Bodin & Tengö’s SES Motifs are a simple way of capturing the relationships between two social groups and two ecological units. The simple quantification of these motifs allow for the method to be scaled up to vast social-ecological networks.

Örjan Bodin and Maria Tengö recently published a paper on social–ecological systems research in Madagascar using exciting new way to quantify such systems.  Social–ecological systems (SES) research often suffers from a lack of a clear means of organizing SES data in such a way as to make it comparable to other SESs.  This is what excites me most about Bodin and Tengö’s new paper in Global Environmental Change.  They provide an objective and context agnostic basic set of measurement tools that can be used to test fundamental hypotheses about the function of social–ecological systems.

Bodin and Tengö, 2012. Disentangling intangible social–ecological systems. Global Environmental Change (22) 2, 430–439.