Berta Martín-López

Leuphana University Lüneburg · Social-Ecological Systems Institute

Nature's contributions to people (NCP) support people's quality of life and are generated by an interplay of both natural and anthropogenic capitals, known as NCP co-production, which also includes ecosystem services. A governance system of formal and informal institutions on different yet interlinked spatial, administrative, and temporal scales in...

The agricultural management of grasslands not only is strongly linked to fodder production but also provides other valuable ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, nutrient regulation, and recreation. Capturing the values that society places on such ecosystem services is a step to provide management recommendations. To elicit the societal...

Nature conservation on privately owned land depends on land managers’ decision-making. Interactions between values, rules and knowledge ( vrk ) underpin decision-making, thus, it is important to understand these interactions to support conservation intentions. We investigated how different sets of vrk determine the decision-making context regarding...

Landscape simplification is a worldwide phenomenon that impacts biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Humans benefit greatly from nature's contributions to people in both material and immaterial ways, yet landscape simplification can undermine these contributions. Landscape simplification can have negative consequences, for example, for human-na...

Climate and environmental change impacts are projected to increase, constituting a significant challenge for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while disproportionately affecting disabled populations. However, current research lacks knowledge on context-specific impacts of climate and environmental change on disabled populations. We u...

This fieldwork protocol describes the methods used within the Effects of land management on the Supply and Distribution of ecosystem services (ESuDis) project. As part of the Biodiversity Exploratories, a large scale and long-term project for functional biodiversity research funded by the German Research Council (DFG), ESuDis seeks to better unders...

Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ec...

Global frameworks to guide consistent monitoring of changes in human–nature interactions across space and time are needed to better understand how healthy ecosystems support societies and to inform policy design. Monitoring Essential Ecosystem Service Variables (EESVs) can provide a comprehensive picture of how links between nature and people are c...

Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science has emerged as a viable answer to current sustainability crises with the aim to strengthen collaborative knowledge production. To expand its transformative potential, we argue that Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science needs to thoroughly engage with questions of unequal power relations and hierarchical s...

Nature's contributions to people (NCP) may be both beneficial and detrimental to humans' quality of life. Since our origins, humans have been closely related to wild ungulates, which have traditionally played an outstanding role as a source of food or raw materials. Currently, wild ungulates are declining in some regions, but recovering in others t...

Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES sites worldwide, we test a co...

In the current Anthropocene Era, with numerous escalating challenges for biodiversity conservation, the inclusion of the social dimension into management decisions regarding wildlife and protected areas is critical to their success. By conducting 354 questionnaires in a Mediterranean protected area (the Biosphere Reserve of Bardenas Reales, Norther...

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in science and policy, but their potential for transformative change remains unexplored. We provide a framework to evaluate how NbS contribute to transformative change and apply it to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). T...

Sustainability transformations research increasingly recognizes the importance of local actors and their networks to foster fundamental societal change. Local actors have different types of relations between each other (e.g., sharing material resources, giving advice) through which they jointly intervene in different system characteristics. We cond...

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in science and policy, but their potential for transformative change remains unexplored. We provide a framework to evaluate how NbS contribute to transformative change and apply it to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). T...

The integration of socio-cultural assessments in ecosystem services research has increased steadily over the last years. However, the stakeholders’ perception of ecosystem services from grasslands, a major agricultural land cover in (pre-)Alpine landscapes, has received only limited attention. Furthermore, studying the heterogeneity of perceptions...

Large scale mapping of ecosystem services and functions (ES) is an important tool for researchers and policy makers to inform nature management and policies but it relies mainly on ES modelled with biophysical data such as land cover, henceforth biophysical ES. Other ES, henceforth species-based ES, are modelled at small scales based on species pro...

Detecting areas with high social-ecological vulnerability (SEV) is essential to better inform management interventions for building resilience in coastal systems. The SEV framework, developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a robust method to identify SEV of tropical coastal systems to climate change. Yet, the application of th...

Climate change poses a serious threat to South Africa's agricultural sector. Implementing adaptation strategies is thus crucial to secure future agricultural production and rural livelihoods. To support effective adaptation, it is necessary to understand how farmers, as primary land-use decision-makers, perceive and respond to climate change. We co...

Global biodiversity policy is at a crossroads. Recent global assessments of living nature (1, 2) and climate (3) show worsening trends and a rapidly narrowing window for action. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has recently announced that none of the 20 Aichi targets for biodiversity it set in 2010 has been reached and only six have bee...

Sustainability science needs more systematic approaches for mobilizing knowledge in support of interventions that may bring about transformative change. In this Perspective, we contend that action-oriented knowledge for sustainability emerges when working in integrated ways with the many kinds of knowledge involved in the shared design, enactment a...

In today’s societies, scavengers play an important role as providers of nature’s contribution to people (NCP), such as disease control and carcass removal. Yet very little is known about the non-material NCP (i.e. nature’s effects on subjective and psychological aspects of people’s well-being) that scavengers provide societies with. The first aim o...

Combining socio-cultural valuations of ecosystem services with ecological and monetary assessments is critical to informing decision making with an integrative and multi-pronged approach. This study examined di↵erences in the perceptions of ecosystem service supply and diversity across eight major ecosystem types in Spain and scrutinized the social...

The United Nations (UN) recently declared 2021 to 2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Against this background, we review recent social-ecological systems research and summarize key themes that could help to improve ecosystem restoration in dynamic social contexts. The themes relate to resilience and adaptability, ecosystem stewardship and nav...

Contributions of place-based social-ecological research to address global sustainability challenges - Volume 3 - Berta Martín-López, Patricia Balvanera, Robert Manson, Tuyeni Heita Mwampamba, Albert Norström

1. Current sustainability challenges demand approaches that acknowledge a plurality of human-nature interactions and worldviews, for which biocultural approaches are considered appropriate and timely. 2. This systematic review analyses the application of biocultural approaches to sustainability in scientific journal articles published between 1990...

While the importance of biological control for crop production is widely acknowledged, research on how farmers perceive on-farm natural enemies remains scarce. This paper examines cider-apple farmers' perceptions and knowledge of the concept of biological control and the specific organisms underpinning its provision (i.e. natural enemies) in the ci...

Plural valuation is about eliciting the diverse values of nature articulated by different stakeholders in order to inform decision making and thus achieve more equitable and sustainable outcomes. We explore what approaches align with plural valuation on the ground, as well as how different social-ecological contexts play a role in translating plura...

This is the list of papers included in the systematic review by Lozano et al. (2019) published in Biological Conservation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.07.002

Abstract Amplifying the impact of sustainability initiatives to foster transformations in urban and rural contexts, has received increasing attention in resilience, social innovation, and sustainability transitions research. We review the literature on amplification frameworks and propose an integrative typology of eight processes, which aim to inc...

Despite a growing number of national-scale ecosystem service (ES) assessments, few studies consider the impacts of ES use and consumption beyond national or regional boundaries. Interregional ES flows-ecosystem services "imported" from and "exported" to other countries-are rarely analyzed and their importance for global sustainability is little kno...

Concern for megafauna is increasing among scientists and non-scientists. Many studies have emphasized that megafauna play prominent ecological roles and provide important ecosystem services to humanity. But, what precisely are ‘megafauna’? Here, we critically assess the concept of megafauna and propose a goal-oriented framework for megafaunal resea...

Scholars, politicians, practitioners, and civil society increasingly call for sustainability transformations to cope with urgent social and environmental challenges. In sustainability transformations research, understandings of transformations are often dominated by Western scientific knowledge. Through a systematic literature review, we investigat...

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the major threats to the biodiversity causing changes in Ecosystem Services (ES) and Nature's Contributions to People (NCP). These changes disproportionately affect the world's disabled populations by accentuating inequalities and increasing marginalization of the most vulnerable members of society. Limited ac...

Nature's contributions to people (NCP) are all the contributions of living nature, both beneficial and detrimental, to the societies' life's quality. Ungulates play this dual role of providers of beneficial and detrimental NCP, as they are responsible of the supply of benefits (e.g. extractive experiences, habitat maintenance) and detriments (e.g....

Decisions on the use of nature reflect the values and rights of individuals, communities and society at large. The values of nature are expressed through cultural norms, rules and legislation, and they can be elicited using a wide range of tools, including those of economics. None of the approaches to elicit peoples’ values are neutral. Unequal pow...

Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. Co-production promises to address the complex nature of contemporary sustainability challenges better than more traditional scientific approache...

Multifunctional landscapes provide critical benefits and are essential for human well‐being. The relationship between multifunctional landscapes and well‐being has mostly been studied using ecosystem services as a linkage. However, there is a challenge of concretizing what human well‐being exactly is and how it can be measured, particularly in rela...

Relational values are values of desirable relationships between people and nature and among people (through nature). We report on the approach to capture relational values of nature’s contributions to people in the regional assessment for Europe and Central Asia of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services...

Although sustainability science and social-ecological systems research pursue very similar goals, i.e., generate problem- and solution-oriented knowledge to foster sustainability transformation, they partly apply different research approaches and use different key concepts. Our aim is to identify archetypes of sustainability transformation research...

Carnivore and humans live in proximity due to carnivore recovery efforts and ongoing human encroachment into carnivore habitats globally. The American West is a region that uniquely exemplifies these human-carnivore dynamics, however, it is unclear how the research community here integrates social and ecological factors to examine human-carnivore r...

Full text: https://rdcu.be/bVy8H | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0412-1 | doi: 10.1038/s41893-019-0412-1 | Regional and global assessments periodically update what we know, and highlight what remains to be known, about the linkages between people and nature that both define and depend upon the state of the environment. To guide resear...

Cumulative anthropogenic activities in coastal regions are a major threat to their marine biodiversity. The consideration of coastal marine areas as social-ecological systems (CMSESs) can be useful for marine biodiversity conservation. This integrative approach incorporates social information that can link anthropogenic activities to marine biodive...

Recent studies have shown the opportunities and limitations of participatory mapping for ecosystem services management, although it is an incipient research area. One of the research questions yet to be addressed is whether the composition of stakeholder groups has an effect on the outputs of participatory mapping. In this study, we assessed the in...

We conducted a systematic review of 502 articles, published between 2000 and 2016, to characterize the research on human-carnivore relations according to (i) temporal and geographical distribution, (ii) biology, (iii) relations between carnivores and humans, (iv) social actors, (v) drivers of change, (vi) management, and (vii) applied methods. We p...

Assessments of the value of nature (e.g., TEEB. The economics of ecosystems and biodiversity: ecological and economic foundations, London, 2010) have tended to focus on the instrumental values of ecosystem services. However, recent academic and policy debate have highlighted a wider range of values (e.g., relational and intrinsic values), valuation...

Mountains play a key role in the provision of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) worldwide that support societies’ quality of life. Simultaneously, mountains are threatened by multiple drivers of change. Due to the complex interlinkages between biodiversity, quality of life and drivers of change, research on NCP in mountains requires interdisci...

This is the database of the paper: Martín-López B, Leister I, Lorenzo Cruz P, Palomo I, Gret-Regamey A, Harrison PA, Lavorel S, Locatelli B, Luque S, Walz A. (2019) Nature’s contributions to people in mountains: a review. PLoS ONE E 14(6): e0217847. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217847

A thorough understanding of long-term temporal social-ecological dynamics at the national scale helps to explain the current condition of a country’s ecosystems and to support environmental policies to tackle future sustainability challenges. We aimedcto develop a methodological approach to understand past long-term (1960-2010) social-ecological dy...

A thorough understanding of long-term temporal social-ecological dynamics at the national scale helps to explain the current condition of a country's ecosystems and to support environmental policies to tackle future sustainability challenges. We aimed to develop a methodological approach to understand past long-term (1960-2010) social-ecological dy...

Access to ecosystem services and influence on their management are structured by social relations among actors, which often occur across spatial scales. Such cross-scale social relations can be analysed through a telecoupling framework as decisions taken at local scales are often shaped by actors at larger scales. Analyzing these cross-scale relati...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We conducted a systematic literature review of the current state of research on the social perceptions of invasive species, aiming to provide guidance towards transdisciplinary research and participatory decision making. In order to detect patterns regarding publication trends and factors determining social perceptions of invasive species, we appli...

Whereas ecosystem service research is increasingly being promoted in science and policy, the utilisation of ecosystem services knowledge remains largely underexplored for regional ecosystem management. To overcome the mere generation of knowledge and contribute to decision-making, scientists are facing the challenge of articulating specific implica...