Urban ecologists have long been aware that many novel ecosystems depend on the unintentional, unplanned, and unmanaged effects of human uses of ecosystem services. Comparable interactions, however, are poorly understood outside of urban settings. This presentation argues that the economic concept of “transaction costs” – the unanticipated costs that arise associated with a transaction between two entities – can provide a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding how, why, and when certain natural ecosystems persist within human managed socio-ecological systems that, on the surface, appear to neglect those natural systems. Drawing on findings from socio-ecological research on contested water use 1) in Great Plains socio-ecological systems (four watersheds in Oklahoma) dominated by extensive and intensive agricultural land use and 2) in a Western Water context (the Rio Grande Basin) where water rights neglect environmental flows almost entirely, we describe how the application of the concept of “transaction costs” to socio-environmental systems can help guide research, modeling, and management of these novel systems.
Results/Conclusions:
Describing the effects of the inclusion of the “transaction cost” concept on interdisciplinary research focusing on socio-ecological systems in the two study regions, we describe how this concept impacted 1) model development efforts associated with a whole-basin approach to coupling hydrological, ecological, and social dynamics across the Rio Grande basin and 2) how “trees” are understood, modeled, and studied in portions of southwestern Oklahoma where issues associated with the encroachment of eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) have been observed. Results include: 1) the development of new collaborative methods for bringing modelers into conversation with social scientists and ecologists and 2) new collaborative approaches for bringing remote sensing, field ecology, and in situ, qualitatively-oriented social scientists into more productive dialogue regarding analyzing and interpreting ecological data. Conclusions focus on how the inclusion of “transaction costs” as a conceptual model, when studying highly-impacted ecosystems in highly coupled socio-ecological systems, should influence ecological study design, interdisciplinary modeling efforts, and, ultimately, the management of these coupled systems.