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.