Editorial: Looking Through the Mesh of a Net: The Challenge of Socio-Ecological Systems

Since the socio-ecological systems (SES) framework1 came into being more than 20 years ago (Colding and Barthel, 2019), it has firmly taken hold conceptually (Bodin and Tengö, 2012; Scotti et al., 2021). Yet in practice it is still in its adolescence, although applications show a promising potential (Salgueiro-Otero and Ojea, 2020; Arias-Gaviria et al., 2021).

Humans impact ecosystems through management, exploitation, and regulation. The way these activities take place depends on the organization of the human society and thus trajectories of ecosystem change reflect social constraints. In turn, ecosystem changes feed back into social relationships creating a subtle interplay that is difficult to recognize and causally understand, but whose comprehension is essential to move toward a sustainable society (Ortiz et al., 2015; Rodriguez et al., 2021).

Causal connections between human society and nature cross the classical boundaries within which scientific and operational knowledge have been established, and this makes understanding socio-ecological dynamics difficult at best. In this special issue, we asked the authors to address these connections and bring to light the complexity triggered by cross-domain interactions. Either methodologically or through the presentation of case studies, the papers collected in this special issue provide a glimpse of the state of the art for socio-ecological analysis. It is clearly far from complete; many key issues pertaining to socio-ecological systems have not been touched upon (i.e., spatio-temporal scales, resilience and climate change, new diseases, and vulnerability of socio-ecological systems). Nevertheless, it is a summary of relevant approaches that are currently in use and exemplifies why research on socio-ecological system is so attractive theoretically, and so promising in practice.