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Lance Gunderson

Publications and source records attributed to Lance Gunderson.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
USGS2025

Spatial regimes provide ample early warning of tipping points

Accelerating global change is a hallmark of the Anthropocene, and the interaction of rapid change in climate, land use and land cover makes understanding the response of social-ecological systems to global change difficult to predict. Global change directly and indirectly affects both social-ecological systems and the landscapes in which they are embedded. Spatial heterogeneity in the location, manifestation of, and responses to global change makes spatially explicit approaches to management and conservation necessary. Spatial regimes, a concept derived from resilience theory, are at the forefront of attempts to operationalize and quantify resilience of dynamic landscapes. Spatial regimes are defined as dynamic landscape units that are shaped by a self-organizing set of processes and structures. They have identifiable spatial extents with discrete boundaries at a given scale that exhibit relative homogeneity in process, structure and composition maintained by feedback mechanisms. Here, we describe the concept of, evidence for, and applications of spatial regimes and how spatial regimes relate to scale and telecoupling of change across social-ecological systems. We emphasize the utility of the concept as an early warning of regime change, one that can provide ample early warning. We discuss methods that can be used to detect spatial regimes and uses of the concept for understanding and managing the spatio-temporal response of social-ecological systems to global change.

Advances in Ecological Research↗
USGS2018

Quantifying uncertainty and tradeoffs in resilience assessments

Several frameworks have been developed to assess the resilience of social-ecological systems, but most require substantial data inputs, time, and technical expertise. Stakeholders and practitioners often lack the resources for such intensive efforts. Furthermore, most end with problem framing and fail to explicitly address trade-offs and uncertainty. To remedy this gap, we developed a rapid survey assessment that compares the relative resilience of social-ecological systems with respect to a number of resilience properties. This approach generates large amounts of information relative to stakeholder inputs. We targeted four stakeholder categories: government (policy, regulation, management), end users (farmers, ranchers, landowners, industry), agency/public science (research, university, extension), and NGOs (environmental, citizen, social justice) in four North American watersheds, to assess social-ecological resilience through surveys. Conceptually, social-ecological systems are comprised of components ranging from strictly human to strictly ecological, but that relate directly or indirectly to one another. They have soft boundaries and several important dimensions or axes that together describe the nature of social-ecological interactions, e.g., variability, diversity, modularity, slow variables, feedbacks, capital, innovation, redundancy, and ecosystem services. There is no absolute measure of resilience, so our design takes advantage of cross-watershed comparisons and therefore focuses on relative resilience. Our approach quantifies and compares the relative resilience across watershed systems and potential trade-offs among different aspects of the social-ecological system, e.g., between social, economic, and ecological contributions. This approach permits explicit assessment of several types of uncertainty (e.g., self-assigned uncertainty for stakeholders; uncertainty across respondents, watersheds, and subsystems), and subjectivity in perceptions of resilience among key actors and decision makers and provides an efficient way to develop the mental models that inform our stakeholders and stakeholder categories.

Ecology and Society↗
USGS2017

Regime shifts and panarchies in regional scale social-ecological water systems

In this article we summarize histories of nonlinear, complex interactions among societal, legal, and ecosystem dynamics in six North American water basins, as they respond to changing climate. These case studies were chosen to explore the conditions for emergence of adaptive governance in heavily regulated and developed social-ecological systems nested within a hierarchical governmental system. We summarize resilience assessments conducted in each system to provide a synthesis and reference by the other articles in this special feature. We also present a general framework used to evaluate the interactions between society and ecosystem regimes and the governance regimes chosen to mediate those interactions. The case studies show different ways that adaptive governance may be triggered, facilitated, or constrained by ecological and/or legal processes. The resilience assessments indicate that complex interactions among the governance and ecosystem components of these systems can produce different trajectories, which include patterns of (a) development and stabilization, (b) cycles of crisis and recovery, which includes lurches in adaptation and learning, and (3) periods of innovation, novelty, and transformation. Exploration of cross scale (Panarchy) interactions among levels and sectors of government and society illustrate that they may constrain development trajectories, but may also provide stability during crisis or innovation at smaller scales; create crises, but may also facilitate recovery; and constrain system transformation, but may also provide windows of opportunity in which transformation, and the resources to accomplish it, may occur. The framework is the starting point for our exploration of how law might play a role in enhancing the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt to climate change.

Ecology and Society↗
USGS2016

Detecting spatial regimes in ecosystems

Research on early warning indicators has generally focused on assessing temporal transitions with limited application of these methods to detecting spatial regimes. Traditional spatial boundary detection procedures that result in ecoregion maps are typically based on ecological potential (i.e. potential vegetation), and often fail to account for ongoing changes due to stressors such as land use change and climate change and their effects on plant and animal communities. We use Fisher information, an information theory-based method, on both terrestrial and aquatic animal data (U.S. Breeding Bird Survey and marine zooplankton) to identify ecological boundaries, and compare our results to traditional early warning indicators, conventional ecoregion maps and multivariate analyses such as nMDS and cluster analysis. We successfully detected spatial regimes and transitions in both terrestrial and aquatic systems using Fisher information. Furthermore, Fisher information provided explicit spatial information about community change that is absent from other multivariate approaches. Our results suggest that defining spatial regimes based on animal communities may better reflect ecological reality than do traditional ecoregion maps, especially in our current era of rapid and unpredictable ecological change.

Ecology Letters↗
USGS2014

Identifying legal, ecological and governance obstacles and opportunities for adapting to climate change

Current governance of regional scale water management systems in the United States has not placed them on a path toward sustainability, as conflict and gridlock characterize the social arena and ecosystem services continue to erode. Changing climate may continue this trajectory, but it also provides a catalyst for renewal of ecosystems and a window of opportunity for change in institutions. Resilience provides a bridging concept that predicts that change in ecological and social systems is often dramatic, abrupt, and surprising. Adapting to the uncertainty of climate driven change must be done in a manner perceived as legitimate by the participants in a democratic society. Adaptation must begin with the current hierarchical and fragmented social-ecological system as a baseline from which new approaches must be applied. Achieving a level of integration between ecological concepts and governance requires a dialogue across multiple disciplines, including ecologists with expertise in ecological resilience, hydrologists and climate experts, with social scientists and legal scholars. Criteria and models that link ecological dynamics with policies in complex, multi-jurisdictional water basins with adaptive management and governance frameworks may move these social-ecological systems toward greater sustainability.

Sustainability↗
USGS2009

Options for national parks and reserves for adapting to climate change

Past and present climate has shaped the valued ecosystems currently protected in parks and reserves, but future climate change will redefine these conditions. Continued conservation as climate changes will require thinking differently about resource management than we have in the past; we present some logical steps and tools for doing so. Three critical tenets underpin future management plans and activities: (1) climate patterns of the past will not be the climate patterns of the future; (2) climate defines the environment and influences future trajectories of the distributions of species and their habitats; (3) specific management actions may help increase the resilience of some natural resources, but fundamental changes in species and their environment may be inevitable. Science-based management will be necessary because past experience may not serve as a guide for novel future conditions. Identifying resources and processes at risk, defining thresholds and reference conditions, and establishing monitoring and assessment programs are among the types of scientific practices needed to support a broadened portfolio of management activities. In addition to the control and hedging management strategies commonly in use today, we recommend adaptive management wherever possible. Adaptive management increases our ability to address the multiple scales at which species and processes function, and increases the speed of knowledge transfer among scientists and managers. Scenario planning provides a broad forward-thinking framework from which the most appropriate management tools can be chosen. The scope of climate change effects will require a shared vision among regional partners. Preparing for and adapting to climate change is as much a cultural and intellectual challenge as an ecological challenge.

Environmental Management↗
USGS2005

The use of discontinuities and functional groups to assess relative resilience in complex systems

It is evident when the resilience of a system has been exceeded and the system qualitatively changed. However, it is not clear how to measure resilience in a system prior to the demonstration that the capacity for resilient response has been exceeded. We argue that self-organizing human and natural systems are structured by a relatively small set of processes operating across scales in time and space. These structuring processes should generate a discontinuous distribution of structures and frequencies, where discontinuities mark the transition from one scale to another. Resilience is not driven by the identity of elements of a system, but rather by the functions those elements provide, and their distribution within and across scales. A self-organizing system that is resilient should maintain patterns of function within and across scales despite the turnover of specific elements (for example, species, cities). However, the loss of functions, or a decrease in functional representation at certain scales will decrease system resilience. It follows that some distributions of function should be more resilient than others. We propose that the determination of discontinuities, and the quantification of function both within and across scales, produce relative measures of resilience in ecological and other systems. We describe a set of methods to assess the relative resilience of a system based upon the determination of discontinuities and the quantification of the distribution of functions in relation to those discontinuities. ?? 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

Ecosystems↗