Exploring the social-ecological systems discourse 20 years later
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the 20-year evolution of the social-ecological systems framework (SESs). Although a first definition of SES dates back to 1988, Berkes and Folke more thoroughly used the concept in 1998 to analyze resilience in local resource management systems. Since then studies of interlinked human and natural systems have emerged as a field on its own right, promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in a wide set of fields and practices. As the SES concept celebrates its 20-year existence we decided to make an overview of how authors use the concept in relation to research that deals with social and ecological linkages. Hence, we conducted a review of the SES concept using the Scopus database, analyzing a random set of journal articles on social-ecological systems (n = 50) regarding definitions of SES, authors' main sources of inspiration in using the concept, as well as document type, subject area, and other relevant information. Although there is a steady increase of SES publications, we found that 61% of the papers analyzed did not even provide a definition of the term social-ecological system(s), a shortcoming that makes case comparisons difficult and reduces the usefulness of the concept. We also found three common SES frameworks that authors seem to be most commonly inspired by, referred to here as the original, the robustness, and multitier frameworks, respectively. The first can be characterized as a descriptive framework, the latter two more as diagnostic frameworks, useful for modeling. Although it would be a bit presumptuous of us to come up with a more thorough definition of the SES concept in this paper, we urge SES scholars to be more meticulous in making explicit what they mean by a social-ecological system when conducting SES research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".