The world's islands provide natural experiments that, while not perfectly controlled, provide enough leverage to gain major evolutionary, cultural, and societal insights. Although islands the size of Cuba and smaller constitute a tiny fraction of Earth's land area, they represent an extremely diverse set of environments and host rich and unique biota. Islands also provide home to a sliver of humanity, but contain nearly every variety of human society. On islands the forces surrounding resilence and vulnerability of social-ecological systems are concentrated and on clearest display. Moreover, because of their insularity, size, and coastal disposition, islands are exposed to high risk of undesirable social-ecological outcomes related to systemic changes and stochastic events. This special session seeks to bring ecological theory and analysis approaches to the study of island social-ecological systems, with an emphasis on revealing and testing principles of vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability in these systems. Theoretical, comparative, meta-analytical, and other data rich approaches focusing on general principles relating to resilience and vulnerability of island socio-environmental systems will be explored. This session has the goal of using islands as model systems for better understanding how coupled human-natural systems function ecologically and respond to intrinsic and extrinsic forces. The lessons gleaned from such analyses may be relevant to larger questions of sustainability globally.