Transcript Biodiversity, Scale and Ecological Resilience

Integrating Inquiry and Practice for
Rural Resilience
Jan Sendzimir
International Institute of
Applied Systems Analysis
Laxenburg, Austria
Wicked Problems
recognize it - can’t really define it
 No single objective function to
maximize
 Many players working at different
levels and using different values that
are not commensurate - You can’t add
them up
 Can
Wicked Problems
 Problems
that are complex all the way
down.
 They don’t successfully decompose at
any one level into units that can be
added back up to the whole picture.
 Things are entangled within levels
and across levels (up and down).
One Source of Wicked Problems

Someone decomposed them anyway ignoring complexity within and between levels
to maximize one objective function.
 Prostitution
Imperative for maximum
productivity: everyone reduced to their
maximum utility
 Farmers
= food producers
 Non-farmers = cheap labor
 Wildlife = pests or aesthetic amenities
Outline
 Resilience

Theory
Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why
system persist, collapse and renew
 What
Makes Systems Resilient?
 Adaptive Practices for Resilience
 Sustainability
Indicators
 Adaptive Management in Minnesota and
Hungary
 Summary
System Dynamics
Adaptive Cycle
(after Holling 1986)return
19
Vegetative Scales
Boreal forest is
patterned
across a range
of scales.
Larger slower
structures
usually
constrain the
behaviour of
faster smaller
scales.
1
cm
1
m
100 1 10
m km km
1000
km
10 000 yrs
4
region
3
1 000 yrs
forest
century
2
patch
LOG 1
TIME years 0
stand
decade
crown
year
needle
month
-1
-2
Occasionally
change at a
small and fast
scale spreads
up to a larger
scale.return
day
-3
hour
-4
-6
-4
-2
0
2
LOG SPACE- km
4
Vegetative & Atmospheric Scales
1
cm
Atmospheric
processes
occur faster
than vegetative
processes
occurring at the
same spatial
scale.
Vegetative Structures
1
m
100 1 10
m km km
1000
km
10 000 yrs
4
region
3
2
patch
LOG 1
TIME years 0
1 000 yrs
forest
stand
climate
change
crown
El
Niño
century
decade
year
needle
month
-1
long
waves
-2
day
Atmospheric Processes
front
-3
thunderstormss
-4
-6
-4
-2
0
2
LOG SPACE- km
hour
4
Collapse of Resilience
 Surprise
–
–
–
from Cross-scale Interactions
Occasionally Natural systems develop to a
stage of “over-maturity” where elements are
over-connected.
They become accidents waiting to happen.
Then collective activities of small scale
processes can “cascade upward” and cause
the system to flip to another system type.
Examples of
Multiple Stable States
 Coral
–
coral vs. algae
 Arid
–
Reefs
Landscapes
shrubland vs. grassland
 Shallow
–
eutrophic vs. clear
 North
–
Lakes
Florida Forest
longleaf pine savanna & fire vs.
hardwood forest without fire
Surprise in Florida Bay
A
Seagrass
Clear Water
B
Muddy Water
Algae Blooms
Florida Bay
Ecological Resilience
Measures
System
integrity as the capacity to absorb
disruption and remain the same kind of ecosystem.
Emerges
from cross-scale interactions
Depends
upon:
–Control
of Disturbance jump
–Regulation of Renewal
Outline
 Resilience

Theory
Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why
system persist, collapse and renew
 What
Makes Systems Resilient?
 Adaptive Practices for Resilience
Sustainability
Indicators
Adaptive Management in Minnesota and
Hungary
 Summary
What Promotes Resilience?
Control
–
of Disturbance
Disturbance Frequency and Intensity
–
Technical Restrictions
–
Chesapeake Shellfish Fishery
–
Herbivore grazing/browsing
–
Fire or logging in forests
–
Development in floodplain
–
Local rain cycle in river basins
What Promotes Resilience?
Control of Disturbance
–
Capacity to Absorb Disturbance
–
Landscape morphometry
–
–
Room for the River Program - Rhine river
–
Habitat availability
–
Ability to migrate (connectivity of landscape)
–
Spatial Heterogeneity (mangroves, eel grass)
Processing and Cycling of Resources
–
–
Cross-scale functional reinforcement
Within-scale functional diversity
Cross-Scale Resilience
Overlapping function within scales and functional
reinforcement across scales.
Use of
different
resources
at same
scale
Guild A
Guild B
Guild C
Guild D
Scale (species body mass)
At the same scale species from different guilds
specialize in the use of different resources, but each
guild can use other resources at lower efficiencies.
Species in a guild utilize the same resource, but at
different scales in the landscape hierarchy jump
Birds and Budworm
predation of budworm at different aggregations
Use of
different
resources
at same
scale
Insectivores
Granivore
Carnivore
Nectivore
small birds
large birds
Scale (species body mass)
As budworm populations increase and occur larger
aggregation both larger birds and birds that would not
normally consume budworm switch to the use of budworm.
This process provides robust control of budworm populations
over a wide range of budworm densities.
What Promotes Resilience?
Regulation of Renewal (or
Regenerative potential) jump
– Stored
Resources
– Soil
depth, organic content, seed
bank
– Water
(aquifer, lake, river)
– Nutrients
in biomass
What Promotes Resilience?
Regulation of Renewal
jump
– Facility
of Response
– Recolonization
distance
– Proximity of Youth (Kobe Earthquake)
– Biodiversity
– Cross-scale
– Capacity
functional diversity
to adapt, to generate
novelty, to innovate
What Promotes Resilience?
Regulation
potential)
of Renewal (or Regenerative
– Availability
–
of Information
Viability of cultural information transfer Cultural Capital
– Language (Norway surrenders to English)
– Customs (education, discourse)
– Politics and institutions
–
Human Memory & Population Age Structure
– Cree People and Caribou (Birkes)
Outline
 Resilience

Theory
Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why
system persist, collapse and renew
 What
Makes Systems Resilient?
 Adaptive Practices for Resilience
Sustainability Indicators
Adaptive
Management in Minnesota,
Poland and Hungary
 Summary
Sustainability Indicators
Allow specialists and stakeholders to
visualize and describe factors crucial to
quality of life in qualitative and quantitative
terms.
 Are the basis for profound learning when the
stakeholders themselves go through a cycle
of proposing indicators, measuring them and
revising and improving them based on
experience.

Sustainability Indicators
in two different nations
( from Meadows et al. 1998)
 Portugal
 Days
of sunshine
per year.
 Kilometers of clean
beach
 Are people warm
and friendly when
you walk the street?
 United
 Lock
States
doors of cars and
homes?
 Wild salmon in our
streams (Seattle)?
 Smell sage brush from
our windows (Denver)?
 Will our children move
away?
Values at different
levels in the world web
( from Daly 1972, Meadows et al. 1998)
Ultimate Ends:
Transformative Media
Religion & Ethics
Happiness, Harmony, Identity, Fulfillment
Community, Enlightenment, Self-Respect
Intermediate Ends:
Political Economy
Well-being
Human & Social Capital
Consumer goods, Communication,
Leisure,Health, Wealth, Knowledge, Mobility
Intermediate Means: Human & Built Capital
Science &
Technology
Labor, Tools, Factories, Processed Raw
Materials, Public and Private Infrastructure
Ultimate Means: Natural Capital
Biosphere, Biogeochemical cycles, Solar Energy, Biodiversity, Earth Materials
Mandate to Counter-pose
Theory and Practice

Science can’t address problems alone
 Control,
replication and isolation of single
causative variables are impossible in a multivariate arena (interface of nature/society).

Problem causes and solutions are dynamic
 Basic
uncertainty emerging from nature is
compounded by society’s attempts to learn and
manage. We need adaptive means to understand
and implement that flexibly integrate theory and
practice.
Management Pathology:
Today’s problem emerges from yesterday’s fix.
 Administrative
drive for growth narrows
policy to achieve efficiency at the expense
of awareness about where the system is
going.
 Typical history:
Broad
research of overall system
Initial success in maximizing productivity by
reducing system variability
All research focused on increasing efficiency
Catastrophic surprise
Management Pathology:
Examples of Emergent Problems
following initial success at reducing variability

Variability Reduction Tool






Emergent Problem
Nurseries, Larger Catch capacity
Pesticides reduce crop yield
variation due to pests
CFCs sustain cool temperatures
Dikes and channelization contain
river level fluctuations

Greater mobility decreases the

Whole world is a suburb of L.A.

Lost local species, culture,



Lost salmon wild stocks
New species become pests or
new capacities in old species
Ozone hole
Rising floodplain, lower
capacity to absorb floods
heterogeneity of available skills

Standardized fast food
vulnerable food chains (BSE)
Outline
 Resilience

Theory
Ideas relating structure and dynamics to why
system persist, collapse and renew
 What
Makes Systems Resilient?
 Adaptive Practices for Resilience
Sustainability
Indicators
Adaptive Management in Minnesota and
Hungary
 Summary
Adaptive Environmental Assessment
is not any one thing
 It’s
a set of questions, practices and
theories that
Have
emerged from hard won experience
over thirty years.
Can be tailored to support responses to
wicked problems
 Understanding
that evolves with the system
 Policy that flexes to changes in the environment
 Actions that manage and probe the system
 Monitoring of actions and their effects
 Linking of inquiry and practice in a functional cycle
Learning That
Persistently Adapts
 Truth
is not constant - Social and
natural systems continue to change
 Initial responses to crises were not
as important as the sustained
capability to learn and respond
accordingly.
AEA Processes Linked in a
Cycle of Integrated Learning
Policy as
Hypothesis
Management
Actions as
Tests
Assessment
Evaluation
Surprise in Florida Bay
A
Seagrass
Clear Water
B
Muddy Water
Algae Blooms
Florida Bay
Rising Bay
Outhouse Bay
Senile Bay
Florida Bay Hypotheses
Topless Bay
Thirsty Bay
Strangled Bay
AEA applied in the Everglades

Wading bird populations have declined dramatically
(as much as 95 percent) over the past 70 years in
South Florida.

In an AEA process, convened in 1989, a number of
alternative hypotheses were posed to explain these
population declines .
Everglades Hypotheses
-
Shrunken Habitat:
• The conversion of portions of the Everglades by agriculture and
urbanization has decreased the original area to half its size. This
area has low biological productivity per unit area, so loss of
productive habitat has lead to lower nesting populations.
-
Decreased Flow:
• The development of the Everglades involved drainage and diversion
of much of the water in south Florida to the extent that much less
water flows through the park. These lower water flows have caused
dramatic declines in biological productivity at the estuarine fringe of
mangroves, a border area that used to hold the densest nesting
colonies.
Everglades Hypotheses
-
Damped Fluctuations of Water Level:
• Water levels fluctuate seasonally in South Florida, driving the ecology of
the Everglades. These fluctuations provide the means of food production
and delivery. Fish populations thrive and reproduce in times of flooding
and are concentrated by lowering water levels to the point where wading
birds can easily feed on them. Water management schedules for canals in
the Everglades has changed these hydrological patterns to the point where
they are not synchronized with wading bird nesting cycles.
-
Distant Magnet:
• The decreases in nesting populations in the Everglades are matched by
increases in other parts of the Southeastern United States, Louisiana and
the Carolinas for example. Population declines in the Everglades may
not wholly reflect lowered ecological conditions there so much as better
or improving conditions elsewhere that have drawn the populations to
distant sites.
Everglades Hypotheses
-
Mercury:
• Mercury concentrations have increased in the atmosphere over this
century, and many wetland soils absorb and concentrate deposition
from the air. Anaerobic water conditions can mobilize this metal
from the soil, and it can pass up the food chain to wading birds.
Over time the latent toxic effects of mercury have decreased the
nesting success of wading birds.
-
Parasites:
• : Increased agriculture upstream of the Everglades has released
progressively larger amounts of nutrients into the surface water, and
populations of parasites have thrived and increased as a result. The
increased burden of parasites has diverted metabolic energy
normally given to reproduction and thereby lowered the success of
nesting of wading birds.
Adaptive Science and Practice in
Minnesota Prairie Streams

Effective Collaboration
–
Scientists provide theory and supervise fieldwork
Farmers manage cattle according to experimental design
and help monitor results
–
Local citizens help monitor stream conditions
–

Mutual Benefit
–
Stream conditions improve
–
–
–
–
–
Erosion reduced, water quality improved
Diversity of habitats and species increased
Farmers increase income and keep their farm
Local citizens learn science, ecology and farming and
spread the knowledge informally
Advance ecological theory on disturbances
Cycles of Erosion and Grazing
A.
B.
C.
Adaptive Science and Practice in a
Hungarian River Basin

Ecology
–

Study of flipping behavior of shallow lakes builds a biophysical model
Socio-Economics
 Computer
simulation links bio-physical model to economic
decisions in the basin

Adaptive Integration of Ecology and SocioEconomics for both stakeholders and scientists
–
–
–
explore alternative futures using the model and suggest
policies
Monitor policy implementation and revisit assumptions
Suggest new experiments and policies
Summary

No scale is more important than others.
Global change doesn’t make local transition irrelevant
Key goal: integrate inquiry and practice
across all scales.
 Adaptive Management is a useful
framework for such integration:

 To
start and sustain a dialogue
 To adaptively link changes in understanding
with innovative action.
Summary
Why is this so rare?
 Practice: People are most used to giving or
taking orders.
 Theory: We are just beginning to
understand how nature and society are
structured and operate.
 Integrating practice and theory into a
workable whole that can adapt to changes
in the world has been accomplished rarely
at one scale: farming, fishing, hunting.