  Modeling social-ecological systems is difficult due to the complexity of
ecosystems and of individual and collective human behavior. Key components of
the social-ecological system are often over-simplified or omitted. Generalized
modeling is a dynamical systems approach that can overcome some of these
challenges. It can rigorously analyze qualitative system dynamics such as
regime shifts despite incomplete knowledge of the model's constituent
processes. Here, we review generalized modeling and use a recent study on the
Baltic Sea cod fishery's boom and collapse to demonstrate its application to
modeling the dynamics of empirical social-ecological systems. These empirical
applications demand new methods of analysis suited to larger, more complicated
generalized models. Generalized modeling is a promising tool for rapidly
developing mathematically rigorous, process-based understanding of a
social-ecological system's dynamics despite limited knowledge of the system.
