Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.

Declining natural resources have led to a cultural renaissance across the Pacific that seeks to revive customary ridge-to-reef management approaches to protect freshwater and restore abundant coral reef fisheries. Effective ridge-to-reef management requires improved understanding of land-sea linkages and decision-support tools to simultaneously evaluate the effects of terrestrial and marine drivers on coral reefs, mediated by anthropogenic activities. Although a few applications have linked the effects of land cover to coral reefs, these are too coarse in resolution to inform watershed-scale management for Pacific Islands. To address this gap, we developed a novel linked land-sea modeling framework based on local data, which coupled groundwater and coral reef models at fine spatial resolution, to determine the effects of terrestrial drivers (groundwater and nutrients), mediated by human activities (land cover/use), and marine drivers (waves, geography, and habitat) on coral reefs. We applied this framework in two ‘ridge-to-reef’ systems (Hā‘ena and Ka‘ūpūlehu) subject to different natural disturbance regimes, located in the Hawaiian Archipelago. Our results indicated that coral reefs in Ka‘ūpūlehu are coral-dominated with many grazers and scrapers due to low rainfall and wave power. While coral reefs in Hā‘ena are dominated by crustose coralline algae with many grazers and less scrapers due to high rainfall and wave power. In general, Ka‘ūpūlehu is more vulnerable to land-based nutrients and coral bleaching than Hā‘ena due to high coral cover and limited dilution and mixing from low rainfall and wave power. However, the shallow and wave sheltered back-reef areas of Hā‘ena, which support high coral cover and act as nursery habitat for fishes, are also vulnerable to land-based nutrients and coral bleaching. Anthropogenic sources of nutrients located upstream from these vulnerable areas are relevant locations for nutrient mitigation, such as cesspool upgrades. In this study, we located coral reefs vulnerable to land-based nutrients and linked them to priority areas to manage sources of human-derived nutrients, thereby demonstrating how this framework can inform place-based ridge-to-reef management.

Through research, restoration of agro-ecological sites, and a renaissance of cultural awareness in Hawaiʻi, there has been a growing recognition of the ingenuity of the Hawaiian biocultural resource management system. The contemporary term for this system, “the ahupuaʻa system”, does not accurately convey the nuances of system function, and it inhibits an understanding about the complexity of the system’s management. We examined six aspects of the Hawaiian biocultural resource management system to understand its framework for systematic management. Based on a more holistic understanding of this system’s structure and function, we introduce the term, “the moku system”, to describe the Hawaiian biocultural resource management system, which divided large islands into social-ecological regions and further into interrelated social-ecological communities. This system had several social-ecological zones running horizontally across each region, which divided individual communities vertically while connecting them to adjacent communities horizontally; and, thus, created a mosaic that contained forested landscapes, cultural landscapes, and seascapes, which synergistically harnessed a diversity of ecosystem services to facilitate an abundance of biocultural resources. “The moku system”, is a term that is more conducive to large-scale biocultural restoration in the contemporary period, while being inclusive of the smaller-scale divisions that allowed for a highly functional system.

Here, we expand on the term "ecomimicry" to be an umbrella concept for an approach to adaptive ecosystem-based management of social-ecological systems that simultaneously optimizes multiple ecosystem services for the benefit of people and place. In this context, we define ecomimicry as a strategy for developing and managing cultural landscapes, built upon a deep understanding of the structure and function of ecosystems, that harnesses ecosystem processes for the purpose of balancing and sustaining key ecosystem services, rather than maximizing one service (e.g., food production) to the detriment of others. Ecomimicry arises through novel, place-based innovations or is adopted from elsewhere and adapted to local conditions. Similarly, precontact Hawaiian socialecological systems integrated a variety of ecomimicry schema to engender a complex system of adaptive resource management that enhanced biocultural diversity and supported resilient food systems, ultimately sustaining a thriving human population. In addition to presenting a synopsis of how ecomimicry was employed in the design and management of Hawaiian social-ecological systems, we identify and characterize specific ecomimicry applications. Within this context, we explore a revival of ecomimicry for biological conservation, biocultural restoration, resilience, and food security. We conclude with a discussion of how revitalizing such an approach in the restoration of social-ecological systems may address issues of conservation and sustainability in the Anthropocene.

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Resource managers increasingly seek to implement cost-effective watershed restoration plans for multiple ecosystem service benefits. Using locally adapted ecosystem service tools and historical management costs, we quantified spatially explicit management costs and benefits (in terms of groundwater recharge and landscape flammability) to assist a state agency in evaluating cobenefits for a predefined restoration scenario (focused on biodiversity benefits) and to prioritize an expanded restoration scenario in the state-managed Pu'u Wa'awa'a watershed (Hawai'i) now and under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 midcentury climate scenario. Restoring all available areas increases recharge by ~1.74 million m 3 /yr (5% of recharge over the entire watershed) under the current climate and does not meaningfully change recharge under RCP 8.5 midcentury, whereas climate change decreases recharge by ~50%. For landscape flammability, climate change increases the median and maximum probability of fire occurrence across all land use scenarios, and full restoration results in the greatest reduction in landscape flammability under both current and RCP 8.5 midcentury climate scenarios. We demonstrate that location and type of forest restoration influence overall cost-effectiveness of restoration, providing insights for landscape planning for ecosystem services under a limited budget. Across all scenarios, capturing potential benefits at low elevations requires greater expenditures ($13,161/ ha) than at high elevations ($5,501/ ha) due mainly to the substantial costs of removing Pennisetum setaceum (fountain grass), the dominant land cover below 1,000 m. If management focuses on groundwater recharge only, the most cost-effective areas occur at high elevations (>1,000 m), with ample fog interception, although recharge benefits decline across the landscape under RCP 8.5 midcentury. Focusing instead on cost-effective landscape flammability reduction as the primary management objective shifts emphasis toward dry low-elevation areas under the current climate. However, under the RCP 8.5 midcentury scenario, the most cost-effective areas for flammability management shift toward higher elevations with greater potential overlap with recharge benefits.

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With growing calls to scale up reforestation efforts worldwide, conservation managers increasingly must decide whether and how to restore highly altered ecosystems. However, empirical research on potential trade‐offs remains scarce. We use a Hawai'i watershed to demonstrate a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to identifying synergies and trade‐offs associated with maintaining an unrestored forest, versus restoration to a historical or hybrid (native and non‐native plant species) state. We focused on restoration scenarios designed by conservation managers and measured ecological, hydrologic, and cultural outcomes they identified as important metrics of success. The hybrid restoration scenario maximized potential outcomes at moderate cost, and increased two rarely measured but often critical metrics to managers and communities: cultural value and resilience to disturbance. Hybrid restoration approaches developed collaboratively can provide a viable option for scaling up restoration in island ecosystems and other contexts where invasive species pose significant challenges and/or where community support is important.