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New applied approaches are needed to address urgent, global environmental issues. Practitioners, scholars, and policy makers alike call for increased integration of natural and social sciences to develop new frameworks for better addressing the range of contemporary environmental issues. From a theoretical perspective, social–ecological systems (SES) offers a novel approach for enhancing sustainability science and for improving the practice of environmental management. To translate SES theory into action, education and training programs are needed that focus on the application of SES approaches across the education and professional spectrum, from K-12 to graduate training to agency management. We developed a training framework that serves sustainability practitioners by building their capacity to apply SES approaches to real world problems and decision-making. The framework uses a SES-based environmental management approach based on a systemic worldview, transdisciplinary thinking, co-development of knowledge, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive governance. The social–ecological systems training and education program (SESTEP or “see-step”) framework was designed to provide SES training opportunities as a response to the need expressed by senior directors of US federal land management agencies. The core of the framework is a 12-step SES heuristic that provides a diagnostic tool for practitioners as they work through a SES case-study issue or problem. The curriculum provides adaptable and tailored professional development training for sustainability professionals to enhance sustainability science in practice. The evaluation of the inaugural course indicates achievement of positive course learning outcomes consistent with advancing sustainability science in practice.

Much of the world’s agricultural lands are projected to face hydrologic and climatic changes that will lead to water scarcity and corresponding food insecurity. The emergent response of complex social-ecological systems to change requires rapid response and tailored solutions. Top-down responses without room for local self-organization may fail to implement effective solutions, yet self-organization alone may be too slow to respond in a period of rapid change and may lack the accountability necessary in the management of a public resource such as water. This research relies on concepts of governing complexity to assess the role of local self-organization nested within formal institutions in developing adaptive solutions to conflict involving irrigated agriculture in Idaho’s Upper Snake River Basin. While formal institutions have provided a framework, steering, and resources for local action, the organization of water users dependent on the resource plays a large role in the ability of the region to adapt to water supply disturbances, highlighting the importance of local capacity within an umbrella of governmental steering to respond to rising water resources issues in semi-arid regions.

Community and stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognized as essential to science at the nexus of food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) to address complex issues surrounding food and energy production and water provision for society. Yet no comprehensive framework exists for supporting best practices in community and stakeholder engagement for FEWS. A review and meta-synthesis were undertaken of a broad range of existing models, frameworks, and toolkits for community and stakeholder engagement. A framework is proposed that comprises situational awareness of the FEWS place or problem, creation of a suitable culture for engagement, focus on power-sharing in the engagement process, co-ownership, co-generation of knowledge and outcomes, the technical process of integration, the monitoring processes of reflective and reflexive experiences, and formative evaluation. The framework is discussed as a scaffolding for supporting the development and application of best practices in community and stakeholder engagement in ways that are arguably essential for sound FEWS science and sustainable management.

Adaptive capacity is a topic at the forefront of environmental change research with roots in both social, ecological, and evolutionary science. It is closely related to the evolutionary biology concept of adaptive potential. In this systematic literature review, we: (1) summarize the history of these topics and related fields; (2) assess relationship(s) between the concepts among disciplines and the use of the terms in climate change research, and evaluate methodologies, metrics, taxa biases, and the geographic scale of studies; and (3) provide a synthetic conceptual framework to clarify concepts. Bibliometric analyses revealed the terms have been used most frequently in conservation and evolutionary biology journals, respectively. There has been a greater growth in studies of adaptive potential than adaptive capacity since 2001, but a greater geographical extent of adaptive capacity studies. Few studies include both, and use is often superficial. Our synthesis considers adaptive potential as one process contributing to adaptive capacity of complex systems, notes "sociological" adaptive capacity definitions include actions aimed at desired outcome (i.e., policies) as a system driver whereas "biological" definitions exclude such drivers, and suggests models of adaptive capacity require integration of evolutionary and social-ecological system components.

The habitat-adapted symbiosis hypothesis predicts that the most positive effects of symbiosis are expected in the most stressful sites for a plant host. Stress varies with site characteristics but also during the life cycle of a plant, with winter annuals experiencing the most stress after fall emergence. For Bromus tectorum, fecundity can vary tremendously from a few to thousands of seeds per plant. We used endophytic Sordaria fimicola to test the hypothesis in three sites in western Montana. We hypothesized that the effects of S. fimicola inoculation would be most positive in the most stressful site after fall application. As predicted, the most positive effects on growth and fecundity were observed in the most stressful site after fall application of S. fimicola. However, the effects of treatments varied within and between sites considerably, and are best understood as an example of context-dependency in plant-microbe interactions rather than habitat-adapted symbiosis.

This paper applies a social metabolism framework and energy flow analysis for evaluating agroecosystem and land use transitions in food-energy-water systems using the Upper Snake River Basin (USBR), Idaho, USA as a case-study. The study area is one of the primary agricultural regions of the State of Idaho. Dairy products are the primary agricultural outputs of the region; therefore, we modified a biomass accounting framework to explicitly incorporate the role of manure in the agroecosystem. Despite the increase of cropland between 2002 and 2012 in the basin, a decrease in energy input was observed for crop production. An increase in the industrial energy inputs for dairy production, on the other hand, showed that the basin is a clear example of a metabolic industrialized farm system – an example of land use intensification. We compare the energy return on investments (EROIs) as an indicator of agroecosystem transition for both crop and dairy production during the period 2002 to 2012. Contrary to our expectations, the analysis suggests that livestock production is a relatively energy efficient process in land management in the basin. This is due to the reuse of nutrient by-products from livestock as well as the refuse and residues from crop farming. At the same time, the findings provide insights on the percentage of manure to be reinvested as compost that would improve energy production efficiency. However, the reuse of manure, as it is managed in the basin, may have a negative implication on the nutrient balance of the agroecosystem that needs further investigation. Nonetheless, there is market potential for the reuse and reinvestment of biomass to make energy production in the basin more efficient.

The Mountain Social Ecological Observatory Network (MtnSEON) is a US National Science Foundation‐funded Research Coordination Network that focuses on social–ecological systems (SES) science approaches to understanding the vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability of complex mountain landscapes. Papers from members of several MtnSEON working groups are presented in this Special Issue, with topics ranging from applying an SES conceptual approach to social–ecological observatories to dealing with the human aspects of predator–livestock interactions in the American West. All of these articles portray varying degrees of integration of social and ecological sciences and methodologies in order to better address both complex and “wicked” problems inherent to many coupled natural and human systems. The diversity of approaches presented here reflect the different project histories, disciplines being integrated, fields of expertise, and nature of the environmental problems and issues being addressed.

The efficient assessment of social-ecological systems is crucial for supporting increased resilience of human communities. One challenge for researchers and managers is that few frameworks exist to assess social-ecological resilience and vulnerability for different landscapes. Mountain landscapes offer management challenges because of their valuable ecosystem services, varying biophysical characteristics, steep gradients, and the socioeconomics of human communities that are distributed across watersheds. Despite this, many mountain communities and regions lack effective management plans to enable adaptive responses to changing socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Assessing the vulnerability and resilience of mountain communities in a standardized manner is an important step in developing adaptation strategies. To help fill this gap, we investigated the utility of a conceptual social-ecological systems typology by assessing 21 mountain communities in the western United States. Our results show that larger cities or urban areas are generally more resilient than smaller communities, but the difference does not seem to be significant. Where there are resilience differences they are often found between communities of different population sizes. However, no community in the Western United States is seen as highly vulnerable to social-ecological change. More broadly, development of such standardized social-ecological systems typologies that are region-specific can be applied towards accommodating other unique environmental niches, while allowing for cross comparisons between regions on a broader continental scale.

One of the factors for the success of simulation studies is close collaboration with stakeholders in developing a conceptual model. Conceptual models are a useful tool for communicating and understanding how real systems work. However, models or frameworks that are not aligned with the perceptions and understanding of local stakeholders can induce uncertainties in the model outcomes. We focus on two sources of epistemic uncertainty in building conceptual models of food-energy-water systems (FEWS): (1) context and framing; and (2) model structure uncertainty. To address these uncertainties, we co-produced a FEWS conceptual model with key stakeholders using the Actor-Resources-Dynamics-Interaction (ARDI) method. The method was adopted to specifically integrate public (and local) knowledge of stakeholders in the Magic Valley region of Southern Idaho into a FEWS model. We first used the ARDI method with scientists and modellers (from various disciplines) conducting research in the system, and then repeated the process with local stakeholders. We compared results from the two cohorts and refined the conceptual model to align with local stakeholders’ understanding of the FEWS. This co-development of a conceptual model with local stakeholders ensured the incorporation of different perspectives and types of knowledge of key actors within the socio-ecological systems models.

Dung fungi, such as Sordaria fimicola, generally reproduce sexually with ascospores discharged from mammalian dung after passage through herbivores. Their life cycle is thought to be obligate to dung, and thus their ascospores in Quaternary sediments have been interpreted as evidence of past mammalian herbivore activity. Reports of dung fungi as endophytes would seem to challenge the view that they are obligate to dung. However, endophyte status is controversial because surface-sterilization protocols could fail to kill dung fungus ascospores stuck to the plant surface. Thus, we first tested the ability of representative isolates of three common genera of dung fungi to affect plant growth and fecundity given that significant effects on plant fitness could not result from ascospores merely stuck to the plant surface. Isolates of S. fimicola, Preussia sp., and Sporormiella sp. reduced growth and fecundity of two of three populations of Bromus tectorum, the host from which they had been isolated. In further work with S. fimicola we showed that inoculations of roots of B. tectorum led to some colonization of aboveground tissues. The same isolate of S. fimicola reproduced sexually on inoculated host plant tissues as well as in dung after passage through sheep, thus demonstrating a facultative rather than an obligate life cycle. Finally, plants inoculated with S. fimicola were not preferred by sheep; preference had been expected if the fungus were obligate to dung. Overall, these findings make us question the assumption that these fungi are obligate to dung.