Like all good assessments, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) provided a state-of-the-art summary of relevant knowledge, in this case, of the state and trends of the world's ecosystems. The MA went further by developing a novel framework for analyzing the fundamental relationship between the well-being of human societies and the ecosystem services on which we depend (1). In this issue of PNAS Carpenter et al. (2) build on the innovative nature of the MA even further by proposing an impressive research agenda that challenges a very broad range of disciplines to build a new type of knowledge base oriented around social-ecological systems and the services they derive from the ecosystems in which they are embedded.
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