Many cultural benefits of ecosystems are difficult to capture in standard ecosystem services (ES) assessments. Scholars and practitioners often respond to this gap by seeking to develop new scientific methods to capture and integrate the plural values associated with diverse cultural benefits categories. This increasing emphasis on value pluralism represents an essential step toward recognitional justice within ES theory and practice. However, current approaches continue to rest on the assumption that ES-knowledge is only made available to decision-makers through scientific documentation. As a result, scholars and decision-makers fail to account for the role of knowledge pluralism as a core element of recognitional justice, and a key enabling factor for meaningful consideration of the plural values linked to cultural benefits of ES. In this paper, we contribute to a pluralist theory of cultural-benefits-knowledge, and ES-knowledge more broadly. Using a Critical Interpretive Synthesis of environmental management literature, we conceptualize a wider range of knowledge forms that convey cultural benefits, based on the knowledge-as-practice concept in addition to the knowledge-as-product concept more familiar to Western actors. As part of the synthesis, we explore when and how diverse forms of cultural-benefits-knowledge intersect with decision-making processes, and the value aspects and categories of cultural benefits most frequently conveyed by each form of knowledge. Our synthesizing argument offers a critique of the concept of “ES-knowledge-use,” proposing a shift in focus toward “learning opportunities” that exist across phases of decision-making. We demonstrate that attention to a greater diversity of knowledge forms (knowledge pluralism), and a fuller spectrum of opportunities to integrate them (learning opportunities) can support more meaningful consideration of the plural values associated with cultural benefits of ecosystem services (value pluralism). In combination, attention to knowledge pluralism and value pluralism can help bring the ES approach into alignment with environmental justice through the recognition and legitimization of multiple identities, well-beings, and human-nature relationships, as reflected in meaningful consideration of the diverse cultural benefits of ES.

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Improved consideration of the cultural benefits of ecosystem services (ES) requires attention to knowledge pluralism in addition to value pluralism. Theorists have increasingly argued that meaningful inclusion of cultural benefits of ES requires attention to plural values, beyond the individual, instrumental values associated with ecosystems. However, there has been little engagement around the role of knowledge pluralism as a foundational enabling factor for meaningful consideration of plural values. This paper contributes to a conceptual toolkit for implementation of knowledge pluralism in ES theory and application by (re)conceptualizing ES-knowledge as a knowledge system. This can support personal and collective reflexivity around the role of worldviews embedded in our institutions, and illuminate what is at stake when assumptions about human-nature relationship and well-being remain hidden. Further, by locating benefits-knowledge as a core element of the ES-knowledge-system, we can imagine a greater range of possible cultural-benefits-knowledge-forms and improve our ability to comprehend and convey the plural values of cultural benefits of ES, as they arise across cultural contexts.

Context Landscape science relies on foundational concepts of landscape ecology and seeks to understand the physical, biological, and human components of ecosystems to support land management decisionmaking. Incorporating landscape science into land management decisions, however, remains challenging. Many lands in the western United States are federally owned and managed for multiple uses, including recreation, conservation, and energy development. Objective We argue for stronger integration of landscape science into the management of these public lands. Methods We open by outlining the relevance of landscape science for public land planning, management, and environmental effects analysis, including pertinent laws and policies. We identify challenges to integrating landscape science into public land

High-intensity land-use and aridification due to climate change could affect a broad range of ecosystem services and landscape attributes in dryland systems. We describe temporal and spatial trends and projections for major categories of land-use as well as aridification in the Colorado Plateau, a dryland region in the western United States. We also identified areas with high potential for overlap between intense land-use and high rates of aridification in the future and explored the potential for impacts to ecosystem services. Our findings suggest that large areas of spatial overlap between different categories of intense land-use types and land-use and climate change are likely to occur and have the potential to impact ecosystem services, such as water availability, according to a simple scenario analysis. In particular, we found that areas with high potential for oil and gas development and recreation are likely to overlap with areas of high aridification due to climate change. Our scenarios suggested that cropland productivity and the recreation tourism economy may be highly impacted by the combination of landuse and climate change. Our analysis approach could be applied at other spatial scales or in other regions to identify where land-use and climate change are likely to co-occur, and increase pressure on environmental resources.

The purpose of this research was to verify that various segments of the rock climbing community have different attitudes toward resource management and to aid in the understanding of attitudinal differences that can affect rock-climbing management. Respondents were given an on-site questionnaire; 400 usable surveys were collected from 13 different locations in the United States. Respondents identified themselves according to the type of climbing they participated in (e.g., traditional climbing, sport climbing, and hybrid climbing). Factor analysis identified five usable factors: bolt placement/use, need for management, reservations about management, appropriateness of bolts, and climbers' self-perception. A repeated-measures analysis of variance identified significant differences among responses from traditional and sport climbers on four of the five scales used to measures attitudes. The variance among the climbing subgroups indicated that various climbing groups had significantly different attitudes toward management. All climbers surveyed had reservations about the management process. Results from the analysis indicated that climbers from all three groups (traditional, sport, and hybrid) felt that managers did not adequately understand the activity of climbing, climbers did not adequately understand the management process, climbing was not treated fairly in the management process in comparison to other activities, and climbing was micromanaged.

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Abstract. The combination of co-occurring climate change and increasing land-use is likely to affect future environmental and socioeconomic conditions in drylands; these hyper-arid to sub-humid landscapes are limited by water resources and prone to land degradation. We characterized the potential for geographic overlap among land-use practices and between land-use and climate change on the Colorado Plateau-a dryland region experiencing rapid changes in land-use and facing aridification. We characterized spatial patterns and temporal trends in aridification, land-use, and recreation at the county and 10-km 2 grid scales. Increasing trends and overlapping areas of high intensity for use, including oil and gas development and recreation, and climate drying, suggest areas with high potential to experience detrimental effects to the recreation economy, water availability, vegetation and wildlife habitat, and spiritual and cultural resources. Patterns of overlap in high-intensity land-use and climate drying differ from the past, indicating the potential for novel impacts and suggesting that land managers and planners may require new strategies to adapt to changing conditions. This analytical framework for assessing the potential impacts of overlapping land-use and climate change could be applied with other drivers of change or to other regions to create scenarios at various spatial scales in support of natural resource planning efforts.