Publications

Pineda-Pinto, M., Frantzeskaki, N., Chandrabose, M., Herreros-Cantis, P., McPhearson, T., Nygaard, C., Raymond, C. 2022. Planning Ecologically Just Cities: A Framework to Assess Ecological Injustice Hotspots for Targeted Urban Design and Planning of Nature-Based Solutions. Urban Policy and Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08111146.2022.2093184

This paper presents a typology of ecological injustice hotspots for targeted design of nature-based solutions to guide planning and designing of just cities. The typology demonstrates how the needs and capabilities of nonhuman nature can be embedded within transitions to multi- and interspecies relational futures that regenerate and protect urban social-ecological systems. We synthesise the findings of previous quantitative an...

Krueger, E., McPhearson, T., Levin, S. 2022. Integrated assessment of urban water supply security and resilience: towards a streamlined approach. Environmental Research Letters. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac78f4

Urbanization and competing water demand, as well as rising temperatures and changing weather patterns, are manifesting as gradual processes that increasingly challenge urban water supply security. Cities are also threatened by acute risks arising at the intersection of aging infrastructure, entrenched institutions, and the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events. To better understand these multi-layered, interacting ch...

McPhearson, T., Cook, E., Berbés-Blázquez, M., Cheng, C., Grimm, N., Andersson, E., Barbosa, O., Chandler, D., Chang, H., Chester, M., Childers, D., Elser, S., Frantzeskaki, N., Grabowski, Z., Groffman, P., Hale, R., Iwaniec, D., Kabisch, N., Kennedy, C., Markolf, S., Matsler, A., McPhillips, L., Miller, T., Muñoz-Erickson, T., Rosi, E., Troxler, T. 2022. A social-ecological-technological systems framework for urban ecosystem services. One Earth. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.04.007

As rates of urbanization and climatic change soar, decision-makers are increasingly challenged to provide innovative solutions that simultaneously address climate change impacts and risks and inclusively ensure quality of life for urban residents. Cities have turned to nature-based solutions to help address these challenges. Nature-based solutions, through the provision of ecosystem services, can yield numerous benefits for pe...

Mejía, G., Groffman, P., Downey, A., Cook, E., Sritrairat, S., Karty, R., Palmer, M., McPhearson, T. 2022. Nitrogen cycling and urban afforestation success in New York City. Ecological Applications. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/eap.2535

Afforestation projects are a growing focus of urban restoration efforts to rehabilitate degraded landscapes and develop new forests. Urban forests provide myriad valuable ecosystem services essential for urban sustainability and resilience. These essential services are supported by natural soil microbial processes that transform organic matter to critical nutrients for plant community establishment and development. Nitrogen (N...

Branny, A., Møller, M., Korpilo, S., McPhearson, T., Gulsrud, N., Olafsson, A., Raymond, C., Andersson, E. 2022. Smarter greener cities through a social-ecological-technological systems approach. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101168

Smart city development is expanding rapidly globally and is often argued to improve urban sustainability. However, these smart developments are often technology-centred approaches that can miss critical interactions between social and ecological components of urban systems, limiting their real impact. We draw on the social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) literature and framing to expand and improve the impact of smart ...

Banitz, T., T. Hertz, L.-G. Johansson, E. Lindkvist, R. Martínez-Peña, S. Radosavljevic, M. Schlüter, K. Wennberg, P. K. Ylikoski,and V. Grimm. 2022. Visualization of causation in social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/ ES-13030-270131

In social-ecological systems (SES), where social and ecological processes are intertwined, phenomena are usually complex and involve multiple interdependent causes. Figuring out causal relationships is thus challenging but needed to better understand and then affect or manage such systems. One important and widely used tool to identify and communicate causal relationships is visualization. Here, we present several common visua...

Kuiper, J. J., Kooi, B. W., Peterson, G. D., Mooij, W. M. Bridging theories for ecosystem stability through structural sensitivity analysis of ecological models in equilibrium. Acta Biotheoretica. https://doi-org.ezproxy.its.uu.se/10.1007/s10441-022-09441-7

Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from different angles. Empirical food web models are developed to analyze how equilibria in real multi-trophic ecosystems are shaped by species interac...

Mansur, A. V., McDonald, R. I., Güneralp, B., Kim, H., Puppim de Oliveira, J. A., Callaghan, C. T., Hamel, P., Kuiper, J. J., Wolff, M., Liebelt, V., Martins, I. S., Elmqvist, T., Pereira, H. M. 2022. Nature futures for the urban century: Integrating multiple values into urban management. Environmental Science and Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2022.01.013

There is an emerging consensus that the health of the planet depends on the coexistence between rapidly growing cities and the natural world. One strategy for guiding cities towards sustainability is to facilitate a planning process based on positive visions for urban systems among actors and stakeholders. This paper presents the Urban Nature Futures Framework (UNFF), a framework for scenario building for cities that is based ...

Lindkvist, E., Pellowe, K., Alexander, S., Drury O'Neill, E., Finkbeiner, E., Girón‐Nava, A., González‐Mon, B., Johnson, A., Pittman, J., Schill, C., Wijermans, N., Bodin, Ö., Gelcich, S., Glaser, M. 2022. Untangling social–ecological interactions: A methods portfolio approach to tackling contemporary sustainability challenges in fisheries. Fish and Fisheries. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/faf.12678

Meeting the objectives of sustainable fisheries management requires attention to the complex interactions between humans, institutions and ecosystems that give rise to fishery outcomes. Traditional approaches to studying fisheries often do not fully capture, nor focus on these complex interactions between people and ecosystems. Despite advances in the scope and scale of interactions encompassed by more holistic methods, for ex...

Lindahl, T., Jarungrattanapong, R. 2022. Avoiding catastrophic collapse in small-scale fisheries through inefficient cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment. Environment and Development Economics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1355770x22000171

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are significant for poverty alleviation, but are threatened by over-exploitation and climate change effects such as drastic drops in regrowth rates. How will fishers adapt? To shed light on this, we ran a common-pool resource experiment with SSF fishers in Thailand. Our results show that groups confronted with a potential abrupt drop in the regrowth rate are more likely to form cooperative agreemen...