Rebalancing water allocation between human consumptive uses and the environment in water catchments is a global challenge. This paper proposes a socio-hydrological water balance framework by partitioning catchment total evapotranspiration (ET) into ET for society and ET for natural ecological systems, and establishing the linkage between the changes of water balance and its social drivers and r...

Emergy (with an 'm') synthesis was used to assess the balance between nature and humanity and the equity among forest outcomes of a US Forest Service ecosystem management demonstration project on the Wine Spring Creek watershed, a high-elevation (1600 m), temperate forest located in the southern Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, USA. EM embraces a holistic perspective, accounting for the...

The “balance of nature” metaphor has been used to explain the functioning of natural systems from ancient times and continues to be invoked in popular culture, in spite of controversy regarding its use in the scientific community. We demonstrate that undergraduate students in the United States believe this term is descriptive of real ecological systems, and continue to do so after instruction i...

this study investigates the application of landscape ecology in planning and design of urban ecological systems. the ecological approach to landscape planning and the concepts of designing and implementing ecological systems have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. however, the ecological systems of urban environment need more research to consider built and natural patches and ...