In an increasingly interconnected world, human–environment interactions involving flows of people, organisms, goods, information, and energy are expanding in magnitude and extent, often over long distances. As a universal paradigm for examining these interactions, the telecoupling framework (published in 2013) has been broadly implemented across the world by researchers from diverse disciplines. We conducted a systematic review of the first five years of telecoupling research to evaluate the state of telecoupling science and identify strengths, areas to be improved, and promising avenues for future study. We identified 89 studies using any derivation of the term telecoupling. These works emphasize trade flows, information transfer, and species dispersal at international, national, and regional scales involving one or a few countries, with China, Brazil, and the United States being the most frequently studied countries. Our review showed a rising trend in publications and citations on telecoupling, with 63% of identified telecoupling studies using the framework’s specific language (e.g., “flows”, “agents”). This result suggests that future telecoupling studies could apply the standardized telecoupling language and terminology to better coordinate, synthesize, and operationalize interdisciplinary research. Compelling topics for future research include operationalization of the telecoupling framework, commonalities among telecouplings, telecoupling mechanisms and causality, and telecoupled systems governance. Overall, the first five years of telecoupling research have improved our understanding of human–environment interactions, laying a promising foundation for future social–ecological research in a telecoupled world.

Technology, transportation and global appetites have transformed trade relationships between near and distant countries. The impact of distant food demand on local agricultural production and trade has attracted considerable scientific scrutiny, yet little is known about how distant trade affects trade relationships and production between adjacent countries. In this paper, we explore this important issue by examining international food trade and agriculture production, which represent how distant places are connected through trade networks. By analyzing patterns of soybean, corn and wheat trading between 1991–2016 under the framework of metacoupling (human-nature interactions within, as well as between adjacent and distant systems), this study provides new insights into the spatio-temporal dynamics of trade flows. Results reveal that telecoupled (between distant countries) trade interacts with the geo-political landscape to enhance or offset intracoupled (within country) production and pericoupled (between neighboring countries) trade. Evidence from the literature and the results of autoregressive integrated moving average models indicate that when restrictions are placed on distant export routes, pericoupled trade increased. The extent to which the telecoupled food trade affected the pericoupled trade and intracoupled processes holds implications for the true extent of production driven by distant demands.

The Arctic is an epicenter of complex environmental and socioeconomic change. Strengthened connections between Arctic and non-Arctic systems could threaten or enhance Arctic sustainability, but studies of external influences on the Arctic are scattered and fragmented in academic literature. Here, we review and synthesize how external influences have been analyzed in Arctic-coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) literature. Results show that the Arctic is affected by numerous external influences nearby and faraway, including global markets, climate change, governance, military security, and tourism. However, apart from climate change, these connections are infrequently the focus of Arctic CHANS analyses. We demonstrate how Arctic CHANS research could be enhanced and research gaps could be filled using the holistic framework of metacoupling (human–nature interactions within as well as between adjacent and distant systems). Our perspectives provide new approaches to enhance the sustainability of Arctic systems in an interconnected world.

Recent climate change has caused declines in ice coverage which have lengthened the open water season in the Arctic and increased access to resources and shipping routes. These changes have resulted in more vessel activity in seasonally ice-covered regions. While traffic is increasing in the ice-free season, the amount of vessel activity in the marginal ice zone (ice concentration 15–80%) or in pack ice (>80% concentration) remains unclear. Understanding patterns of vessel activities in ice is important given increased safety challenges and environmental impacts. Here, we couple high-resolution ship tracking information with sea ice thickness and concentration data to quantify vessel activity in ice-covered areas of the Pacific Arctic (northern Bering, Chukchi, and western Beaufort Seas). This region is a geo-strategically critical area that contains globally important commercial fisheries and serves as a corridor for Arctic access for wildlife and vessels. We find that vessel traffic in the marginal ice zone is widely distributed across the study area while vessel traffic in pack ice is concentrated along known shipping routes and in areas of natural resource development. Of the statistically significant relationships between vessel traffic and both sea ice concentration and thickness, over 99% are negative, indicating that increasing sea ice is associated with decreasing vessel traffic on a monthly time scale. Furthermore, there is substantial vessel traffic in areas of high concentration for bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), and traffic in these areas increased four-fold during the study period. Fishing vessels dominate vessel traffic at low ice concentrations, but vessels categorized as Other, likely icebreakers, are the most common vessel type in pack ice. These findings indicate that vessel traffic in areas of ice coverage is influenced by distant policy and resource development decisions which should be taken into consideration when trying to predict future vessel-ice interactions in a changing climate.

Theory suggests life history plays a key role in the ability of organisms to persist under fluctuating environmental conditions. However, the notion that environmental variability has shaped the distribution of life history traits across large spatial and taxonomic scales has gone largely untested using empirical data. Synthesising a collection of data resources on global climate, species traits, and species ranges, we quantified the role that environmental variability over time has played in shaping pace of life across the world's non‐migratory, non‐marine bird species (N = 7477). In support of existing theory, we found that species that experience high inter‐annual temperature variability tended to have a slower pace of life, while the opposite was true for high intra‐annual temperature variability. The effect of precipitation variability was less pronounced and more uncertain. These observed patterns were apparent despite the vastly different ecologies of our study species and evidence of strong phylogenetic constraint. Additionally, we highlight the importance of contextualising rates of environmental change in terms of the historical variability of environmental systems and species' pace of life. Species experiencing higher rates of relative environmental change, in terms of standard deviations per generation, may be most susceptible to climate change.