Graeme S. Cumming

• D. Phil. (Oxon)
• Professor (Full) at The University of Western Australia

Although the growing field of research on social-ecological systems (SESs) deals with some of the most important questions of our time, the study of SESs lacks an overarching theoretical framework. The development of such a framework is desirable because it would greatly improve our ability to generalize from individual case studies, to distinguish...

Ecosystems influence human societies, leading people to manage ecosystems for human benefit. Poor environmental management can lead to reduced ecological resilience and social–ecological collapse. We review research on resilience and collapse across different systems and propose a unifying social–ecological framework based on (i) a clear definition...

Significance Our analysis shows that there are two distinct groups of national economies, roughly equating to developed and less developed countries. The economies of countries in each group are pushed toward two different equilibrium points by differences in the feedbacks between natural resource consumption, population growth, and gross domestic...

As conservation biology has matured, its scope has expanded from a primarily ecological focus to recognition that nearly all conservation problems involve people. At the same time, conservation actions have been increasingly informed by ever more sophisticated quantitative models. These models have focused primarily on ecological and geographic ele...

A minimal social-ecological model, based on the robustness framework, suggests a typology of six different kinds of social-ecological mismatch and a set of general hypotheses about how they might arise.

Motivation Here, we make available a second version of the BioTIME database, which compiles records of abundance estimates for species in sample events of ecological assemblages through time. The updated version expands version 1.0 of the database by doubling the number of studies and includes substantial additional curation to the taxonomic accura...

Context Species that provide habitat for other organisms are critical for land- and seascape structure. Since coral patch interiors offer different habitats and perform a functionally different role from edges, loss and fragmentation of corals can negatively impact biodiversity. Although processes leading to coral loss have been well documented, th...

Underpinned by systemic thinking, social-ecological systems (SES) research has emerged as a critical field for addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene, marked by a cross-scale focus, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, and a strong emphasis on place-based work. Thanks to the efforts of many networks and institutes, the field has advanced...

The benefits that people obtain from marine and coastal ecosystems are numerous and complex. Although marine ecosystem service approaches are increasing in prominence, relatively little is known about how marine ecosystem service provision relates to individual habitat types at the level at which they are typically considered in management and poli...

In recent years, research on normatively positive social tipping dynamics in response to the climate crisis has produced invaluable insights. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to the potentially negative social tipping processes that might unfold due to an increasingly destabilized Earth system and to how they might in turn re...

As global heating and other anthropogenic influences alter tropical marine environments, it is unclear how marine bird populations will be impacted and whether their current roles in tropical marine ecosystems will change. Although marine birds roost and breed on tropical islands in large numbers, the direct trophic interactions between these birds...

Context As complementary terrestrial and aquatic habitats are pulled apart by environmental change, animals will have to adjust their behaviours to successfully track their fundamental niches. We introduce a novel example of how climate change impacts can drive separation between complementary foraging and breeding habitats in seabirds. Objectives...

Ostrom’s principles for the effective management of common pool resources emphasize the importance of local participation by affected actors in the design of rules. Principle 3 proposes that including local knowledge will facilitate the creation of effective rules that fit local social and ecological settings. However, the validity of the design pr...

Knowledge about adaptive capacity and its determinants has increased significantly over the last decade. However, most research on adaptive capacity has been static, not considering how adaptive capacity might change over time, particularly after severe disturbances. We studied the adaptive capacity dynamics of Asian-Pacific reef tourism operators...

The social and cultural elements of human interactions with nature remain among the least-studied and least understood elements of social-ecological systems. Although the conceptual framework of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides an entry point into assessing nature’s contributions...

Water governance in river basins worldwide faces challenges due to complex socio-economic and environmental factors. In the Yellow River Basin (YRB), two major institutional shifts, the 1987 Water Allocation Scheme (87-WAS) and the 1998 Unified Basin Regulation (98-UBR), aimed to address water allocation and usage issues. This study quantifies the...

Complex social-ecological contexts play an important role in shaping the types of institutions that groups use to manage resources, and the effectiveness of those institutions in achieving social and environmental objectives. However, despite widespread acknowledgment that “context matters”, progress in generalising how complex contexts shape insti...

Global estimates of the economic value of coral reefs have been made using benefit transfer and other valuation methods, but it is unclear whether these estimates match actualized values (e.g. market values of reef fish and reef tourism) or how they scale to specific regions. Here we empirically estimated the (actualized) direct economic contributi...

Water governance determines “who gets water, when, and how” in most large river basins. Shifts in water governance regimes from natural to social‐ecological or “hydrosocial” carry profound implications for human wellbeing; identifying regime changes in water governance is critical to navigating social‐ecological transitions and guiding sustainabili...

In recent years research on positive social tipping dynamics in response to the climate crisis has produced invaluable insights. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to the potentially negative social dynamics that might arise due to an increasingly destabilised Earth system, and how they might in turn reinforce social destabilis...

Conservation of breeding seabirds typically requires detailed data on where they feed at sea. Ecological niche models (ENMs) can fill data gaps, but rarely perform well when transferred to new regions. Alternatively, the foraging radius approach simply encircles the sea surrounding a breeding seabird colony (a foraging circle), but overestimates fo...

This editorial reflects on the history of the conservation movement, the strong continuing influence of its colonial past, and the counter‐emergence of a more pluralistic and respectful worldview. Conservation Letters seeks to support and foster an ethical and inclusive discipline of conservation that discards elements of its colonial and racist hi...

Nearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (‘Life below Water’) of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030. In a time of increasing social-...

Connectivity is vital for the biodiversity and functioning of marine ecosystems. It is known to be important for coral reefs, but the scales at which connectivity effects matter—and, correspondingly, the scales at which management responses are needed—are poorly understood in marine systems. We used 23 years of fish monitoring data collected from ~...

Sustainability-focused research networks and communities of practice have emerged as a key response and strategy to build capacity and knowledge to support transformation towards more sustainable, just and equitable futures. This paper synthesises insights from the development of a community of practice on social-ecological systems (SES) research i...

Success or failure of a polycentric system is a function of complex political and social processes, such as coordination between actors and venues to solve specialized policy problems. Yet there is currently no accepted method for isolating distinct processes of coordination, nor to understand how their variance affects polycentric governance perfo...

Coral reefs are increasingly affected by climate-induced disturbances that are magnified by increasing ocean temperatures. Loss of coral reefs strongly affects people whose livelihoods and wellbeing depend on the ecosystem services reefs provide. Yet the effects of coral loss and the capacity of people and businesses to adapt to it are poorly under...

The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) was established in 2011, and is now one of the major international social-ecological systems (SES) research networks. During this time, SES research has undergone a phase of rapid growth and has grown into an influential branch of sustainability science. In this Perspective, we argue that SES res...

Context Connectivity between habitat patches is vital for ecological processes at multiple scales. Traditional metrics do not measure the scales at which individual habitat patches contribute to the overall ecological connectivity of the landscape. Connectivity has previously been evaluated at several different scales based on the dispersal capabil...

The dynamics and adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems are heavily contingent on system structure, which is established through geography, institutions, interactions, and movement. Contrasting views of system structure, as hierarchies and single-level networks respectively, have tended to emphasize the role of either top-down or lateral (p...

Social-ecological systems (SES) research has emerged as an important area of sustainability science, informing and supporting pressing issues of transformation towards more sustainable, just and equitable futures. To date, much SES research has been done in or from the Global North, where the challenges and contexts for supporting sustainability tr...

Under global environmental change, understanding the interactions between people and nature has become critical for human survival. Comparative research can identify trends within social-ecological systems providing key insights for both environmental and developmental research. Island systems, with clear land boundaries, have been proposed as idea...

Actors across all economic sectors of society will need to adapt to cope with the accelerating impacts of climate change. However, little information is currently available about how microeconomic actors are adapting to climate change and how best to support these adaptations. We reviewed the empirical literature to provide an overview of (1) the c...

Feedbacks between people and ecosystems are central to the study of social–ecological systems (SES) but remain poorly understood. It is commonly assumed that changes in ecosystems leading to a reduction in ecosystem services will trigger human responses that seek to restore service provision. Other responses are possible, however, but remain less s...

Aim Movement is integral to the distribution and abundance of wildlife. We undertook an experimental test of the navigation capacity of Egyptian Geese Alopochen aegyptiacus to better understand the movements of moult‐migratory waterfowl and the implications of navigation capacity for their ecology. Location Southern Africa. In June 2015, we transl...

Context Recent efforts to apply sustainability concepts to entire landscapes have seen increasing interest in approaches that connect socioeconomic and biophysical systems. Evaluating these connections through a cultural ecosystem services lens clarifies how different spatiotemporal scales and levels of organisation influence the production of cult...

Small-scale fisheries are important for the livelihoods and food security of millions of people in low-income countries. Sustainably managing these dynamic social-ecological systems requires understanding links between ecosystems and human well-being: the focus of ecosystem service approaches. However, in-depth exploration of how co-production and...

Remote sensing products are widely used in ecology and environmental science to understand how surfaces are composed and configured in a landscape and how they change through time. Land cover maps that describe the nature of habitats available to organisms have become critical tools in the study of anthropogenic impacts, such as fragmentation, on b...

Research on ecosystem services has focused primarily on questions of availability or supply and often assumes a single human community of identical beneficiaries. However, how people perceive and experience ecosystem services can differ by socio-demographic characteristics such as material wealth, gender, education, and age. Equitable environmental...

The community dynamics of organisms that exhibit multi‐scale responses to habitat change are poorly understood. We quantified changes in species diversity and the functional composition of a waterbird community over two iterations of a repeated transition, the annual drying‐down of arid‐region Lake Ngami, Botswana. We used our data to test three th...

Coral reefs are extremely vulnerable to human-induced climate change. Most notably, increasing ocean temperatures are causing increasing incidence and severity of mass coral bleaching. There have been three major episodes of mass-bleaching on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in just the last 5 years, corresponding with extreme temperatures in 2...

Lasting community-based governance of common-pool resources depends on communities self-organizing to monitor compliance with rules. Monitoring serves an important function in community-based governance by establishing conditions for long-term cooperation, but the factors that foster its provision are poorly understood. We have analysed data from 1...

Marine capture fishery resources are declining, and demand for them is rising. These trends are suspected to incite conflict, but their effects have not been quantitatively examined. We applied a multi‐model ensemble approach to a global database of international fishery conflicts between 1974 and 2016 to test the supply‐induced scarcity hypothesis...

As habitats change, highly specialised species may die or be forced to relocate. However, some obligate coral-dwelling damselfishes appear to survive the localized extinction of their primary habitat, branching coral, caused by coral bleaching. To address this apparent paradox, we documented the spatial behaviour of obligate coral-dwellers in relat...

Urbanization profoundly transforms ecosystems and the bundles of services they provide to people. The relationship between urbanization and how ecosystem services are produced together to form bundles has received increased research interest. However, there is limited understanding of how people’s perceptions of the benefits they receive from ecosy...

Context: Recent efforts to apply sustainability concepts to entire landscapes have seen increasing interest in approaches that connect socioeconomic and biophysical aspects of landscape change. Evaluating these connections through a cultural ecosystem services lens clarifies how different spatiotemporal scales and levels of organisation influence t...

Many coastal communities depend on ecosystems for goods and services that contribute to human well‐being. As long‐standing interactions between people and nature are modified by global environmental change, dynamic and diversified livelihood strategies that enable seasonal adaptation will be critical for vulnerable coastal communities. However, the...

Urbanization is a key driver of social and environmental change world‐wide. However, our understanding of its impacts on the multidimensional well‐being benefits that people obtain from ecosystems remains limited. We explored how the well‐being contributions from land‐ and seascapes varied with urbanization level in the Solomon Islands, a fast‐urba...

Access mechanisms can determine the benefits that people derive from a given ecosystem service supply. However, compared to ecosystem service availability, access has received little research attention. The relative importance of availability compared to access in limiting ecosystem service benefits is even less well understood. In cities, the obse...

ContextLandscape sustainability emerges from interactions between linked human and natural systems. Many of these interactions are mediated by institutions (e.g., rules, laws, customs, traditions), most of which are themselves spatially defined entities that both generate and respond to spatial variation in the landscape. However, the spatial dynam...

Conserving biodiversity in the long term will depend in part on the capacity of Protected Areas (PAs) to cope with cross-scale, social-ecological disturbances and changes, which are becoming more frequent in a highly connected world. Direct threats to biodiversity within PAs and their interactions with broader-scale threats are both likely to vary...

Forests both support biodiversity and provide a wide range of benefits to people at multiple scales. Global and national remote sensing analyses of drivers of forest change generally focus on broad-scale influences on area (composition), ignoring arrangement (configuration). To explore meso-scale relationships, we compared forest composition and co...

There is increasing evidence that non-reef habitats in the seascape surrounding coral reefs are widely used by reef-associated fishes. However, our understanding of seascape use in the Indo-Pacific region is incomplete due to its large geographical range and as a consequence, considerable environmental variation (e.g. tidal regimes). We used remote...

The management of natural resources creates feedbacks between ecosystems and societies, both of which exist at characteristic scales. Theory predicts that sustainability is higher when governance and management scales align with scales of ecological heterogeneity. We analyzed the areas of institutions (10,030 permissions from 7,478 permits in the G...

Institutions are vital to the sustainability of social-ecological systems, balancing individual and group interests and coordinating responses to change. Ecological decline and social conflict in many places, however, indicate that our understanding and fostering of effective institutions for natural resource management is still lacking. We assess...

Urbanization entails social, economic and environmental changes that can transform how people relate to nature and disconnect them from it, with consequences for their wellbeing. The impacts of urbanization on human-nature relationships viewed through people’s ecosystem service (ES) preferences are however poorly understood, especially in the rapid...

Ecologists have long studied patterns, directions and tempos of change, but there is a pressing need to extend current understanding to empirical observations of abrupt changes as climate warming accelerates. Abrupt changes in ecological systems (ACES)—changes that are fast in time or fast relative to their drivers—are ubiquitous and increasing in...

Coral reefs around the world have recently been decimated by successive years of worldwide mass bleaching linked to global climate change and the increasing incidence of marine heatwaves. Coral reef scientists, managers, and users are struggling to come to terms with the impacts of what is a very large-scale and seemingly unmanageable driver of cha...

Secondary contact and hybridization between recently diverged taxa have been increasing due to anthropogenic changes to the environment. Determining whether secondary contact leads to gene flow between species is important for understanding both the evolutionary consequences of such events (i.e. genetic swamping, speciation reversal, hybrid speciat...

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...

Bird atlases have become an important source of distribution data for broad-scale analyses in ecology, biogeography and conservation. However, national bird atlases are undertaken in different ways in different countries, usually with little formal assessment of alternatives. Existing research suggests that the differences in accuracy between line...

Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience, and practical applications in environmental resource management are rare. Here, we define social-ecological resilience as a property of social-ecological systems that includes at least three main characteristics — resistance, recovery and robustness (the ‘three Rs’). We defi...

The global degradation of natural ecosystems is leading to an increased focus on interventionist management and habitat restoration. On coral reefs, a foremost example of this trend is the extensive culling of crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster spp.), which are native to coral reefs throughout the Indo-Pacific. At high densities, following popul...

Increasing numbers of large marine protected areas (LMPAs) are being added to the global conservation estate, raising new challenges for marine social-ecological management and biodiversity conservation. To better understand the importance of spatial heterogeneity and scale in managing LMPAs, we undertook a quantitative, spatially explicit analysis...

Many far-ranging species depend heavily on relatively small or temporary resources within a heterogeneous landscape. For waterfowl, most species rely on deep, permanent waterbodies as refugia from predators during annual flightless molt periods when synchronous loss and regrowth of the flight feathers occurs. The movements of ducks to and from mol...

Achieving effective, sustainable environmental governance requires a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the complex patterns of interdependencies connecting people and ecosystems within and across scales. Network approaches for conceptualizing and analysing these interdependencies offer one promising solution. Here, we present t...

Marine ecology seeks to understand the factors that shape biological communities. Progress towards this goal has been hampered by habitat‐centric approaches that ignore the influence of the wider seascape. Coral reef fishes may use non‐reef habitats (e.g. mangrove and seagrass) extensively, yet most studies have focused on within‐reef attributes or...

The relationship between diversity and resilience is relatively well‐established for ecological systems, but remains much less explored for socio‐economic systems. Institutional diversity can have particular relevance for protected areas, whose managerial responses to environmental change depend on their legal basis, ability to make and enforce rul...

The world's coral reefs are rapidly transforming, with decreasing coral cover and new species configurations. These new Anthropocene reefs pose a challenge for conservation; we can no longer rely on established management plans and actions designed to maintain the status quo when coral reef habitats, and the challenges they faced, were very differe...

Globally, many ecosystems are being challenged and transformed by anthropogenic climate change. Future ecosystem configurations will be heavily influenced by the critical ecological functions that affect resilience. Robust measures of these functions will thus be essential for understanding and responding to ecological change. Coral reefs are exper...

Views that protected area (PA) expansion relies predominantly on land purchased by government are increasingly being challenged. The inclusion of privately owned PAs (PPAs) in national conservation strategies is now commonplace, but little is known about their long‐term persistence and how it compares to that of state‐owned PAs. We undertook the fi...

We described the geographic distribution of 82 haemosporidian lineages (Plasmodium, Haemoproteus, and Leucocytozoon) in the cattle egret sampled in five countries in central-western and southern Africa. Seventy-three lineages have not previously been reported. We determined the prevalence of three haemosporidians in the samples. We investigated the...

Bird species that showed 100% similarity with new lineages described in cattle egret. BLASTN tool was used to compare the similarity among the Plasmodium, Haemoproteus, and Leucocytozoon cyt-b sequences obtained from the B. ibis samples and sequences of cyt-b lineages deposited in the MalAvi database. Lineages were classified as generalists when in...

Bayesian phylogenetic tree to identify lineages of Leucocytozoon. All morphospecies used to identify these genera were downloaded from MalAvi (Bensch et al., 2009) and GenBank databases. (DOCX)

Geographic coordinates of African sites where blood samples were collected from cattle egret nestlings. Blood was collected from nestlings in breeding colonies. N is total number of birds sampled per colony. (DOCX)

Urbanization can profoundly alter socioecological relationships, but its influence on how people perceive and value ecosystem services (ES) is poorly understood. We reviewed an emerging literature in which sociocultural valuation of ES is compared among urban and rural dwellers. This research suggests that, although regulating and cultural ES were...