A shared understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs to people from alternative land management strategies is critical to successful decision-making for managing public lands and fostering shared stewardship. This study describes an approach for identifying and monitoring the types of resource benefits and tradeoffs considered in National Forest planning in the United States under the 2012 Planning Rule and demonstrates the use of tools for conceptualizing the production of ecosystem services and benefits from alternative land management strategies. Efforts to apply these tools through workshops and engagement exercises provide opportunities to explore and highlight measures, indicators, and data sources for characterizing benefits and tradeoffs in collaborative environments involving interdisciplinary planning teams. Conceptual modeling tools are applied to a case study examining the social and economic benefits of recreation on the Ashley National Forest. The case study illustrates how these types of tools facilitate dialog for planning teams to discuss alternatives and key ecosystem service outcomes, create easy to interpret visuals that map details in plans, and provide a basis for selecting ecosystem service (socio-economic) metrics. These metrics can be used to enhance environmental impact analysis, and help satisfy the goals of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 2012 Planning Rule, and shared stewardship initiatives. The systematic consideration of ecosystem services outcomes and metrics supported by this approach enhanced dialog between members of the Forest planning team, allowed for a more transparent process in identification of key linkages and outcomes, and identified impacts and outcomes that may not have been apparent to the sociologist who is lacking the resource specific expertise of these participants. As a result, the use of the Ecosystem Service Conceptual Model (ESCM) process may result in reduced time for internal reviews and greater comprehension of anticipated outcomes and impacts of proposed management in the plan revision Environmental Impact Statement amongst the planning team.

Ecological restoration programs increasingly aim to provide socio-economic and environmental benefits. However, monitoring of socio-economic outcomes of these programs lags behind monitoring of ecological outcomes. Socio-economic methods are less established, managers have less experience, and metrics used vary, stymieing evaluation and adaptive management. Here we demonstrate that logic models and stakeholder engagement can be used to identify core socio-economic metrics across various types of restoration, focusing on coastal restoration in the Gulf of Mexico. Across four major restoration types (oyster restoration, habitat restoration, recreation enhancement, and water quality improvement), core metrics were identified as changes in jobs, restoration expenditures, recreational activity, cognitive function, and subjective well-being. These metrics can provide a starting point for increased and more consistent monitoring of socio-economic outcomes. The collaborative, science-based, and replicable process we developed to identify core metrics can be applied to other ecosystems and management actions to expand monitoring and evaluation of socio-economic impacts.

It is critical that future sustainability leaders possess the skills and aptitudes needed to tackle increasingly ‘wicked’ challenges. While much has been done to identify this need, inadequate Leadership Training for graduate students in Sustainability (LTS) continues to plague even the most highly-resourced institutions. Collectively, the authors of this paper represent the small yet growing number of LTS programs across the United States and Canada working to close this training gap. In this paper, we describe the integrative approach we took to synthesize our collective knowledge of LTS with our diverse programmatic experiences and, ultimately, translate that work into concrete guidance for LTS implementation and design. We present a framework for the suite of key LTS aptitudes and skills yielded by our collaborative approach, and ground these recommendations in clear, real-world examples. We apply our framework to the creation of an open-access curricular database rich with training details, and link this database to an interactive network map focused on sharing programmatic designs. Together, our process and products transform many disparate components into a more comprehensive and accessible understanding of what we as LTS professionals do, with a view to helping others who are looking to do the same for the next generation of sustainability leaders.