Our Editors

Editors in Chief

Patricia (Patty) Balvanera is a professor at the Institute for Ecosystems and Sustainability Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She was trained in biology, ethnobotany and ecology. Within large inter- and trans-disciplinary teams and research networks, she explores the role of biodiversity in contributing to human well-being and analyzes the dynamics of social ecological systems, with emphasis on the values that underpin the drivers of such dynamics. At the local scale, she monitors the dynamics of managed diverse tropical systems, and co-develops more sustainable food systems through transdisciplinary processes designed by creatives around the kitchen. At the global scale, she develops conceptual frameworks and monitoring strategies, performs cross-site syntheses, and delivers assessments at the science-policy interface. She has co-led several inter- and trans-disciplinary initiatives such as the Scientific Committee of the Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society (one of the core Projects of Future Earth), the Ecosystem Services group of the Global Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network (GEOBON), the Mexican Network on Social Ecological Systems and Sustainability, and the Values Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Katrina (Kate) Brown is Professor Emerita of Social Sciences at the University of Exeter in UK. Her pioneering interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work focuses on individual and society capacities for adaptation and transformation, emphasising resilience as co-produced and co-constructed though social relations. Her PhD examined women’s collective action in drought-prone Kenya, and she has worked with communities and collaborators around the world on environmental change and social justice. She was granted an inaugural ‘Axa Outlook’ award for her project ‘You, Me and Our Resilience’ to work with creative practitioners and communities to develop actions to build resilience to climate change. Her book, Resilience, Development and Global Change presents a re-visioning of resilience for development. She holds an honorary doctorate from Wageningen University, Netherlands, for ‘outstanding contributions to environmental social science, in the fields of political ecology, conservation and resilience’. She is Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and was identified as one of the most influential cross-disciplinary and social scientists in the 2020 and 2021 Highly Cited Researchers lists. As Professor Emerita, she describes herself as a ‘feral social scientist’ and currently works on environmental change, inequality and resilience, and as an advisor to international scientific organisations and programs.

Craig R. Allen is the Director of the Center for Resilience in Agricultural Working Landscapes and Professor in the School of Natural Resources, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He retired as Leader of the USGS Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in 2018. He is a member of the Board of the Resilience Alliance, and is an elected lifetime Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), for contributions to resilience theory and practice. His work focuses on the development of both theory and practice, and has focused on quantifying resilience, developing resilience based concepts such as panarchy, discontinuities, spatial regimes, and more. His work often addresses the role of invasions, extinctions and landscape change on social-ecological resilience. More recently, Dr. Allen has begun to address questions of resilience in working landscapes. He has published >250 articles and 5 books, with Applied Panarchy (with L. Gunderson and A. Garmestani) published in 2022. He has served as a science advisor for the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the USGS Powell Center and NSF Science and Technology centers. His interest in resilience began during his Ph.D. work at the University of Florida, under the guidance of CS Holling. Dr. Allen also completed a post-doc with Holling in Zoology at the University of Florida.

Former Editors in Chief

Lance Gunderson
Emory University, USA

Marco Janssen
Arizona State University, USA

Carl Folke
Stockholm University, Sweden

C.S. ‘Buzz’ Holling
University of Florida, USA

C.S. ‘Buzz’ Holling

Founding Editor-in-Chief

Ecology and Society would not exist if it were not for C.S. ‘Buzz’ Holling, the founding Editor-in-Chief who guided the journal from its inaugural issue in 1997 through the first 6 years of publication. Buzz saw the potential of open-access, online publishing as an opportunity to transform not only how research was reviewed and distributed but also as a way of disrupting some of the rigidities associated with traditional research publishing that he perceived as limiting the development of conservation science and the field of ecology itself. He embraced the twin goals of novelty and experimentation as the guiding principles for a new journal that sought to go beyond traditional research by publishing interdisciplinary papers that combined theory and practice, using a new medium – the internet, at a time when most academics were just opening their first email accounts. Now more than 25 years on, Ecology and Society has continued to flourish under his successors and Buzz remains an inspiration. His passion for rigorous scholarship, innovation and embracing change, is reflected in every issue and special feature and continues to boldly guide the journal’s development. Buzz Holling passed away on August 16 2019. The editorial “Remembering Buzz Holling” (https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol24/iss4/art39/) reminds us, he lived a remarkable life of creativity, discovery, scholarship and service to humanity. 

Editor block – please see right sidebar for options.

Editorial Board

91 members
  • William Neil Adger

    College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter
  • Arun Agrawal

    School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, USA
  • John M. Anderies

    School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, United States
  • Marina Apgar

    IDS
  • Simone F. Athayde

    University of Florida
  • Jacopo A. Baggio

    School of Politics, Security and International Affairs, University of Central Florida; National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida
  • Julia Baird

    Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, Brock University, Canada; Department of Geography and Tourism Studies, Brock University, Canada
  • Michele L. Barnes

    University of Sydney; James Cook University, Australia
  • Xavier Basurto

    Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University Marine Lab, Beaufort, North Carolina, USA
  • Andrew Reid Bell

    Department of Earth & Environment, Boston University
  • Abigail Bennett

    Michigan State University
  • Marta Berbes-Blazquez

    University of Waterloo, School of Planning; Arizona State University, School for the Future of Innovation in Society
  • Brock J. Bergseth

    James Cook University
  • Reinette Biggs

    Centre for Sustainability Transitions, Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Erin L. Bohensky

    CSIRO Land and Water
  • Deborah Bossio

    The Nature Conservancy
  • Francois Bousquet

    CIRAD, UMR SENS, F-34398 Montpellier, France.SENS, CIRAD, IRD, Université de Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France.
  • Rafael Calderon-Contreras

    Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Unidad Cuajimalpa
  • Juan Camilo Cardenas

    Universidad de Los Andes, Facultad de Economia, Calle 19A No. 1-37 Este, Bogota, Colombia, 111711
  • Antonio J. J. Castro

    Laboratory of Sustainability, Resilience and Governance of Socio-Ecological Systems (SociECOS Lab), University of Almeria (Spain)
  • Brian C. Chaffin

    W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation, University of Montana
  • Esteve Corbera

    Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain; Institute of Environmental Science and Technology & Department of Geography, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain.
  • Robert Costanza

    Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
  • Robin K. Craig

    University of Southern California Gould School of Law
  • Yaella Depietri

    Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Natural Resources and Environmental Research Center, University of Haifa (Haifa, Israel)
  • Victoria M. Donovan

  • Tarsha Eason

    U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, National Risk Management Research Laboratory, Durham, North Carolina 27711, USA
  • Bruno J. Ens

    SOVON Vogelonderzoek Nederland
  • Alexandra Paige Fischer

    School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan
  • Joern Fischer

    Social-Ecological Systems Institute, Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany
  • Alexandra Paige Fischer

    School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan
  • Carl Folke

    Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
  • Bruce C. Forbes

    Arctic Centre, University of Lapland
  • Beth Fulton

    CSIRO
  • Diego Galafassi

  • Jorge H. Garcia

    School of Management, Universidad de Los Andes (UASM)
  • Ahjond Garmestani

    U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development; Utrecht Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law, Utrecht University
  • Stefan Gelcich

    Departamento de Ecología, Center of Applied Ecology and Sustainability (CAPES), Center for the Study of Multiple-Drivers on Marine Socio-Ecological Systems, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
  • Anne D. Guerry

    Natural Capital Project, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA; School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
  • Natalie Marie Gulsrud

  • Lance Gunderson

    Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
  • Dagmar Haase

    Department of Geography, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Department of Computational Landscape Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Leipzig, Germany
  • Maria Jose Martinez Harms

    Centro de Investigacion del Cambio Climatico Universidad Santo Tomas (Chile) Instituto en Ecologia y Biodiversidad
  • Jennifer Hodbod

    Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds
  • Dave Huitema

    Wageningen University & Research
  • Gary P. Kofinas

    University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK, USA; Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA
  • Kasper Kok

    Environmental Systems Analysis Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands
  • Marianne E. Krasny

    Cornell University
  • Steven Lade

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
  • Steve Lansing

    Complexity Institute, Nanyang Technological University
  • Jacqueline Lau

    Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia; WorldFish, Batu Maung, Penang, Malaysia
  • Marina Garcia Llorente

    Social-Ecological Systems Lab. Ecology Department, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.
  • Eric Lonsdorf

    Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University
  • David Manuel-Navarrete

    School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
  • Berta Martín-López

    Institute of Ethics and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research, Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany
  • Vanessa Masterson

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
  • Matias E. Mastrangelo

    CONICET Argentina
  • Chanda Meek

    Department of Political Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska, United States of America.
  • Gwendwr R. Meredith

    School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  • Patrick Meyfroidt

    Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research, Earth and Life Institute, UCLouvain, Belgium; Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS), Belgium
  • Manjana Milkoreit

    University of Oslo
  • Michele-Lee Moore

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden; Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria, Canada
  • Donald Nelson

    University of Georgia, USA
  • Hien T. Ngo

    FAO
  • Jon Norberg

    Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Albert V. Norström

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Per Olsson

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Lennart Olsson

    Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies, LUCSUS
  • Claudia Pahl-Wostl

    Institute of Geography, Research Centre Institute of Environmental Systems Research, Osnabrück University, Germany
  • Irene Perez-Ibarra

    Agrifood Institute of Aragon, University Zaragoza
  • Garry D. Peterson

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Juan Luis Peña-Mondragón

    Instituto de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas y Sustentabilidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
  • Tobias Plieninger

    University of Göttingen, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Göttingen, Germany; University of Kassel, Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, Witzenhausen, Germany
  • Ingrid E. van Putten

    CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Castray Esplanade, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; Centre for Marine Socioecology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS 7001, Australia
  • Maja Schlüter

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
  • Michael Schoon

    School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States of America.
  • Murray Scown

    Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS)
  • Chinwe Ifejika Speranza

    Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland.
  • Marja Spierenburg

    Leiden University, Stellenbosch University (South Africa)
  • Samantha S. Stone-Jovicich

    Land and Water, CSIRO, Australia
  • Suneetha M. Subramanian

    United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies
  • Shana Sundstrom

    University of Nebraska–Lincoln
  • Maria Tengö

    Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
  • Linda Theron

    University of Pretoria
  • Mario Torralba

    Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Institute for Environmental Studies
  • Ronald L. Trosper

    University of Arizona
  • Vivian Valencia

    Bishop’s University
  • Sechindra Vallury

    University of Georgia
  • Alta de Vos

    Centre for Sustainability Transitions, Stellenbosch University
  • Frances R. Westley

    Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resiliencen and School for Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo, Kitchener, ON, Canada
  • Tracy Yandle

    New Zealand Ministry of Transport

Our History

Ecology and Society began with a bold idea and a desire to innovate. When an ecology lab was asked to reduce their journal subscriptions in the university library because of the high cost, a small group of students and professors responded in an unexpected way. They decided that since they were the ones who developed the research proposals, did the research, reviewed and wrote the papers to publish, and then paid to read the journals, that they would try something different. Their idea was to start their own journal on the internet and to make everything they published freely accessible.

It was the early 1990s. Most academics at the time were signing up for their first email accounts, and few had even glimpsed the world wide web. The team reached out to colleagues at the ESA and their vision caught the attention of an experienced managing editor, Lee Miller, who broke down the submission and peer-review process into all of the steps and charts necessary to automate the manuscript and publishing process. It took time and teamwork. A critical piece was convincing Buzz Holling, who embraced the ambitious idea with an equal measure of experience and adventure. In June of 1997, Ecology & Society became one of the first fully automated and online peer-reviewed science publications, and to our knowledge, the first ecological journal online. The bold experiment continues with E&S enthusiastically charting a course towards the future.

1995

An idea: Publish on the internet & make it free

1997

Inaugural issue of Conservation Ecology

2000

Resilience Alliance founded & becomes publisher

2001

Founding EIC Buzz Holling steps down

2004

Name change to Ecology & Society

2008

500 papers published!

2019 & 2021

End of an era: Carl Folke & Lance Gunderson step down

2022

New design launch