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Resilience, experimentation, and scale mismatches in social-ecological landscapes

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Abstract

Growing a resilient landscape depends heavily on finding an appropriate match between the scales of demands on ecosystems by human societies and the scales at which ecosystems are capable of meeting these demands. While the dynamics of environmental change and ecosystem service provision form the basis of many landscape ecology studies, enhancing landscape resilience is, in many ways, a problem of establishing relevant institutions that act at appropriate scales to modify and moderate demand for ecosystem services and the resulting exploitation of ecosystems. It is also of central importance for landscape sustainability that institutions are flexible enough to adapt to changes in the external environment. The model provided by natural ecosystems suggests that it is only by encouraging and testing a diversity of approaches that we will be able to build landscapes that are resilient to future change. We advocate an approach to landscape planning that involves growing learning institutions on the one hand, and on the other, developing solutions to current problems through deliberate experimentation coupled with social learning processes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Percy FitzPatrick Institute, DST/NRF Center of Excellence, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7701, South Africa

    Graeme S. Cumming

  2. University of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden

    Per Olsson

  3. Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, 99775, USA

    F. S. Chapin III

  4. 220 Canterbury Crescent, Nanaimo, BC, V9T 4S4, Canada

    C. S. Holling

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  1. Graeme S. Cumming
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  2. Per Olsson
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  3. F. S. Chapin III
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  4. C. S. Holling
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Correspondence to Graeme S. Cumming.

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Cumming, G.S., Olsson, P., Chapin, F.S. et al. Resilience, experimentation, and scale mismatches in social-ecological landscapes. Landscape Ecol 28, 1139–1150 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9725-4

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