Spatial resilience: integrating landscape ecology,resilience, and sustainability |
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Authors: | Graeme S Cumming |
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Institution: | (1) Percy FitzPatrick Institute, DST/NRF Centre of Excellence, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7701, South Africa |
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Abstract: | Landscape ecology has a high potential to contribute to sustainability in the interactions of people and nature. Landscape
ecologists have already made considerable progress towards a more general understanding of the relevance of spatial variation
for ecosystems. Incorporating the complexities of societies and economies into landscape ecology analyses will, however, require
a broader framework for thinking about spatial elements of complexity. An exciting recent development is to explicitly try
to integrate landscape ecology and ideas about resilience in social–ecological systems through the concept of spatial resilience.
Spatial resilience focuses on the importance of location, connectivity, and context for resilience, based on the idea that
spatial variation in patterns and processes at different scales both impacts and is impacted by local system resilience. I
first introduce and define the concepts of resilience and spatial resilience and then discuss some of their potential contributions
to the further interdisciplinary integration of landscape ecology, complexity theory, and sustainability science. Complexity
theorists have argued that many complex phenomena, such as symmetry-breaking and selection, share common underlying mechanisms
regardless of system type (physical, social, ecological, or economic). Similarities in the consequences of social exclusion
and habitat fragmentation provide an informative example. There are many strong parallels between pattern–process interactions
in social and ecological systems, respectively, and a number of general spatial principles and mechanisms are emerging that
have relevance across many different kinds of system. Landscape ecologists, with their background in spatially explicit pattern–process
analysis, are well placed to contribute to this emerging research agenda. |
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