LAUSR

TheAmericanWest exists in the popular imagination as a distinct region, and policies and politics often suggest that both the challenges and the opportunities for landmanagement and humanwellbeing across the region are relatively homogeneous. In this paper, we argue that there are key characteristics that define theWest as a social-ecological region, and also that there aremyriad socialecological systems (SESs)within the region that require diverse and dynamic approaches tomanaging change over time.We first conceptualize aridity, topography, and a unique political economy of land as exogenous factors that persist over time and space to define theAmericanWest as a contiguous social-ecological region.We then identify a second set of characteristics that showhigh degrees of variation across SESs within the AmericanWest. Finally, we operationalize the relationships between regional characteristics and local dynamics through a set of case studies that exemplify specific types of SESs in the region. The results of these empirical representations of the regional and intra-regional social-ecological dynamics of the contemporary AmericanWest highlight the implications for research andmanagement of taking a cross-scale integrated approach to address pressing socialecological opportunities and challenges in complex adaptive systems.