Abstract
The focus on human-mangrove relationships would benefit from a systemic approach, provided by the ‘social-ecological system’ (SES) concept, which appeared in the mid-1990s. While the SES concept has quickly spread among studies dealing with many terrestrial or marine ecosystems, it only recently made its appearance in mangrove research. Yet, the complex dynamics of connections and feedbacks within and between societal and ecosystemic components would be better understood through this systemic approach. This review analyses how the SES concept has been integrated in mangrove research and the benefits that studies on human-mangrove interactions could draw from fully applying the SES concept. A systematic review of the literature was performed on Web of Science and Scopus with the key words ‘soci* ecolog* system*’ and ‘mangrove*’, providing 67 publications. Each publication was double-coded for: (i) descriptive information about the publication; (ii) SES information; (iii) concepts and frameworks other than SES; (iv) main methodologies and case studies; (v) main outputs. The first publication on mangroves mentioning the SES concept dates back to 2009. The number of publications increased from an average of 2 studies per year between 2009 and 2014 to 8 between 2015 and 2021. Most publications use the concept to place the studies on the society-mangrove relation topic. Instead, few actively use or apply SES frameworks. The few that are used lack a systemic approach. For instance, very few studies deal with links and feedbacks of the mangrove SES and/or try to determine the threshold of variables that have a paramount role in the resilience of the SES. Studying the dynamics of nested spatial-temporal scales would help identify and follow emergent properties of SES. One of the first steps for addressing these challenges is the co-building of integrated research designs in transdisciplinary research projects to produce more accurate data.