- A social-ecological system is a system of people and nature, for example the basin of a river, Carpenter explains in this video.About Steve Carpenter
Professor Steve Carpenter's main research programs are the North Temperate Lakes LTER project based in Madison and at Trout Lake, and the BioComplexity project (which dovetails closely with LTER) - the Cascade Project in northern Wisconsin, which is a project to develop integrative models for lakes of northern Wisconsin, and is a cluster of international projects on building theory for ecosystem management.
Carpenter serves as co-chair of the Scenarios Working Group for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The Millennium Assessment is an international project to assess the condition of earth´s ecosystems and the implications for human well-being.
The Scenarios Working Group is charged with evaluating the plausible futures of ecosystem services used by humans over the next 50 years.