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Marine protected areas (MPAs) are widely promoted as effective tools for conserving biodiversity and safeguarding ecosystem services. However, MPA success can be hindered by a lack of legitimacy and low social support because of perceived negative effects on ecosystem services and human well-being. Despite these social challenges, the social dimensions of marine conservation, such as the effects of MPAs on coastal livelihoods and local communities’ perceptions of these effects, are often overlooked in conservation initiatives. In this study, we use a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative network analysis derived from interviews and focus group discussions, to examine the perceptions of key stakeholder groups about the Litoral Norte MPA in Portugal. Our findings reveal that most stakeholder groups hold more negative than positive views about the governance and management of the MPA. Key concerns include unsatisfactory participation in MPA decisions and perceptions that the MPA fails to deliver positive social and ecological outcomes, such as increased community involvement, fair income distribution, and enhanced fish abundance. Policy makers and managers need to address these negative perceptions to improve conservation governance and management. By considering the stakeholder feedback presented in this study, such as fostering better engagement with the local community and transforming conflicts into opportunities for co-developing new conservation actions with local resource users, policy makers and managers can increase support for Litoral Norte and enhance the social and ecological outcomes of the MPA.

Over the past three decades community-based natural resources management (CBNRM) has sought to address the concurrent needs of economic development and ecological protection at the local level, but there is often strong divergence between development and conservation interests and successes. In particular, CBNRM has not always led to expected socioeconomic outcomes, while information of its impact on human well-being at household level is sparse. In Botswana, most communities do not disburse benefits from CBNRM ventures to households. This leads to an inherent scale mismatch that arises because the costs of living with wildlife are felt at the household level, while the benefits are paid out at the community or village level. We use longitudinal data from two household surveys conducted 22 years apart to assess if benefits from the Botswana model of CBNRM have increased household-level adaptive capacity for those living with wildlife. We take a livelihoods capital approach to develop indicators of adaptive capacity and measure how livelihood diversity, inequality, and adaptive capacity have changed in five communities in northern Botswana between 1995 and 2017. Our analyses confirm the findings of qualitative reviews and suggest that CBNRM is under-performing in its contribution to improved household-level adaptive capacity. CBNRM cannot be said to benefit communities if the majority of community members do not experience increased well-being. We therefore recommend restructuring the governance models of CBNRM and other community conservation approaches to ensure that benefits are more directly targeted to actively participating households.

Ecosystem services and the biodiversity that supports them directly provision food and livelihoods to millions around the world within environments increasingly facing multifaceted changes. Yet the perspectives of resource users on the value of those resources and the challenges they face amid social-ecological change are still too often poorly understood. In this study, we use Photovoice methodology and a social-ecological systems perspective to understand the value of access to fish resources and the impacts of changing access for small-scale fishing communities in Cambodia. Contrasting the perspectives of households in different ecological settings, including adjacent to the Tonle Sap Lake and within its floodplain, revealed stark differences in the experiences of regulation enforcement and fisheries management for communities that had viable alternatives to fishing compared to those without options beyond fishing. The study addresses the need to understand both the lived experiences of those on the frontlines of environmental changes, and to disentangle the heterogeneous experiences across and within communities to improve resource management and community support in complex, changing social-ecological systems.

Anticipating, avoiding, and managing disruptive environmental change such as regime shifts and the impacts it has on human well-being is a key sustainability challenge. Woody encroachment is a globally important example of a regime shift that occurs in savanna systems, where a large fraction of the world's poor live. Woody encroachment is known to negatively impact a variety of ecosystem services, but few studies have investigated the impact of woody encroachment on local land users and their livelihoods. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews to determine how different land users - local subsistence communities and managers of conservation tourism areas - perceive woody encroachment in the Hluhluwe region of South Africa, how it affects the ecosystem services they rely upon, and what costs they incur in undertaking activities to reverse woody encroachment. Most interviewees perceived trees to be increasing in the landscape (83%). However, perceptions about the causes of woody encroachment differed: community members cited the reduced usage of trees as the reason for woody encroachment, whereas conservation managers mostly attributed the change to increased CO2. Most community members felt woody encroachment was harmful to their household and general well-being, citing loss of grazing for livestock, and fear of attacks by wild animals and criminals as the main impacts. In contrast, conservation managers perceived woody encroachment to have both harmful and beneficial impacts, with the main negative impacts being loss of grazing for wildlife and impacts on tourism through reduced visibility for game viewing. All the conservation areas invested in tree clearing compared to only 20% of respondents in the community areas, where an average of ZAR367 (US$25) was spent per year on clearing, compared to ZAR293,751 (US$20,000) and ZAR163,000 (US$11,000) spent in private game reserves and government reserves, respectively. Our findings highlight the negative impacts of ongoing woody encroachment, the differentiated impacts it has on different land users, and differences in capacity to combat encroachment. These findings highlight the need for state-funded management interventions to support clearing of trees in encroached areas, particularly in communal areas.

Achieving sustainable development as an inclusive societal process in rural landscapes, and sustainability in terms of functional green infrastructures for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, are wicked challenges. Competing claims from various sectors call for evidence-based adaptive collaborative governance. Leveraging such approaches requires maintenance of several forms of social interactions and capitals. Focusing on Pan-European regions with different environmental histories and cultures, we estimate the state and trends of two groups of factors underpinning rural landscape stewardship, namely, (1) traditional rural landscape and novel face-to-face as well as virtual fora for social interaction, and (2) bonding, bridging, and linking forms of social capital. We applied horizon scanning to 16 local landscapes located in 18 countries, representing Pan-European social-ecological and cultural gradients. The resulting narratives, and rapid appraisal knowledge, were used to estimate portfolios of different fora for social interactions and forms of social capital supporting landscape stewardship. The portfolios of fora for social interactions were linked to societal cultures across the European continent: "self-expression and secular-rational values" in the northwest, "Catholic" in the south, and "survival and traditional authority values" in the East. This was explained by the role of traditional secular and religious local meeting places. Virtual internet-based fora were most widespread. Bonding social capitals were the strongest across the case study landscapes, and linking social capitals were the weakest. This applied to all three groups of fora. Pan-European social-ecological contexts can be divided into distinct clusters with respect to the portfolios of different fora supporting landscape stewardship, which draw mostly on bonding and bridging forms of social capital. This emphasizes the need for regionally and culturally adapted approaches to landscape stewardship, which are underpinned by evidence-based knowledge about how to sustain green infrastructures based on both forest naturalness and cultural landscape values. Sharing knowledge from comparative studies can strengthen linking social capital.

Integrated ecosystem assessment (IEA) is a framework that organizes and summarizes science to aid in the transition from a traditional single sector toward a holistic management approach known as ecosystem-based management (EBM). An essential step of the IEA framework is the development of conceptual models. These models allow the integration of intrinsically linked social, environmental, and biological components of marine ecosystems that is pivotal to address unsolved questions in fisheries management. We constructed social-ecological conceptual models of relevant commercial and subsistence fisheries for Sitka, a fisheries-based community in Southeast Alaska, by collecting and synthesizing available scientific information, local ecological knowledge (LEK), and qualitative information. We conducted focus groups with key informants in Sitka who had in-depth knowledge of their community's interactions with local fisheries and the structure and function of the surrounding ecosystem. The resulting conceptual models coproduced by scientists and Sitka stakeholders, illustrate the main biological and environmental factors driving the abundance of Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis) and Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) in Southeast Alaska. Furthermore, these coproduced models elucidate how the interaction between Sitka residents and these fisheries affect community well-being. Our models will serve as the basis to assess EBM objectives for Sitka as part of an IEA place-based framework. This study also highlights the importance of integrating LEK into science and potentially into the broader Alaska fisheries management structure.

Through complex interactions and feedback processes between coastal ecological and social components at different temporal and spatial scales, coastal environments coproduce a range of ecosystem services (ES) and benefit different social groups. In these highly populated areas, multiple actors, interests, and activities coexist, leading to intensified conflicts between stakeholders. The research presented here aims to understand how coastal social-ecological complexity is studied within coastal ES literature. A systematic review of the literature consisting of 199 manuscripts was performed using the PRISMA method (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). The results show that coastal ES research has been focused on understanding ecological processes for ES provision and value. Hence, coastal ES studies fall short of considering the social components and social-ecological interactions of coastal systems: ES flows, demand, coproduction, power relations, institutions and governance, temporal and spatial scales, value pluralism, uncertainty, and human well-being multidimensions and distribution. The partial integration of social-ecological complexity within coastal ES research limits coastal ES management because nonlinear interactions among social and ecological components are not well understood, particularly stakeholders' relations, their roles, and the links to ES. Finally, we propose a conceptual framework that integrates the gaps identified during the review. The framework places coproduction and power relations as the core factors of assessments of coastal ES, as means to understand complex, nonlinear social-ecological interactions and feedback processes. Hence, it also provides necessary tools to address normative issues of coastal management such as control, access, trade-offs, and benefits.

Regime shifts, i.e., large, persistent, and usually unexpected changes in ecosystems and social-ecological systems, can have major impacts on ecosystem services, and consequently, on human well-being. However, the vulnerability of different regions to various regime shifts is largely unknown because evidence for the existence of regime shifts in different ecosystems and parts of the world is scattered and highly uneven. Furthermore, research tends to focus on individual regime shifts rather than comparisons across regime shifts, limiting the potential for identifying common drivers that could reduce the risk of multiple regime shifts simultaneously. Here, we introduce the Regime Shifts Database, an open-access database that systematically synthesizes information on social-ecological regime shifts across a wide range of systems using a consistent, comparative framework, providing a wide-ranging information resource for environmental planning, assessment, research, and teaching initiatives. The database currently contains 28 generic types of regime shifts and > 300 specific case studies. Each entry provides a literature-based synthesis of the key drivers and feedbacks underlying the regime shift, as well as impacts on ecosystem services and human well-being, and possible management options. Across the 28 regime shifts, climate change and agriculture-related activities are the most prominent among a wide range of drivers. Biodiversity, fisheries, and aquatic ecosystems are particularly widely affected, as are key aspects of human well-being, including livelihoods, food and nutrition, and an array of cultural ecosystem services. We hope that the database will stimulate further research and teaching on regime shifts that can inform policy and practice and ultimately enhance our collective ability to manage and govern large, abrupt, systemic changes in the Anthropocene.

The value of diverse perspectives in social-ecological systems research and transdisciplinarity is well recognized. Human well-being and how it is derived from dynamic ecosystems is one area where local knowledge and perspectives are critical for designing interventions for sustainable pathways out of poverty. However, to realize the potential to enrich the understanding of complex dynamics for sustainability, there is a need for methods that engage holistic ways of perceiving human-nature interactions from multiple worldviews that also acknowledge inequalities between scientific and other forms of knowledge. To date, photovoice has been used to elicit local knowledge and perspectives about ecosystem changes and ecosystem services. We expand this to explore the utility of the method for facilitating the mobilization of plural insights on human well-being, which is subject to complex social-ecological dynamics, and its role in processes for coproduction of knowledge that acknowledges the need for equity and usefulness for all actors. Drawing on two cases, one in community-based marine protected areas in Kenya and one dealing with agricultural decline and rural-urban migration in South Africa, we demonstrate two modes of application of photovoice: as a scoping exercise and as a deep learning tool. The studies descriptively illustrate how photovoice can depict the hidden and often neglected intangible connections to ecosystems, plural and disaggregated perceptions of complex social-ecological dynamics, and issues of access and distribution of ecosystem benefits. The studies also show how photovoice can encourage equitable participation of nonacademic actors in research processes and in particular contribute to mobilization of knowledge and translation of knowledge across knowledge systems. We discuss how local perspectives may be further recognized and incorporated in transdisciplinary research and reflect on the practical and ethical challenges posed by using photographs in participatory research on social-ecological systems.

Conservation practice has sometimes been criticized for relying on simplistic assumptions about social contexts in natural resource management. Despite recent advances conceptualizing the interface between human well-being and the environment, very few studies moving from theory to practice exist. We address this gap by providing one of the first careful examinations of local conceptualizations of well-being in a conservation context, using mixed methods to examine the multidimensionality and heterogeneity of well-being conceptualizations across three sites in northern Cambodia. Each site faced different levels of conservation activities and development pressures, the latter being mainly linked to the degree of impact from economic land concessions. Our results highlight village context as a key line of variation in individual well-being, rather than differences related to age, gender, or wealth. Our results suggest that conservation incentives that mirror people's aspirations can balance out negative trade-offs linked to compliance and can contribute to well-being. We show that multifaceted values are attached to well-being components, highlighting the importance of subjective indicators and perceptions to capture fully the social changes and impacts of conservation in complex contexts. We conclude that enquiries into subjective well-being should become an integral part of participatory assessments and adaptive management of conservation interventions.

Diverse and productive ecosystems and human well-being are too often considered opposing targets. This stems mainly from nature being perceived as separate from culture, which results in resilience indicators that focus predominantly on either ecosystems or humans, and that overlook the interplay between the two. Meanwhile, global targets for biodiversity conservation and human well-being have yet to be satisfactorily achieved. We believe that in order to develop effective, culturally appropriate, and equitable conservation strategies that ensure social-ecological resilience, conservation planners and practitioners must conceive of human and ecological well-beings as an interrelated system. By giving nature a voice, and by viewing nature and people as an undifferentiated whole, some indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) have philosophical bases for achieving well-being for both humans and nature. Biocultural approaches to conservation ground management in local knowledges, practices, and ontologies. These approaches encompass both the biological and cultural aspects of a system, address complex relationships and feedbacks within human and ecological well-being, and offer flexible frameworks that facilitate synthesis across different metrics, knowledge systems, and ontologies. The process of developing indicators of resilience with a biocultural approach could help (1) overcome the human-nature dichotomy that often makes global approaches incompatible with local approaches by integrating local peoples' diverse forms of relating to nature, (2) reflect two-way feedbacks between people and their environment by focusing on processes, not just final states, and (3) define, measure, and monitor ecological and human well-being as a whole. It can also facilitate dialog between IPLCs and global decision-makers who are disconnected from local realities, and between people from a diversity of disciplinary, ontological, and professional backgrounds.

Experiences of nature contribute to human health and well-being, yet as the world's population continues to concentrate in towns and cities there is mounting concern that these experiences are diminishing. Despite this, little is known about how we can maintain experiences of nature as cities grow. Here, we quantify how people's opportunities to experience nature might change with future urban growth in the city of Brisbane, Australia. We simulated the addition of 84,642 houses under compact and sprawling growth scenarios and modeled changes in people's opportunities to experience nature by estimating changes in backyard size, public green space provision, and bird species richness close to households. We discovered that the form of urban growth could strongly influence people's opportunities to experience nature in a way that is highly nonrandom across the socioeconomic gradient. Under a sprawling pattern of development, with low residential densities and few interstitial green spaces, our models suggest severe declines in access to public green space and bird species richness around people's homes. These declines are predicted to be concentrated in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas of the city. Compact development leads to greater reductions in backyard size, but smaller declines in access to public green space and bird species richness. Our results point to a difficult trade-off; residential infill will maintain larger green spaces and higher overall bird diversity but reduce backyard sizes, impacting people's opportunities to experience nature in a different way. Careful planning is needed to balance the availability of public and private urban green spaces to ensure that the opportunities for people to experience nature are maintained as urbanization continues.

Conservation areas, both public and private, are critical tools to protect biodiversity and deliver important ecosystem services (ES) to society. Although societal benefits from such ES are increasingly used to promote public support of conservation, the number of beneficiaries, their identity, and the magnitude of benefits are largely unknown for the vast majority of conservation areas in the United States public-private conservation network. The location of conservation areas in relation to people strongly influences the direction and magnitude of ES flows as well as the identity of beneficiaries. We analyzed benefit zones, the areas to which selected ES could be conveyed to beneficiaries, to assess who benefits from a typical conservation network. Better knowledge of ES flows and beneficiaries will help land conservationists make a stronger case for the broad collateral benefits of conservation and help to address issues of social-environmental justice. To evaluate who benefits the most from the current public-private conservation network, we delineated the benefit zones for local ES (within 16 km) that are conveyed along hydrological paths from public (federal and state) and private (easements) conservation lands in the states of North Carolina and Virginia, USA. We also discuss the challenges and demonstrate an approach for delineating nonhydrological benefits that are passively conveyed to beneficiaries. We mapped and compared the geographic distribution of benefit zones within and among conservation area types. We further compared beneficiary demographics across benefit zones of the conservation area types and found that hydrological benefit zones of federal protected areas encompass disproportionately fewer minority beneficiaries compared to statewide demographic patterns. In contrast, benefit zones of state protected areas and private easements encompassed a much greater proportion of minority beneficiaries (~22-25%). Benefit zones associated with private conservation lands included beneficiaries of significantly greater household income than benefit zones of other types of conservation areas. Our analysis of ES flows revealed significant socioeconomic gaps in how the current public-private conservation network benefits the public. These gaps warrant consideration in regional conservation plans and suggest that private conservation initiatives may be best suited for responding to the equity challenge. Enhancing the ecosystem benefits and the equity of benefit delivery from private conservation networks could build public and political support for long-term conservation strategies and ultimately enhance conservation efficacy.

The social-ecological systems of rice terraces across Southeast Asia are the result of centuries of long-term interactions between human communities and their surrounding ecosystems. Processes and structures in these systems have evolved to provide a diversity of ecosystem services and benefits to human societies. However, as Southeast Asian countries experience rapid economic growth and related land-use changes, the remaining extensive rice cultivation systems are increasingly under pressure. We investigated the long-term development of ecosystem services and the adaptive capacity of the social-ecological system of rice terrace landscapes using a case study of Banaue (Ifugao Province, Northern-Luzon, Philippines). A set of indicators was used to describe and assess changes in the social-ecological state of the study system. The resilience of the rice terraces and the human communities that maintain them was examined by comparing the current state of the system with results from the literature. Our findings indicate that, although the social-ecological system has not yet shifted to an alternative state, pressures are increasing and some cultural ecosystem services have already been lost.

Assessments of ecosystem services have been proposed as one way of incorporating concerns about environmental change and ecosystem conditions into subnational development planning. In Thailand a policy window for such initiatives is opening because of a transition in national policy toward area-based planning combined with broader political reforms to expand public participation and encourage more evidence-based decision making. We explored three case studies in Thailand in which central and local government agencies and research organizations partnered to engage local communities and other stakeholders in assessments of ecosystem services and human well-being. The analysis focused on the role ecosystem assessments play in building and creating demand for coproductive capacity. By coproductive capacities we mean the ability to combine scientific resources and governance capabilities in ways that bring about informed social change. We found evidence that the assessments built capacities for governance actors to explore scientific and research-based evidence, to consult scientific experts, and then to evaluate existing policies and plans using this newly acquired information. At the same time, scientific experts also learned to explore public policy issues, to consult planners and decision makers in government, and based on this knowledge to evaluate scientific evidence and revise the scope and goals of their research and analytical activities to better meet policy needs and demands. Coproductive capacities were built when various stakeholders jointly engaged in compilation and interpretation of evidence. Doing so helped legitimize the assessment process with positive feedback on both governance and science capacities. We also found evidence, however, of significant cultural and institutional constraints to designing and making better use of ecosystem services assessments. These constraints included insufficient resources for both knowledge making and decision making. Power relations and organizational culture likewise had implications for capacities to govern and do science. Nevertheless, by creating demand for greater capacities, assessments contribute to improving the quality of evidence-based social change.

There is an increasing demand for development of natural resources, which can be accompanied by environmental degradation. Planning for multiple land uses requires navigating trade-offs between social, economic, and environmental outcomes arising from different possible futures. To explore these trade-offs, we use the Daly River catchment, in Australia's Northern Territory, as a case study. The catchment contains areas of priority for both conservation and development. In response to the challenge of navigating the required trade-offs, the Daly River Management Advisory Committee (DRMAC) initiated a land-use plan for the region. Both development and conservation of natural resources in the catchment will affect human well-being and the long-term provisioning of ecosystem services in diverse ways. To understand some of these impacts, an innovative engagement process was designed to elicit the relative importance of key factors to residents' well-being. The process identified 19 well-being factors grouped into four domains: biodiversity, socio-cultural, recreational, and commercial. Overall, the highest-ranked well-being factors were in the social-cultural and biodiversity domains while commercial values were ranked the least important. Respondents reported low satisfaction with commercial factors as well, noting concerns over environmental impacts from existing developments and sustainability of future developments. We identified differences in the reported importance values for several types of stakeholders, most notably between indigenous respondents and those employed in the agricultural sectors. Indigenous respondents placed greater importance on biodiversity and socio-cultural factors. Agricultural respondents placed greater importance on commercial factors. The outcomes of our engagement were integrated into DRMAC's process of objective-setting to ensure that objectives for each domain were included in land-use planning. Our results can also anticipate potential conflicts between different stakeholders and changes in well-being associated with different land uses. We describe how our findings will inform the next stages of stakeholder engagement and comment on the utility of such an approach for integrating well-being into objective setting for land-use and scenario planning.

There is broad support for the notion that ecosystem services influence human well-being (HWB), however, the means to measure such an effect are elusive. Measures of HWB are commonly used within the fields of psychology, economics, and international development, but thus far have not been integrated fully into ecosystem service assessments. We examine the multidimensional nature of HWB and discuss the need for a robust framework that captures its complex relationship with ecosystem services. We review several well-known HWB indices and describe the adaptation of two frameworks - the Economist Intelligence Unit's Quality of Life Index and the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework - to evaluate county-level HWB within the Albemarle-Pamlico Basin (Virginia and North Carolina, USA) using a stakeholder-engaged approach. We present maps of HWB that illustrate the results of both frameworks, discuss the feedback from stakeholders that guided indicator and data selection, and examine the observed differences in HWB throughout the basin. We conclude with suggestions for enhancing the role of ecosystem services in HWB indices.

Land-cover change has been identified as one of the most important drivers of change in ecosystems and their services. However, information on the consequences of land cover change for ecosystem services and human well-being at local scales is largely absent. Where information does exist, the traditional methods used to collate and communicate this information represent a significant obstacle to sustainable ecosystem management. Embedding science in a social process and solving problems together with stakeholders are necessary elements in ensuring that new knowledge results in desired actions, behavior changes, and decisions. We have attempted to address this identified information gap, as well as the way information is gathered, by quantifying the local-scale consequences of land-cover change for ecosystem services in the Little Karoo region, a semiarid biodiversity hotspot in South Africa. Our work is part of a stakeholder-engaged process that aims to answer questions inspired by the beneficiaries and managers of ecosystem services. We mapped and quantified the potential supply of, and changes in, five ecosystem services: production of forage, carbon storage, erosion control, water flow regulation, and tourism. Our results demonstrated substantial (20%-50%) declines across ecosystem services as a result of land-cover change in the Little Karoo. We linked these changes in land-cover to the political and land-use history of the region. We found that the natural features that deliver the Little Karoo's ecosystem services, similar to other semiarid regions, are not being managed in a way that recognizes their constraints and vulnerabilities. There is a resulting decline in ecosystem services, leading to an increase in unemployment and vulnerability to shocks, and narrowing future options. We have proposed a way forward for the region that includes immediate action and restoration, mechanisms to fund this action, the development of future economic activity including tourism and carbon markets, and new ways that the science-stakeholder partnership can foster these changes. Although we acknowledge the radical shifts required, we have highlighted the opportunities provided by the resilience and adaptation potential of semiarid regions, their biodiversity, and their inhabitants.

Ecosystem services are necessary, yet not sufficient for human well-being (however defined). Insufficient access to the ecosystem provisioning service of food is a particularly important factor in the loss of human well-being, but all ecosystem services contribute in some way to well-being. Although perhaps long obvious to ecologists, the links between ecosystems and aspects of human well-being, including health, have been less well understood among the social science community. This situation may now be starting to change, thanks in part to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). Causality between ecosystem services and well-being is bidirectional; it is increasingly clear that functioning societies can protect or enhance ecosystem services, and accordingly, that societies with impaired well-being (best documented in the case of chronic diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS) can also experience a related decline in ecosystem services. The future state of human well-being and of ecosystem services is more than the co-evolution of these two fundamental elements. Human well-being also depends, critically, upon the human institutions that govern relationships between human individuals and groups, and also between humans and ecosystem services. The scenarios working group of the MA found that human well-being is highest in the Global Orchestration scenario, which assumes the fastest evolution of beneficial institutions, and is lowest in the Order from Strength scenario. Human well-being was found to be intermediate in the other two scenarios (Adapting Mosaic and Techno-Garden) even though these scenarios share a much greater recognition of the importance of ecosystem services to human well-being.

Ecosystem services are essential for human well-being, but the links between ecosystem services and human well-being are complex, diverse, context-dependent, and complicated by the need to consider different spatial and temporal scales to assess them properly. We present the results of a study in the rural community of Sistelo in northern Portugal that formed part of the Portugal Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The main purpose of our study was to assess the linkages between human well-being and ecosystem services at the local level, as perceived by the community. We used a range of tools that included participatory rural appraisal and rapid rural appraisal as well as other field methods such as direct observation, familiarization and participation in activities, semistructured interviews, trend lines, well-being ranking, and other ranking and scoring exercises. Sistelo has a unique landscape of agricultural terraces that are now being abandoned because of the depopulation of the region, a common trend in mountainous rural areas of Europe. From the community perspective, some components of well-being such as material well-being have been improving, whereas some ecosystem services, e.g., food production, have been declining. Although a few of the local criteria for well-being are closely related to local ecosystem services, most of them are not. People recognize many of the services provided by ecosystems, in particular, provisioning, cultural, and regulating services, although they feel that provisioning services are the most important for well-being. It is apparent that, for the Sistelo community, there is an increasing disconnect between local well-being and at least some local ecosystem services. This disconnect is associated with greater freedom of choice at the local level, which gives the local inhabitants the power to find substitutes for ecosystem services. The consequences of land abandonment for human well-being and ecosystem services at different temporal and spatial scales are discussed.