Natural Resource Management Reimagined: Using the Systems Ecology Paradigm

The Systems Ecology Paradigm (SEP) incorporates humans as integral parts of ecosystems and emphasizes issues that have significant societal relevance such as grazing land, forestland, and agricultural ecosystem management, biodiversity and global change impacts. Accomplishing this societally relevant research requires cutting-edge basic and applied research. This book focuses on environmental and natural resource challenges confronting local to global societies for which the SEP methodology must be utilized for resolution. Key elements of SEP are a holistic perspective of ecological/social systems, systems thinking, and the ecosystem approach applied to real world, complex environmental and natural resource problems. The SEP and ecosystem approaches force scientific emphasis to be placed on collaborations with social scientists and behavioral, learning, and marketing professionals. The SEP has given environmental scientists, decision makers, citizen stakeholders, and land and water managers a powerful set of tools to analyse, integrate knowledge, and propose adoption of solutions to important local to global problems.

Robert G. Woodmansee is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) at Colorado State University (CSU). He is also a former Program Director for Ecosystem Studies at the U.S. National Science Foundation, and a founding member of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. His research interests are in biogeochemistry and landscape ecology, including spatial and temporal scaling in ecosystems.

John C. Moore is Professor and Head of the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability and Director of the NREL at Colorado State University. His research interests are in the fields of soil ecology, mathematical/theoretical ecology, and the application of the theory of complex adaptive systems to teaching and learning.  His research on food web structure, function and dynamics is positioned at the interfaces of community ecology, ecosystem ecology, and evolution linking species traits and adaptions to biogeochemical cycles.

Dennis S. Ojima is Professor in the Ecosystem Science and Sustainability Department and a Senior Research Scientist in the NREL at Colorado State University. His research addresses climate change effects on ecosystems around the world. He was involved in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and in 2007 received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the latter.

Laurie Richards serves as a pre-award research administrator for approximately 83 research scientists and graduate students from both the NREL and Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability (ESS). She also acts as the publication editor and manager assisting NREL/ESS scientific staff with manuscript submission to many scientific journals.