I am postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analaysis and Synthesis working on the Ecosystem-Based Management initiative. As part of my work with the EBM group I am investigating through a search of the social science literature which are the elements that make an EBM initiative succesful. That is, what are the social, cultural and economical elements that make an EBM approach actually work. As part of my previous work I have worked a lot with large-scale ecological patterns and their relationship with environmental forcing.