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Declining ocean health, increasing human demands on marine ecosystems, and a history of management focused on individual activities, species or sectors has led to calls for more comprehensive, integrated management that considers entire coupled social-ecological systems. This transition to ecosystem-based management (EBM) for the oceans will certainly face a number of hurdles, and many practitioners struggle with how to move forward with EBM. In this paper, we assess whether the necessary science exists to support EBM. Specifically, we evaluate the state of the social and natural sciences for three research areas that are critical to EBM: (1) ecosystem services, (2) cumulative impacts, and (3) ecosystem variability and change. For each of the three research areas, we describe its importance to EBM and assess existing and emerging information and application of this knowledge, focusing on the US …