Climate Change Workshop 2007 Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes Craig R. Allen Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research

Climate Change Workshop 2007

Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes

Craig R. AllenNebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit


• Resilience

• Climate change: non-linear surprises following changes in slow variables

• UNL and the Resilience Alliance

• UNL Resilience Research / Adaptive Management Approaches

• Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes

• An adaptive management approach for selecting habitat improvement targets in the shortgrass prairie

• Adaptive harvest management for greater prairie-chicken harvest in Southeast Nebraska

Overview


“A public Domain, once a velvet carpet of rich Buffalo-grass

and grama, now an illimitable waste of rattlesnake-bush and

tumbleweed, too impoverished to be accepted as a gift by

the states within which It lies. Why? Because the ecology of

the Southwest happened to be set on a hair trigger.”

Aldo Leopold, The Conservation Ethic, 1935


Freshwater Lakes

Clear


Freshwater Lakes

Clear Algae


Rangelands in Australia

Grass


Rangelands in Australia

Grass Shrubs


Sandhills in Nebraska

Grass


Sandhills in Nebraska

Grass Dunes or Brush


Observed Ecosystem Shifts

FROM:

Clear water lake

Benthic Vegetation

Grassland

Forest Pest outbreak

Hard Coral

TO:

Turbid water lake

Algae

Shrubland

No outbreak

Algae


A measure of the amount of “disturbance” needed to “flip” an ecosystem from one stable state to a different stable state

Both undesirable and desirable system states can be highly resilient, i.e., hard to shift to another state

Resilience


Threshold Response


Threshold Response


The Resilience Alliance www.resalliance.org

• Multidisciplinary network focused on

– Understanding of complex environmental systems– Combining social, economic, and ecological factors– Extensive involvement in Adaptive Management– Regional case studies linked with theory development



• Multidisciplinary network focused on

– Understanding of complex environmental systems– Combining social, economic, and ecological factors– Extensive involvement in Adaptive Management– Regional case studies linked with theory development

– Paradigm shift from top-down (command-and-control) optimization to resilience and self-organization

– Explores complex dynamics in social-ecological systems– Research focus on managing for resilience, adaptability, and transformability in

systems of people and nature


Resilience Video


Arizona State University Center for Environmental Studies

Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics

Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique

Indiana University, Center for the Study of Institutions

Stockholm University, Center for Transdisciplinary Research

James Cook University, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reefs

The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems

Emory University

McGill School of the Environment

South Africa node

Stockholm Environmental Institute

Dutch Node

University of Wisconsin

University of Nebraska-Lincoln



Arizona State University Center for Environmental Studies

Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics

Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique

Indiana University, Center for the Study of Institutions

Stockholm University, Center for Transdisciplinary Research

James Cook University, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reefs

The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems

Emory University

McGill School of the Environment

South Africa node

Stockholm Environmental Institute

Dutch Node

University of Wisconsin

University of Nebraska-Lincoln



Resilience Questions

• How does resilience manifest itself in different systems?

• What are the properties of systems that make them more or less resilient?

• How do we measure resilience?

• How do we recover resilience and adaptability in systems where they are being eroded, and enhance them in systems undergoing change?


Resilience and Climate Change - What’s the Connection?

• How does resilience manifest itself in different systems?

Some systems will be more or less affected by climate change.

• What are the properties of systems that make them more or less resilient?

How do we recognize which systems are vulnerable and which aren’t vulnerable, and how do we decrease the vulnerability of systems to the threat of climate change?

How do we lessen the chance of unpleasant ecological or economic surprise driven by climate change?


Hysterisis: When the Path Out is not the same as the Path In

What Insights Might Resilience Thinking Bring to the Understanding and Anticipation of Climate Change?


Linear changes (inputs) can have non-linear responses

Thresholds


Unanticipated reactions to efforts to control variation

Surprise


UNL Resilience Projects

• Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes

• NSF Proposed – Resilience of Water Resources

• USDA NRI – Resilience in Working Landscapes

• Sandhills Biocomplexity


Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes

• The contribution of high diversity patches in an agricultural landscape

• How does diversity relate to

– Pollination

– Herbivory

– Soil development

– Invasion resistance

• And are some of these ecosystem services exported to adjacent row crop agriculture?

• If so, how does this contribute to the resilience of the landscape?


Invasion Resistance


Herbivory


Adaptive Resource Management (and Adaptive Governance)

• A method to experimentally probe systems to determine key uncertainties, with experiments where it is ok to fail

• An approach that “…views policy as hypotheses: that is, most policies are really questions masquerading as answers. Because policies are questions, then management actions become treatments, in an experimental sense."

• UNL projects:

– Adaptive harvest management for greater prairie-chicken harvest in Southeast Nebraska

– An adaptive management approach for selecting habitat improvement targets in the shortgrass prairie ecosystem

• Establishing MS and PhD options in ARM


Adaptive Harvest Management for Greater Prairie-Chicken Harvest in Southeast Nebraska

• Adaptive Resource Management

• Using harvests and surveys to gain information about harvest mortality


Adaptive Harvest Management Process

• Determine objectives

• Define regulatory options

• Define set of models to represent uncertainties

• Design annual monitoring program

• Define way to measure model credibility


Comparing Model Predictions to Survey Data

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

Surveyed males

Additive model prediction

Compensatory model prediction

Reducing model uncertainty


Resilience and Climate Change Questions• How will the intensification of agriculture driven by increased demand for

ethanol affect the resilience of agricultural landscapes to change driven by climate warming?

• How will climate change affect water availability in the Great Plains, and how will this affect the resilience of this system?

• How will climate change affect the distribution and diversity of animals and plants, and how will this influence the resilience of Great Plains ecosystems. http://calmit.unl.edu/invasives/

• What surprises might we anticipate? How might we mitigate potential negative changes. What scenarios should we envision?

• Thank you!

Documents

Climate Change Workshop 2007 Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes Craig R. Allen Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research