Abstract
The American West exists in the popular imagination as a distinct region, and policies and politics often suggest that both the challenges and the opportunities for land management and human well-being across the region are relatively homogeneous. In this paper, we argue that there are key characteristics that define the West as a social-ecological region, and also that there are myriad social-ecological systems (SESs) within the region that require diverse and dynamic approaches to managing change over time. We first conceptualize aridity, topography, and a unique political economy of land as exogenous factors that persist over time and space to define the American West as a contiguous social-ecological region. We then identify a second set of characteristics that show high degrees of variation across SESs within the American West. Finally, we operationalize the relationships between regional characteristics and local dynamics through a set of case studies that exemplify specific types of SESs in the region. The results of these empirical representations of the regional and intra-regional social-ecological dynamics of the contemporary American West highlight the implications for research and management of taking a cross-scale integrated approach to address pressing social-ecological opportunities and challenges in complex adaptive systems.
Highlights
There are few regions as evocative and symbolically powerful as the American West
There is a substantial body of human–environment research embedded within the often-taken-forgranted bounds of the West, historically thought of as lands west of the 100th meridian (Wilkinson 1993, Seager et al 2018; for a few research examples, see Brick et al 2001, Robbins et al 2009, Altaweel et al 2015)
With an empirically based definition of the West as a social-ecological region, the analytical synthesis and research agenda we present is driven by an interest in advancing the conceptualization and investigation of socialecological systems (SESs) dynamics within the West, as regional political and climate pressures have the potential to dominate discourse about management and decision-making (Ragsdale 2016, Schoenagel et al 2017)
Summary
Any further distribution of 10 W A Franke College of Forestry & Conservation, University of Montana, United States of America this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation American Farmland Trust, United States of America University of Idaho, United States of America Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. and DOI. Keywords: social-ecological region, social-ecological system, American West Supplementary material for this article is available online
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