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Spatial resilience: integrating landscape ecology, resilience, and sustainability

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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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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues who have discussed these and related ideas with me over the years, and to Jianquo Wu and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This research was supported by the DST/NRF Centre of Excellence at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute, the University of Cape Town, the Oppenheimer Foundation, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

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

    Graeme S. Cumming

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Correspondence to Graeme S. Cumming.

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Cumming, G.S. Spatial resilience: integrating landscape ecology, resilience, and sustainability. Landscape Ecol 26, 899–909 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-011-9623-1

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