Sustaining wildlife populations, which can provide both ecosystem services and disservices to human societies, represents a global conservation challenge. The ecosystem services (ES) and Ostrom’s social-ecological systems (SES) frameworks have been widely implemented across the social and natural sciences to characterize nature's benefits to humans. Despite their utility and generalizability, individually they are inadequate tools for addressing the sustainable management of many wildlife populations. The main limitations are that the SES framework does not specifically address competing perspectives on wildlife generated by different experiences of benefits and costs, while the ES framework presents usually a limited representation of the social and governance context in which such competing perspectives are embedded.
Results/Conclusions
We propose a unified Social-Ecological framework of Ecosystem Disservices and Services (SEEDS) that addresses these gaps. The SEEDS framework emulates the hierarchical structure of the SES framework, but adds subsystems reflecting heterogeneous stakeholder views and experiences of wildlife-based benefits and costs. We propose a list of variables and indicators to facilitate operationalizing SEEDS, and initiate a broader discussion about the key variables for analyzing human-wildlife systems. Building on the previous implementations of SES framework as a tool for analyses of common-pool resources (e.g, fisheries), we envision that one of the applications of SEEDS will be to support a synthesis of human-wildlife conflict and coexistence to identify the characteristics associated with positive outcomes for both human well-being and wildlife conservation. Some of the challenges are defining boundaries of human-wildlife systems as units of analysis, and integrating different types of data across research fields. Despite these challenges common to many transdisciplinary frameworks, research across disciplinary boundaries can lead to conservation solutions that are better adapted to social-economic contexts and thus, more successful.