Earth Stewardship, Socioecosystems, the Need for a Transdisciplinary Approach and the Role of the International Long Term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 214

Keywords Capacity building • Coupled socio-ecological systems • Epistemological
paradigm • Long-term ecological research • Socioecosystems • Transdisciplinary
research

14.1 Introduction

The extent of our current environmental crises has reached planetary proportions,
clearly shown in a variety of challenges collectively known as “global change”
(Vitousek 1992 ; Steffen et al. 2004 ). It includes not only climate change, loss of
biodiversity, soil erosion of arable land, and stratospheric ozone depletion, but other
problems less mentioned in the mass media, but equally important, such as ocean
acidifi cation and disruption of the global N and P biogeochemical cycling
(Rockström et al. 2010 ). All of these are interconnected in various ways. Among
these earth-scale environmental problems, land use change particularly is relevant
since it is not only the main cause of biodiversity loss, it also embodies the transfor-
mation of natural ecosystems and thus the processes eroding earth's life support
system (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1991 ).
Society's development highly depends on the benefi ts it obtains from nature
(Daily et al. 1997 ). In order to get these ecological services, humans interact and
transform their local ecosystems. These local transformations became regional with
human expansion currently, and have reached global proportions (Kates and Paris
2003 ). Sustainability has been proposed as the goal of societal development in
response to this severe environmental crisis (ICSU 2010 ; Spangenberg 2011 ).
Global-level problems require global-level solutions, an idea that is embedded in the
Earth Stewardship concept (Chapin et al. 2011 ). As Power and Chapin ( 2009 ) state:
Planetary stewardship requires that decision makers and stakeholders be well-informed
about how global change is likely to affect households, resources, livelihoods, and quality
of life. They must also learn how local actions and reactions to change could feed back to
infl uence the trajectory of planetary change. To provide this information, ecologists must
redouble their efforts to understand and forecast ecosystem changes across multiple
scales.

An important initiative within the global research arena is the International Long
Term Ecological Research Network, known by its acronym ILTER ( www.ilternet.
com ). Since its creation, ILTER has grown at an average rate of two countries and
30 sites per year, reaching now 37 national networks and embracing nearly 600
academic groups anchored in specifi c sites over the fi ve continents and committed
to conducting scientifi c research spanning decades (Gosz 1996 ; Parr 2013 ).
In the following lines we will describe the type of changes that are already
occurring in the scientifi c sector to deal with this global-scale environmental crisis.
Also we will identify changes that we need to foster and speed up in order to
advance towards an earth-level stewardship process, and will lift up the role of
ILTER in this endeavor.