Asah Stanley Tanyi
Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA.
Environ Manage. 2008 Dec;42(6):1077-90. doi: 10.1007/s00267-008-9172-9. Epub 2008 Sep 5.
The social-ecological system (SES) approach to natural resource management holds enormous promise towards achieving sustainability. Despite this promise, social-ecological interactions are complex and elusive; they require simplification to guide effective application of the SES approach. The complex, adaptive and place-specific nature of human-environment interactions impedes determination of state and trends in SES parameters of interest to managers and policy makers. Based on a rigorously developed systemic theoretical model, this paper integrates field observations, interviews, surveys, and latent variable modeling to illustrate the development of simplified and easily interpretable indicators of the state of, and trends in, relevant SES processes. Social-agricultural interactions in the Logone floodplain, in the Lake Chad basin, served as case study. This approach is found to generate simplified determinants of the state of SESs, easily communicable across the array of stakeholders common in human-environment interactions. The approach proves to be useful for monitoring SESs, guiding interventions, and assessing the effectiveness of interventions. It incorporates real time responses to biophysical change in understanding coarse scale processes within which finer scales are embedded. This paper emphasizes the importance of merging quantitative and qualitative methods for effective monitoring and assessment of SESs.
社会生态系统（SES）方法在自然资源管理中对于实现可持续性具有巨大潜力。尽管有此潜力，但社会生态相互作用复杂且难以捉摸；需要进行简化以指导SES方法的有效应用。人类与环境相互作用的复杂性、适应性和特定地点性阻碍了管理者和政策制定者确定感兴趣的SES参数的状态和趋势。基于一个经过严格开发的系统理论模型，本文整合了实地观察、访谈、调查和潜在变量建模，以说明相关SES过程的状态和趋势的简化且易于解释的指标的发展。乍得湖流域洛贡河漫滩的社会 - 农业相互作用作为案例研究。研究发现这种方法能生成SES状态的简化决定因素，可在人类 - 环境相互作用中常见的一系列利益相关者之间轻松交流。该方法被证明对监测SES、指导干预措施以及评估干预措施的有效性很有用。它纳入了对生物物理变化的实时响应，以理解嵌入更精细尺度的粗尺度过程。本文强调了合并定量和定性方法对有效监测和评估SES的重要性。
