Quantifying ecological and social drivers of ecological surprise

1. A key challenge facing ecologists and ecosystem managers is understanding what drives unexpected shifts in ecosystems and limits the effectiveness of human interventions during these events. Research that integrates and analyzes data from natural and social systems can provide important insight for unraveling the complexity of these dynamics, and is a critical step towards development of evidence-based, whole systems management approaches. 2. To examine our ability to influence ecosystems that are behaving in unexpected ways, we explore three prominent cases of ‘ecological surprise’. We capture the social-ecological systems using key variables and interactions from Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework, which integrates broader ecosystem processes (e.g. climate, connectivity), management variables (e.g. quotas, restrictions, monitoring), resource use behaviours (e.g. harvesting), and the resource unit (e.g. trees, fish, clean water) being managed. 3. Structural equation mode...