Ecological science and sustainability for the 21st century

Abstract

Ecological science has contributed greatly to our understanding of the natural world and the impact of humans on that world. Now, we need to refocus the discipline towards research that ensures a future in which natural systems and the humans they include coexist on a more sustainable planet. Acknowledging that managed ecosystems and intensive exploitation of resources define our future, ecologists must play a greatly expanded role in communicating their research and influencing policy and decisions that affect the environment. To accomplish this, they will have to forge partnerships at scales and in forms they have not traditionally used. These alliances must act within three visionary areas: enhancing the extent to which decisions are ecologically informed; advancing innovative ecological research directed at the sustainability of the planet; and stimulating cultural changes within the science itself, thereby building a forward‐looking and international ecology. We recommend: (1) a research initiative to enhance research project development, facilitate large‐scale experiments and data collection, and link science to solutions; (2) procedures that will improve interactions among researchers, managers, and decision makers; and (3) efforts to build public understanding of the links between ecosystem services and humans.

Towards linking environmental law and science

“…Actionable research may be best enabled through co-development of research programs with diverse communities and collaborators with close attention to emerging policy windows Moon et al 2014;Rose 2014;Beier et al 2017;Keeler et al 2017;Rose et al 2017) rather than the classic approach of testing scientific theory that is often taught in university (Palmer et al 2005;Keeler et al 2017). Collaboration among scientists and lawyers, government agencies, Indigenous peoples, and stakeholders can enable the early identification of specific data gaps or uncertainties that will be relevant to environmental policy windows (Sutherland et al 2012;Adams et al 2014;Cook et al 2014).…”

Comparative study of urban ecology development in the U.S. and China: Opportunity and Challenge

“…The new urban ecology is the result of evolution of ecosystem ecology to understand specific sets of interactions between humans and ecological processes that occur in urbanizing regions (Alberti et al 2003). In the 1990s, realizing that most aspects of ecosystems on the Earth cannot be understood without accounting for the influence of humanity (Palmer et al 2005;Vitousek et al 1997), the thinking of American ecologists evolved from a focus on humans as intruders on the natural world to humans as part of the natural world (Botkin 1990;McDonnell and Pickett 1990). The Sustainable Biosphere Initiative sponsored by the Ecological Society of America outlined strategies for sustainable ecological systems as one of the three ecological research priorities (Lubchenco 1991).…”

“…The history of ecological study in cities has deep roots in the 1920s when the Chicago School advocated human ecology and studied the city system by introducing ecological theories and principles (Young 1974). However, the ecologists began to study urban ecosystems again at the end of the 20th century due to an emerging conviction that incorporating human activities as integral components of Earth's ecosystems was needed (Vitousek et al 1997;Palmer et al 2005). Since the beginning of the 21st century, urban ecological study has shown a significant increase (Fig.…”

The Road Ahead: The Sustainability Transition and Coastal Research

“…Sustainability science seeks real world solutions to sustainability issues and aims to break down artificial and outdated disciplinary gaps between the natural and social sciences through the creation of new knowledge and its practical application to decision making (Clark and Dickson 2003;Palmer et al 2005).…”