Crises affect research in many ways. Place-based research especially is affected by many threats, such as natural hazards, global health crises, and political conflicts, which have the potential to greatly disrupt fieldwork. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, has affected social-ecological research activities significantly, due to the field’s reliance on stakeholder engagement and connections with different knowledge and natural systems. In order to produce recommendations for future place-based social-ecological research in crisis situations, Hermans et al. (2021) sought to reveal the vulnerabilities and opportunities that crisis brings to research, with the aim to create a more sustainable research landscape in the future.

The authors attempted to learn from existing experiences with crisis-related disruptions, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They reflected on examples of setbacks and opportunities in order to create strategies and guidance on constructively handling similar crisis-related disruptions to place-based research in the future. These recommendations were as follows: