Challenges of and opportunities for integrating social science into landscape ecology research

Christensen 2023), integration of social science into landscape studies remains underdeveloped (Chowdhury and Turner II 2019).Compared to research with a biophysical focus, landscape ecology studies grounded in social science questions, response variables, and feedbacks have been relatively few.Challenges with integration of social science in landscape ecology are similar to those described by others pursuing interdisciplinary study.Examples include underdeveloped metrics and terminology, absence of theory as a component of the system of study, difficulties with amalgamating qualitative and quantitative data, limited availability of large-scale and longitudinal datasets, and inconsistency and mismatch between temporal and spatial scales of analysis (Kline et al. 2017;Elsawah et al. 2020;Meyfroidt et al. 2022).There also exists naiveties of those who choose to pursue social science research without adequate theoretical knowledge, analytical training, or ability to accurately interpret and report results (Martin 2020).Furthermore, criticisms exist about the quality of social science data, particularly qualitative types, which may appear cryptic, arcane, or uninformative to untrained eyes (Miles 1979;Sutherland et al. 2018;Alexander et al. 2020) and, therefore, remain underused as a data type and information source (Eakin and Gladstone 2020).Other data sharing and distribution restrictions exist because of human subjects ethics guidelines and