for this growing field to improve research design and increase the breadth of questions that can be addressed with SEN to understand human–nature interdependencies in a changing world.

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