Search Results

Protected areas currently comprise a substantial land use and cover 14% of the Earth’s land surface. Their expansion in recent decades, combined with increasing economic growth and aspirations in high biodiversity areas, has brought the relevance of socio-ecological systems (also known as coupled human-natural systems) to the fore for conservation. Socio-ecological processes operate at multiple scales: within protected areas, for example resource use by people living inside protected areas; surrounding protected areas, for example poverty alleviation for communities on the fringes; and larger landscapes, for example conflicts between infrastructure expansion and corridors for animal movement between networks of protected areas. National-and global-scale processes such as climate change, shifting priorities of international donors, and market forces that lead to land use change influence outcomes for conservation and people at all of these scales. Protected area management faces several mismatches in addressing these socio-ecological dimensions: conflicting objectives for conservation and development; ecological and social processes that operate at larger spatial scales than protected areas; and governance of land use in the larger landscape in which protected area managers have no authority. The next step in the historical evolution of protected area management is incorporating socio-ecological dynamics and addressing these mismatches.

Ecologists and historical ecologists study many of the same questions, seeking to understand interactions between humans, other species, and the environment, but over different time scales. Collaborations between the two fields would help ecologists understand how the past affects the present, give ecologists a better understanding of what it means for systems to be “natural,” and allow the study of coupled human-natural systems over a wider range of conditions than occur at the present. Historical ecologists would benefit from access to sophisticated theories and models about natural systems that could be tested with historical data, and from adopting more explicit approaches to hypothesis testing. I discuss 3 steps that historical ecologists could take to improve collaboration between the two fields.

This chapter highlights the importance of considering people as integral to foodwebs. Despite extensive recent research on coupled human-natural systems, lacking are models that incorporate human behavior in a way that yields pragmatic insights into the management of multispecies fisheries. Using the US West Coast commercial fisheries system as a case study, this chapter develops a novel network approach of linking the social system (i.e., fishing communities) to the ecological system (the fish). The analysis reveals that fisheries that seem unconnected biologically, such as benthic Dungeness crabs and pelagic tuna, can in fact be strongly linked by fishing vessels that are active in both fisheries. Understanding how human behavior connects seemingly disparate ecological systems has important implications for fisheries managers seeking to balance human well-being with sustainable populations of fish.