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Humans and the environment form a single complex system where humans not only influence ecosystems but also react to them. Despite this, there are far fewer coupled human–environment system (CHES) mathematical models than models of uncoupled ecosystems. We argue that these coupled models are essential to understand the impacts of social interventions and their potential to avoid catastrophic environmental events and support sustainable trajectories on multi-decadal timescales. A brief history of CHES modelling is presented, followed by a review spanning recent CHES models of systems including forests and land use, coral reefs and fishing and climate change mitigation. The ability of CHES modelling to capture dynamic two-way feedback confers advantages, such as the ability to represent ecosystem dynamics more realistically at longer timescales, and allowing insights that cannot be generated using ecological models. We discuss examples of such key insights from recent research. However, this strength brings with it challenges of model complexity and tractability, and the need for appropriate data to parameterize and validate CHES models. Finally, we suggest opportunities for CHES models to improve human–environment sustainability in future research spanning topics such as natural disturbances, social structure, social media data, model discovery and early warning signals. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful land restoration in impoverished rural environments may require adoption of new resource management strategies; however, feedbacks between local knowledge and introduced restoration technologies have rarely been articulated. We used interview scenarios to analyze the role of local knowledge in land restoration at a large-scale, long-term watershed rehabilitation and wet meadow restoration program in the highland Andes. Indigenous communities built over 30,000 check dams, terraces and infiltration ditches, and the density of erosion control structures and visible restoration varied greatly across participant communities. We developed a survey reaching across the highest restoration management intensity, lowest restoration management intensity, and non-project (control) communities. We interviewed 49 respondents using 14 scenarios based on photos depicting biophysical phenomena related to land degradation and restoration. The scenarios generated 5,828 statements that were coded into 964 distinct concepts. As expected, respondents that built more erosion control structures had more detailed knowledge of check dam construction and ecosystem development following physical interventions. More significantly, there was a shift in the conceptualization of and attitudes toward land degradation and restoration. Respondents who built more erosion control structures were more likely to: attribute wetland hydrology to groundwater recharge rather than myth constructs about seeps and springs; attribute land degradation to human rather than mythological causes; and have more proactive attitudes regarding land restoration. Evidence suggests that when addressing severe land degradation or restoring ecosystem processes not readily observable by indigenous people, such as groundwater flow and wetland recharge, restoration success will depend on combining local and scientific knowledge.

Management of wetland ecosystems that are tightly coupled with human systems typically requires balancing multiple objectives to ensure that a range of ecosystem services are provided for the benefit of society. We describe how adopting a complex systems approach may provide managers with the appropriate conceptual tools to achieve social and ecological objectives in a multifunctional wetland landscape. We illustrate the applicability of the approach using the Grasslands Ecological Area (GEA) in California as a case study. Human intervention has shaped and reshaped the GEA over the past century, affecting the ability of the landscape to provide ecosystem services. Ecological disaster in the 1980s precipitated transformative change in the management system toward an approach that adopts many of the recommended actions for complexity. Present-day management, which balances multiple social and ecological objectives, has led to improved water quality, restoration of wetland habitats, and a general increase in system complexity at the landscape scale. New research and real-time monitoring systems facilitate adaptive management and heterogeneous responses of wetland management entities. We argue that taking a complex systems approach to management in the GEA provides a common, and inclusive, conceptual model for all stakeholders and may lead to a more sustainable and ecologically resilient landscape over the long term. Copyright:

Governing human-environmental ecosystems is a complex problem. Rule-based fisheries models are faced with several challenges. First, for large geographical problems like oceans, they require considerable time to find satisfactory solutions. Second, they tend to be reactive rather than anticipatory. Behavioural assumptions directly impact fishers' capacity for adaptation and behaviour, which influences possible management strategies. To capture style and speed of adaptation to changes in the environment, coupled human-environment models must progress toward cognitively and socio-culturally realistic representations of fisher decision-making. In this paper, we implement the erotetic decision-making model in the POSEIDON fisheries model. The agents replicate observed behaviours such as fishing the line of a Marine Protected Area, using Individually Tradable Quotas, and returning to favoured fishing locations, and learning to break rules given harsh constraints. This provides a principled proof that reasons-based cognitive structures allow for anticipatory behavioural adaptation rather than reactive behavioural adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Over the past several decades, wildfires have become larger, more frequent, and/or more severe in many areas. Simultaneously, anthropogenic ignitions are steadily growing. We have little understanding of how increasing anthropogenic ignitions are changing modern fire regimes. Location: Conterminous United States. Time period: 1984–2016. Major taxa studied: Vegetation. Methods: We aggregated fire radiative power (FRP)‐based fire intensity, event size, burned area, frequency, season length, and ignition type data from > 1.8 million government records and remote sensing data at a 50‐km resolution. We evaluated the relationship between fire physical characteristics and ignition type to determine if and how modern U.S.A. fire regimes are changing sensu stricto given increased anthropogenic ignitions, and how those patterns vary over space and time. Results: At a national scale, wildfires occur over longer fire seasons (17% increase) and have become larger (78%) and more frequent (12%), but not necessarily more intense. Further, human ignitions have increased 9% proportionally. The proportion of human ignitions has a negative relationship with fire size and FRP and a positive relationship with fire frequency and season length. Areas dominated by lightning ignitions experience fires that are 2.4 times more intense and 9.2 times larger. Areas dominated by human ignitions experience fires that are twice as frequent and have a fire season that is 2.4 times longer. The effect of human ignitions on fire characteristics varies regionally. Ecoregions in the eastern U.S.A. and in some parts of the coastal western U.S.A. have no areas dominated by lightning ignitions. For the remaining ecoregions, more intense and larger fires are associated with lightning ignitions, and longer season lengths are associated with human ignitions. Main conclusions: Increasing anthropogenic ignitions – in tandem with climate and land cover change – are contributing to a 'new normal' of fire activity across continental scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-based production provides societies with indispensable goods such as food, feed, fibre, and energy. Yet, with economic globalisation and global population growth, the environmental and social trade-offs of their production are ever more complex. This is particularly so since land use changes are increasingly embedded in networks of long-distance flows of, e.g., material, energy, and information. The resulting scientific and governance challenge is captured in the emerging telecoupling framework addressing socioeconomic and environmental interactions and feedbacks between distal human-environment systems. Understanding telecouplings, however, entails a number of fundamental analytical problems. When dealing with global connectivity, a central question is how and where to draw system boundaries between coupled systems. In this article, we explore the analytical implications of setting system boundaries in the study of a recent telecoupled land use change: the expansion of Chinese banana plantation investments in Luang Namtha Province, Laos. Based on empirical material from fieldwork in Laos in 2014 and 2015, and drawing on key concepts from the 'systems thinking' literature, we illustrate how treating the system and its boundaries as epistemological constructs enable us to capture the differentiated involvement of actors, as well as the socio-economic and environmental effects of this land use change. In discussing our results, the need for more explicit attention to the trade-offs and implications of scale and boundary choices when defining systems is emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Management of wetland ecosystems that are tightly coupled with human systems typically requires balancing multiple objectives to ensure that a range of ecosystem services are provided for the benefit of society. We describe how adopting a complex systems approach may provide managers with the appropriate conceptual tools to achieve social and ecological objectives in a multifunctional wetland landscape. We illustrate the applicability of the approach using the Grasslands Ecological Area (GEA) in California as a case study. Human intervention has shaped and reshaped the GEA over the past century, affecting the ability of the landscape to provide ecosystem services. Ecological disaster in the 1980s precipitated transformative change in the management system toward an approach that adopts many of the recommended actions for complexity. Present‐day management, which balances multiple social and ecological objectives, has led to improved water quality, restoration of wetland habitats, and a general increase in system complexity at the landscape scale. New research and real‐time monitoring systems facilitate adaptive management and heterogeneous responses of wetland management entities. We argue that taking a complex systems approach to management in the GEA provides a common, and inclusive, conceptual model for all stakeholders and may lead to a more sustainable and ecologically resilient landscape over the long term.

The special issues of theAnnalsallow the editors to highlight themes of international significance that showcase the breadth and depth of geography in a format accessible to a broad array of readers. This ninth special issue of theAnnals of the AAGfocuses on mountains. The understanding of mountain environments and peoples has been a focus of individual geographers for centuries and for the organized discipline of geography for more than a century; more recently, the geographical interest in mountain regions among researchers has been growing rapidly. The articles contained within are from a wide spectrum of researchers from different parts of the world who address physical, political, theoretical, social, empirical, environmental, methodological, and economic issues focused on the geography of mountains and their inhabitants. The articles in this special issue are organized into three themed sections with very loose boundaries between themes: (1) physical dynamics of mountain environments, (2) coupled human–physical dynamics, and (3) sociocultural dynamics in mountain regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactions between distant places are increasingly widespread and influential, often leading to unexpected outcomes with profound implications for sustainability. Numerous sustainability studies have been conducted within a particular place with little attention to the impacts of distant interactions on sustainability in multiple places. Although distant forces have been studied, they are usually treated as exogenous variables and feedbacks have rarely been considered. To understand and integrate various distant interactions better, we propose an integrated framework based on telecoupling, an umbrella concept that refers to socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances. The concept of telecoupling is a logical extension of research on coupled human and natural systems, in which interactions occur within particular geographic locations. The telecoupling framework contains five major interrelated components, i.e., coupled human and natural systems, flows, agents, causes, and effects. We illustrate the framework using two examples of distant interactions associated with trade of agricultural commodities and invasive species, highlight the implications of the framework, and discuss research needs and approaches to move research on telecouplings forward. The framework can help to analyze system components and their interrelationships, identify research gaps, detect hidden costs and untapped benefits, provide a useful means to incorporate feedbacks as well as trade-offs and synergies across multiple systems (sending, receiving, and spillover systems), and improve the understanding of distant interactions and the effectiveness of policies for socioeconomic and environmental sustainability from local to global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The southern Yucatán Peninsular Region project was designed from the outset as an integrative, multidisciplinary program of study examining tropical deforestation in the largest track of seasonal tropical forest remaining in Mexico and in which smallholder agriculture and a major biosphere reserve are juxtaposed in regard to land uses and covers. Treating land as a coupled human–environment system, the project joins the remote sensing, environmental, social, and modeling sciences in a way that is now recognized as land change science. This paper introduces the project, the study region, and six papers that explore some of the coupled system dynamics in the region. These include the sub-regional variation in deforestation, the pan-regional adoption or anticipation of cattle ranching, the emergence of divergent household agricultural and overall livelihood strategies, the roles of cultural and household histories in agricultural livelihood choices, the temporal intensification of swidden cultivation and its implications for forest species, and carbon stocks across cultivation units, including a new econometric modeling application to forecast changes in these stocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Consistent with the challenges of sustainability science, land architecture offers a comprehensive approach to land system dynamics useful for numerous types of assessments, ranging from the vulnerability of coupled human–environment systems to forest transitions. With antecedents in several research communities, land architecture addresses the tradeoffs within and between the human and environmental subsystems of land systems in terms of the kind, magnitude, and pattern of land uses and covers. This approach is especially cogent for changes in tropical forests, given the broad-ranging forces acting on them and the equally broad-ranging consequences of their loss. The rudiments of the land architecture approach are illustrated for changes in seasonal tropical forests in the southern Yucatán of Mexico, the pivot of which is the Calakmul biosphere reserve. Simplifying the dynamics involved, the region-wide land architecture is the collective design of stakeholders with different land-use goals that favor tradeoffs in subsystem outcomes serving better either the reserve and related programs or the smallholder farmers that populate the region. A major tradeoff involves forest cover per se, which holds implications for forest transition theory. Evidence for an incipient transition involves the scale of analysis taken. The dynamics involved hold too much uncertainty to forecast a permanent transition to more forest cover and imply that more complex but robust versions of the theory are required. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents the concept and theoretical specification of a multi-agent based model for spatio-temporal simulation of a coupled human–landscape system. The model falls into the class of all agents, where the human population and the landscape environment are all self-organized interactive agents. The model framework is represented by four components: (i) a system of human population defining specific behavioural patterns of farm households in land-use decision-making according to typological livelihood groups, (ii) a system of landscape environment characterising individual land patches with multiple attributes, representing the dynamics of crop and forest yields as well as land-use/cover transitions in response to household behaviour and natural constraints, (iii) a set of policy factors that are important for land-use choices, and (iv) a decision-making procedure integrating household, environmental and policy information into land-use decisions of household agents. In the model, the bounded-rational approach, based on utility maximisation using spatial multi-nominal logistic functions, is nested with heuristic rule-based techniques to represent decision-making mechanisms of households regarding land use. Empirical verifications of the model''s components and the application of the model to a watershed in Vietnam for integrated assessments of policy impacts on landscape and community dynamics are subjects of a companion paper. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Coupled human–environment systems and traditional agricultural landscapes can be a key element in the conservation of biodiversity, ecological functionality, and cultural heritage. Terraced landscapes are a relevant example of traditional landscapes within the Mediterranean area, but they are now threatened due to the abandonment of agricultural activities. In order to identify factors that can affect the conservation strategies needed to maintain terraced landscapes in the Mediterranean area, we performed a literature review on studies about terraces and their management, soil erosion and vegetation dynamics after abandonment, etc. We collated a total of 285 scientific papers reporting 293 case studies in 19 countries. The majority of these studies analyze dry stone terraces and their influence on soil erosion and water runoff, either in cultivated or abandoned terrace systems. Only a minority of papers suggest maintenance or conservation strategies or involve farmers, exploring their decision-making. The conservation of terraced landscapes is in the hands of local farmers, and thus they should be actively involved in decision-making to find the most suitable strategies for assuring the continuity in farming and preserve cultural landscapes in the Mediterranean area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]