The development of harmonized, standardized, and integrated environmental observation systems is a key challenge in Earth system science and essential for advancing interdisciplinary research to support global sustainability. The Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, Critical Zone and Socio-ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI) is a recently developed pan-European network of in-situ research sites that facilitates long-term, comprehensive observation, analysis, and modeling of environmental and ecosystem change. The eLTER RI is guided by the ”Whole System Approach for in-situ research on Life Supporting Systems in the Anthropocene” (WAILS). This initiative focuses on Europe’s primary ecosystems, encompassing the atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and their socio-ecological interactions with the anthroposphere. A fundamental prerequisite for effective environmental monitoring is a standardized and harmonized design that facilitates consistent and comparable environmental data across diverse spatial and temporal scales. The present study proposes the eLTER Framework of Standard Observations (eLTER SOs), which delineates essential ecosystem variables, their measurement methods, and protocols. These SOs constitute the conceptual foundation of eLTER RI. The eLTER SOs provide a basis for overcoming existing disciplinary barriers to the international harmonization of environmental research and a foundation for cross-sphere observation concepts. The eLTER SO combines both, the scientific-academic perspective, as known from ”classical” Essential Variable concepts, with the operational perspective required for the establishment and long-term operation of in-situ observatories. This framework provides a robust basis for international harmonization of environmental research and fosters stronger global collaboration in addressing environmental challenges.

Covid-19 heralded a prolonged global crisis with wide-ranging impacts still unfolding. Understanding their dynamics is crucial for building societal resilience for future crises. Existing studies focus on pre-determined pandemic impacts, with little comparison of their societal significance. This study bridges these gaps through an exploratory, grounded approach, inducing real-time impacts from diverse published sources using qualitative and quantitative methods.

We assessed a purposefully-random sample of pandemic-related publications by media, government agencies, and civil society organizations in Israel, between January 2020–April 2021. A thematic analysis of 908 publications identified 32 pandemic impacts across four key areas: economic, social, health, and national governance, and 14 additional themes that reflect aspects in which the impacts were referenced.

A content analysis revealed foci dominated by economic and social impacts, particularly on business, employment, the financial market, and the healthcare system. Key featured themes included policy, social distancing, and crisis mishandling. Economic impacts emphasized businesses, social impacts emphasized education, health impacts emphasized the healthcare system (surpassing morbidity and mortality); and governance concerns emphasized the political system. Findings indicate that the effects of responses to Covid-19 were more prominently featured than direct health impacts, signaling their considerable societal significance. In Israel, findings highlight the societal toll of strict infection containment measures.

Our preliminary synthesis supports these findings, revealing an interconnected cascade of accumulating impacts. The key role of policy response measures in mitigating/exacerbating them underscores the need for a whole-systems approach in crisis response and monitoring, with particular attention to indirect, policy-related impacts.

Environmental knowledge networks (EKNs) link research collaborators in a common purpose to produce data and knowledge to better understand social-ecological phenomena and address environmental challenges. Over recent years, as scientists have grappled with how to produce data and actionable knowledge for conservation and sustainability, more EKNs have been established. Although each network is founded for its own purposes and maintains its own goals and ways of operating, these networks are generally managed by scientists to produce knowledge to advance science and decision making. In this Insight article, we articulate key qualities and benefits of EKNs and shows how EKNs can address grand challenges that cannot be answered by a single team or institution, create a diverse, vibrant culture of science and community of practice, and provide innovative solutions and knowledge to society. We also discuss challenges of EKN governance, and how challenges may vary with a network’s development. Finally, based on a synthesis of structured discussions about key issues in EKN management, we share recommendations and best practices, emphasizing management practices that are inclusive, reflexive, adaptive, and flexible, so that others may benefit from our experience leading EKNs.

Although sustainability pathways are urgently needed to safeguard human and non-human life within a habitable Earth system, there is no consensual knowledge about how to trigger such pathways, due to differences in values, interests, and power at multiple levels. While we develop actionable knowledge about how to induce sustainability pathways in an equitable and just way, we need to better comprehend how to avoid “locked-in” outcomes—strongly entrenched situations minimizing potential for change—in social-ecological systems (SES). Here, we offer a roadmap to guide innovative research to observe, understand, and ultimately avoid, processes that can induce lock-ins at multiple spatiotemporal scales in SES. We use recent research illustrating lock-in dynamics in the Guadalquivir Estuary and Doñana Delta SES to funnel experiences and insights from other cases and produce a knowledge base comprehensive enough to highlight novel research avenues. Our roadmap is organized in three broad research areas: (1) general cross-cutting research themes; (2) policy, collective action and governance; (3) plurality of values and methodological pluralism, acknowledging the role of long-term socio-ecological research (LTSER) platforms as transdisciplinary knowledge co-production spaces supporting solution creation. Hopefully, this roadmap may serve to support solutions to collectively learn how to navigate away from lock-in in SES, towards safer and more equitable sustainability pathways.

Context

Scholars across holistic, transdisciplinary, place-based fields of research, such as landscape ecology and social ecology, have increasingly called for an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach for transformations toward greater sustainability of social-ecological systems. This Perspective showcases organizational transformation toward sustainability in the context of a research network dedicated to place-based, social-ecological research in Europe.

Objectives

Using the European LTER research infrastructure (eLTER RI) as a case, we analyze recent organizational-level shifts motivated by desires to increase sustainability impact. These shifts include knowledge integration between the natural and social sciences, stakeholder engagement, and a reformulation of administrative guidelines and practices.

Methods

Following a program evaluation, new conversations led to new initiatives in the eLTER RI. As researchers who were involved in the program evaluation and the development of new initiatives, we rely on our professional experience and participant observation to provide insights about this process and its developments.

Results

Recommendations from a recent assessment that critiqued and provided recommendations for the research infrastructure have recently been implemented in the eLTER RI. eLTER has leveraged a unique and timely opportunity—formal recognition and project funding by the EU—to upscale and standardize its infrastructure by creating novel protocols and enacting steps towards implementation.

Conclusions

This Perspective demonstrates how eLTER’s research agenda and related protocols have evolved to better integrate multiple knowledge types, promote stakeholder integration into research, and foster greater equity and reflexivity in doing science, all of which are considered necessary to increase sustainability impact. We conclude by considering current and potential future challenges.

Shared gardens of apartment buildings comprise a large portion of the overall area of ​​neighborhoods and are a significant component of its open space. The importance of these gardens includes ecological, physical-biological, and health considerations. National Outline Plan (TAMA) 38 for strengthening residential buildings against earthquakes has in recent years become one of the means for urban renewal in Israel, and a catalyst for physical changes in residential lots that have become increasingly paved and impermeable to water due to building expansion and addition of associated infrastructures. This study analyzes the physical changes occurring in shared gardens of residential lots in two neighborhoods where many TAMA projects have been implemented: the Carmeliya neighborhood of Haifa and a section of Tel Aviv's Quarter #4. We measured the change in abundance of built space in the lots before and after the implementation of the TAMA - measuring the building footprint, the green (vegetated) space, and the 'grey' space (paved areas). In order to understand how the planning system views these lot-scale green spaces, we also reviewed official guidelines that are directly or indirectly related to urban open spaces in the municipal plans, as well as policy documents related to TAMA implementation in each city. Finally, Prior to the implementation of the TAMA, shared gardens constituted approximately two-thirds of the area of ​​the neighborhoods. With the implementation of TAMA 38, the green area of ​​each individual lot was reduced, by one-third to one half of its original area. A third of the original green area became built or paved area. The remaining green space was highly fragmented, with little connectivity, trees were cut down, and the formerly green facade of the lots were lost. The process of submitting objections did not result in a change in the final result regarding green space. Planning policy regarding shared gardens was not well defined, and despite their large contribution to the neighborhoods' network of green space, they were not considered as part of the green infrastructure in urban plans. Today, urban densification strategies focus on preserving the open spaces surrounding the city. However, the open space within the city is constantly threatened with development, and this requires the planning system to adopt measures to preserve and cultivate these urban green spaces.

There is often pressure on protected area managers to enhance wild landscapes and protect biodiversity while simultaneously promoting goals such as assuring ongoing provision of ecosystem services and providing for tourist and recreational needs. In the current study, we investigate two tools that may provide different types of management-relevant knowledge on recreation ecosystem services to aid management decisions in a protected area (PA), particularly where such tradeoffs must be considered. We constructed a spatial recreational model of the whole Cairngorms National Park, Scotland (ESTIMAP-Recreation), parameterised by hard and soft recreationalists (providing “where and what” types of knowledge). We then conducted 33 interviews with managers, residents, and visitors, asking if and how they considered the resulting maps useful. In parallel, we conducted focused walking interviews in two contrasting park sites, favoured by hard and soft recreationalist to determine if it was possible to gain further insight into other aspects of the recreational ecosystem services (the “why”). These walking interviews were conducted in a woodland adjacent to an urban area (30 interviews) and in a wild landscape mountain area (22 interviews). The complimentary nature of these approaches highlights the diverse sources of knowledge PA managers may exploit to assist in managing the many conflicting objectives imposed upon them.

The development of cultural ecosystem services (CES) concept has progressed beyond the common categories of economic benefits from tourism and recreation, and yet definitions of CES remain vague and often shallow. It is necessary to develop methodologies that can more fully express the depth of meaning of non-material benefits humans receive from nature to both strengthen the conceptual foundation of CES, and to support the evaluation, management, and decision-making processes pertaining to protected areas and other environments. This study demonstrates how embodied interviews, conducted with informants while walking in nature, capture real-time intuitive and grounded perceptions of, and reactions to, four different ecosystem types and their associated services. The results provide a deeper and more nuanced understanding of diverse human-nature relationships and reflect two distinct groups of CES values or themes: general (common across research sites) and local (site-specific). The twelve General CES include cognitive and psychological services, among them calmness and newness, heightened imagination and curiosity, increased energy and motivation, and gaining new perspectives. Local themes differed from one ecosystem to another and included more biodiversity- and geodiversity-related values pertaining to local species and geology, as well as more sensory-based experiences.