Socio-Ecological Land Systems of Latin America

Short Description

Socio-Ecological Land Systems (SELS) include different processes and contexts that enable integrating the socio-ecological aspects of territories with regional land-uses. There are many disciplines that study them, from the social or economic sciences, the environmental or the land use sciences. A thorough and holistic understanding and definition of large scale SELS is a challenging synthesis endeavor that must be  addressed collectively by an array of specialists. This group is building an interdisciplinary team of researchers to integrate their expertise and territorial knowledge into understanding the intertwined relations between land-use patterns and their associated socio-ecological systems (and vice versa) of Latin America.

Goals and Objectives

The overall goal of this WG is to generate a channel for discussion and collaboration on the understanding and defining of SELS for Latin America by contrasting and synthesizing experts’ territorial knowledge with available socio-ecological data. Our overarching aim is to contribute to the Land System Science community by generating a reference framework for analyzing patterns and processes in land science, management and planning under the umbrella of SELS in Latin America. Above all, we hope this Working Group can be a catalyst for generating new avenues and empowering the GLP community to work closely together, while expanding multidisciplinary work in the context of Socio-Ecological Land Systems.

This group’s research interests include:

  • systematically analyze, map and characterize the SELS of SA (ongoing), 
  • expand the effort to include Central America and Caribbean,
  • explore the dynamism of the SELS systems at large and at more detailed (i.e., sub national) levels,
  • delve into the nature of the characteristics that differentiates the land systems,
  • propose ways to bridge lack of data in certain areas (especially social and cultural dimensions),
  • investigate land-use induced biotic homogenization and their reactions on face of climate change, among others. 

Specifically, the group proposes the following concrete work outputs:

Short term:

  • Define the agenda of coming years after our collaboration work on spatial SELS for SA: compilation of potential venues for continuing collaborative research and emerging research questions (paper, book, opinion piece)
  • Organize a symposium or immersive session in up-coming OSM GLP 2021 in the Americas and during the Argentine Ecology meeting (end of 2020)

Long term:

  • Promote the use of the spatial SELS and conceptual model as a framework for organizing research and teaching agendas related to Land Science; for example, linking with IAI activities and GLP Latin American Nodal Office.
  • Develop science towards communicating results to stakeholders outside of the scientific journal universe and promote co-production research.

Advisory Board Members

Dr. Eugenio Arima, University of Texas at Austin, United States
Dr. Sébastien Boillat, University of Bern, Switzerland
Dr. Martha Bonilla, INECOL, Mexico
Dr. Ignacio Gasparri, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán - CONICET, Argentina 
Dr. Ricardo Grau, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán - CONICET, Argentina
Dr. Esteban Jobbagy, CONICET & Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina
Dr. Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel, University of Bern, Switzerland

GLP Themes: Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity , Land management systems

 

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Blog

Land systems’ insights from the pandemic and lock down

The organizers and several participants of a recent Working Group Meet & Greet put together this blog post summarizing the discussions held during the event. Although it will take time to make sense of the myriad changes the COVID-19 pandemic has brought and continues to bring into their lives as scientists, and into the socio-ecological land systems that they study, they identified several likely patterns of long-term change.   Read full post

Related Information

Event

March 21, 2023

POSTPONED! Decolonizing land system science: perspectives from Latin America

Wednesday, March 29, 2023 -
3:00pm to 4:30pm

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED! The GLP Socio-Ecological Land Systems of Latin America working group is happy to invite you to their next webinar led by Sébastien Boillat. This webinar aims at bringing together different perspectives of decolonizing land system science with a focus on Latin America, including indigenous perspectives on the land, knowledge co-construction, cartography and representation, and challenges faced by land system researchers in Latin America.

Read more

News

March 2, 2023

Global shocks, cascading disruptions, and (re-) connections: viewing the COVID-19 pandemic as concurrent natural experiments to understand land system dynamics

A new paper in Landscape Ecology examined how studying the Covid-19 pandemic's severe impacts on land users and landscapes around the world allow a better understanding of how global shocks, cascading disruptions, and reconnections influence contemporary land systems. The paper grew out of a collaboration between multiple GLP Working Groups.

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Event

September 23, 2021

GLP Webinar: Socio-Ecological Land System Research in Mexico

Thursday, October 28, 2021 - 4:00pm

The GLP Socio-ecological Land Systems of Latin America Working Group is very excited to announce their next webinar to be held on October 28th 2021 at 16:00 CEST (UTC+2) where Martha Bonilla (INECOL, Mexico) and colleagues will share about social-ecological networks of Mexico.

Register on Zoom

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Working Group Coordinators

 

Working Group Members