This quarter’s issue of Environment Systems & Decisions features two special research highlights. First, two review papers investigate historical and future trends in the application of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) in the academic literature. These reviews investigate different aspects of MCDA in research and in practice. Cegan et al. (2017) conduct a literature search aided by text mining analysis to explore trends in how decision-making approaches have been applied in the environmental sciences. Aspects such as methodologies (e.g., AHP, TOPSIS, MAUT, MAVT, Outranking), environmental applications (e.g., water, air, energy), and other relevant factors were documented and synthesized. Complementing this work, Kurth et al. (2017) documented trends in how MCDA has been used specifically within US government agencies. Together, these papers provide an in-depth assessment of the past, present, and future of MCDA research.

The second collection of articles highlights the work of student authors. While the topics vary across these three papers, the common thread is that all of the first authors are students. In the first paper, Hinrichs et al. (2017) discuss the challenges of collaboration in interdisciplinary team science settings and provide several recommendations for fostering innovation. Next, McKay et al. (2017) developed a tool to quantify metrics of governance quality for socio-ecological systems, drawing from a wide variety of fields such as ecology and business. Finally, De Nardo et al. (2017) conducted structured interviews to investigate the relationship between perceptions of different pro-environmental behaviors and social status.

Finally, the issue concludes with an assortment of general submissions that span research domains and application areas. Sardar et al. (2017) present an integrative method combining various numerical analyses with GIS and remote sensing in an effort to estimate solar downward shortwave radiation, which has implications for agriculture, climatology, and other fields. McCurdy and Travis (2017) developed a method to examine the effects of different climate change adaptation strategies to the cost efficiency and service level of drainage infrastructure. Haywood et al. (2017), in a conceptual paper, explore the relationships between enterprise risk management and systems thinking and identify potentials for tools from the systems modeling domain which can be applied for effective risk management.

Upcoming special issues of Environment Systems & Decisions include topics of Food Security (planned for late 2017) and Resilience in Socio-Technical Systems (planned for early 2018).