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Telecoupling is an integrative social-ecological framework that has made important contributions to understanding land change processes in a hyperconnected world. Visualizations are a powerful tool to communicate knowledge about telecoupling phenomena. However, little is known about current practices of telecoupling visualization and the challenges involved in visually displaying connections between multiple social-ecological systems. Our research takes stock of existing telecoupling visualizations and provides recommendations for improving current practices. We systematically review 118 visualizations presented in the scientific literature on telecoupling, and assess them in terms of their content and the adopted visualization approaches. To this end, we conceptualize telecoupling visualizations through a network lens. We find that they typically present networks of social-ecological systems, which are linked through flows. Displays of telecoupling connections through actor networks or action situation networks are less frequent. We categorize the existing visualizations into seven main types, which differ in terms of the visual encoding strategies used to represent telecoupling components. We then draw on insights from data visualization literature to reflect critically upon these current practices and provide practical recommendations. Finally, we show that network perspectives are inherent in telecoupling research and visualizations, and may deserve further attention in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key challenge in addressing the global degradation of natural resources and the environment is to effectively transfer successful strategies across heterogeneous contexts. Archetype analysis is a particularly salient approach in this regard that helps researchers to understand and compare patterns of (un)sustainability in heterogeneous cases. Archetype analysis avoids traps of overgeneralization and ideography by identifying reappearing but nonuniversal patterns that hold for well-defined subsets of cases. It can be applied by researchers working in inter- or transdisciplinary settings to study sustainability issues from a broad range of theoretical and methodological standpoints. However, there is still an urgent need for quality standards to guide the design of theoretically rigorous and practically useful archetype analyses. To this end, we propose four quality criteria and corresponding research strategies to address them: (1) specify the domain of validity for each archetype, (2) ensure that archetypes can be combined to characterize single cases, (3) explicitly navigate levels of abstraction, and (4) obtain a fit between attribute configurations, theories, and empirical domains of validity. These criteria are based on a stocktaking of current methodological challenges in archetypes research, including: to demonstrate the validity of the analysis, delineate boundaries of archetypes, and select appropriate attributes to define them. We thus contribute to a better common understanding of the approach and to the improvement of the research design of future archetype analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]