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Complex socio-environmental challenges require interdisciplinary, team-based research capacity. Graduate students are fundamental to building such capacity, yet formal opportunities for graduate students to develop these capacities and skills are uncommon. This paper presents an assessment of the Graduate Pursuit (GP) program, a formal interdisciplinary team science graduate research and training program administered by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). Quantitative and qualitative assessment of the program’s first cohort revealed that participants became significantly more comfortable with interdisciplinary research and team science approaches, increased their capacity to work across disciplines, and were enabled to produce tangible research outcomes. Qualitative analysis of four themes—(1) discipline, specialization, and shared purpose, (2) interpersonal skills and personality, (3) communication and teamwork, and (4) perceived costs and benefits—encompass participants’ positive and negative experiences and support findings from past assessments. The findings also identify challenges and benefits related to individual personality traits and team personality orientation, the importance of perceiving a sense of autonomy and independence, and the benefit of graduate training programs independent of the university and graduate program environment.

Teaching ecosystem services provides an ideal opportunity to use inquiry-based learning to help students make connections between ecological, geological, and social systems. The idea of ecosystem services, or the benefits nature provides to society, has emerged as a key concept in a host of environmental fields and is just beginning to gain attention within the geosciences. Although the concept has the potential to positively affect policy decisions by quantifying the economic value of ecosystem services, it has been criticized for commodifying nature and having limited engagement with geoscience perspectives. To teach ecosystem services to the next generation of geoscientists, we developed two variations of an inquiry-based learning exercise in which students used the ecosystem services approach to assign a monetary value to eight different ecosystem services generated by four ecosystems. One version of the exercise had students make these valuations in the field, whereas one was completed solely in the classroom. In both cases, the students scored significantly better on a postexercise assessment, demonstrated a deeper understanding of the ecosystem services approach, and reported that the exercise was preferable to a traditional lecture. Our data and observations also suggest that this exercise offers a great deal of flexibility and can be used in many learning environments. Geoscientists should be especially interested in integrating the concept of ecosystem services into their courses so that the next generation of geoscientists is well positioned to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of ecosystem services.

Habitat exchange programs, a form of biodiversity offsetting, aim to compensate for negative impacts in one area by conservation in another. A newer subset of habitat exchange programs includes programs that have three distinct characteristics: they allow for temporary (as opposed to only permanent) credits; they are centralized and overseen by nonregulatory, independent administrators; and they exist in the absence of mandatory mitigation policy. As a result, these programs may be relatively flexible and practical in areas where environmental regulation is unpalatable politically. We synthesized gray and peer‐reviewed literature to evaluate these programs' strengths and shortcomings. On the basis of our synthesis, we suggest that temporary conservation credits in habitat exchanges could encourage participation of landowners in conservation and enable programs to respond to environmental change. However, temporary credits can lead to trade‐offs between flexibility and uncertainty. Moreover, there is little evidence that these habitat exchange programs have benefited target species, and many challenges associated with offsetting programs persist. Newer forms of habitat exchange programs may have potential to achieve no net loss or net gains of biodiversity to a greater extent than other forms of offsetting, but this potential has not yet been realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ranching communities in 10 Western states self‐organized to create conservation organizations affiliated with state livestock associations and supporting conservation efforts compatible with agricultural production. These "rangeland trusts" collectively conserve over 2.7 million acres through conservation easements. We identify these efforts as a type of community‐based conservation based on the collective nature of the efforts and the balance between community needs and conservation. They differ from traditional CBC efforts with ties to industry groups and a focus on private lands that provide public goods. A coalition of rangeland trusts formed in 2006, leading to a form of multilevel governance that establishes operating principles and actively advocates for ranch land conservation. We suggest that existing industry structures can assist to scale out conservation, bridging organizations can facilitate novel interactions and policy change, and tensions on the meaning and implementation of conservation must be navigated at each scale of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dawn of the 21st century saw the emergence of the newly declared field of "sustainability science." The new field's research agenda focuses on meeting human needs while simultaneously sustaining the life support systems of the planet. The field works to merge the natural and social sciences with analyses conducted from global to local scales. Sustainability science resembles the long-standing human-environment tradition in geography, yet geography was not widely recognized as a fundamental discipline during the emergence of sustainability science. The failure of geography to exert itself in the birth of sustainability science is the latest failure by geography to take its place as a discipline essential to solving pressing environmental problems. Opportunities remain for geography to take a central role in the advancement of sustainability science by leveraging its diversity of perspectives to provide a needed and uniquely geographical contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]