Conceptual Integration for Social-Ecological Systems An Ontological Approach

Sustainability research and policy rely on complex data that couples social and ecological systems (SESs) to draw results and make decisions, therefore understanding the dynamics between human society and natural ecosystems is crucial to tackle sustainability goals. SESs frameworks are employed to establish a common vocabulary that facilitates the identification of variables and the comparison of results. A variety of SESs approaches have been proposed and explored, however integration and interoperability between frameworks is missing, which results in a loss of relevant information. In addition, SESs frameworks often lack semantic clarity which exacerbates difficulties in developing a unified perspective. In this paper we demonstrate the use of ontological analysis to unify the main elements of two prominent SESs paradigms, the social-ecological system framework (SESF) and the Ecosystem Services (ESs) approach, to build an integrated social-ecological perspectives framework. The proposed conceptual framework can be adopted to combine existent and future results from the two paradigms in unified databases and to develop broader explanatory and decision-making tools for SESs and sustainability research.