Citation:

Allen, C., A. Garmestani, D. Angeler, C. Roberts, S. Sundstrom, D. Twidwell, AND D. Uden. Applications of Spatial Regimes. Chapter 5, Applied Panarchy: Applications and Diffusion Across Disciplines. Island Press, Chicago, IL, , 94-115, (2022).

Impact/Purpose:

·       This book chapter advances understanding of how to improve environmental governance for linked social-ecological systems, which has critical ramifications for improving environmental outcomes. This paper moves the research on environmental governance forward by analyzing the issue, and providing guidance. In the long-term, improving environmental governance has broad-scale implications for the environment in the United States, with particular interest for Regions (2,4,5), communities (Puerto Rico, USVI, Florida, Wisconsin) and the general public.

Description:

Global change affects ecosystems, social systems and the landscapes in which they are embedded. Spatial heterogeneity in the location, manifestation of, and responses to environmental change makes spatially explicit approaches to management and conservation necessary. Spatial resilience (Cumming 2011; Allen et al. 2016), a crucial component of resilience theory (Holling 1973; Angeler and Allen 2016), is at the forefront of attempts to operationalize and quantify resilience concepts on dynamic landscapes and overcome core uncertainties regarding the interdependence of biotic responses, which is the case when biotic and abiotic components of ecosystems strongly interact and self-organize (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Spatial resilience recognizes the spatially and temporally complex dynamics of landscapes, and in doing so, represents the most recent conceptual advance that seeks to explain the resilience and transformability of heterogeneous non-stationary systems (Sundstrom et al. 2017). Despite recent progress, ambiguity in definitions, information gaps, and an overall lack of quantification and operationalization remain.

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