Browsing by Author "Elmqvist, Thomas"

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Ecosystem Services Linking Social and Ecological Systems: River Brownification and the Response of Downstream Stakeholders
(2011) Tuvendal, Magnus; Elmqvist, Thomas
"The theoretical framework of ecosystem services and that of resilience thinking are combined in an empirical case study of a social-ecological system. In the River Helge å catchment in southern Sweden, a slow increase in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) results in brownification of the water with consequences on ecosystem services in the lower part of the catchment of concern by local resource managers. An assessment of ecosystem service delivery was conducted to (1) identify plausible drivers of brownification in the study site and assess future ecosystem service delivery for stakeholders in downstream areas. An analysis of the perspective of beneficiaries, using qualitative methods, was pursued to (2) evaluate the impacts of brownification on downstream stakeholders. Our analyses of drivers of brownification in combination with climate change projections suggests that Kristianstads Vattenrike Biosphere Reserve will experience extreme water flows much more frequently than the system is accustomed to today, and that these water flows will be highly affected by brownification. The combination of severe summer flooding and high water color constituted a new disturbance regime and thus requires new adaptive strategies by local stakeholders. A range of coping and adaptation strategies were displayed by the farmers but also a possible transformation strategy, i.e., abandonment of the seasonally flooded meadows. Because hay making and grazing are central components in the active management of the Kristianstads Vattenrike Biosphere Reserve, to discontinue this practice would have system-wide ramifications for the Biosphere Reserve. The vulnerability of fishing in the culturally significant 'Eel Coast,' part of the downstream area, was also exposed. We argue that for environmental monitoring of slow changing variables to make sense to local stakeholders, clear links to ecosystem service benefits are required. The responsibility for this and thus for matching of social and ecological scales falls heavily on regional managers. We further argue that resilience of a social-ecological system can be estimated by observing and analyzing how local stakeholders respond to disturbances, i.e., by analyzing their response strategies."
History and Local Management of a Biodiversity-Rich, Urban Cultural Landscape
(2005) Barthel, Stephan; Colding, Johan; Elmqvist, Thomas; Folke, Carl
"Urban green spaces provide socially valuable ecosystem services. Through an historical analysis of the development of the National Urban Park (NUP) of Stockholm, we illustrate how the coevolutionary process of humans and nature has resulted in the high level of biological diversity and associated recreational services found in the park. The ecological values of the area are generated in the cultural landscape. External pressures resulting in urban sprawl in the Stockholm metropolitan region increasingly challenge the capacity of the NUP to continue to generate valuable ecosystem services. Setting aside protected areas, without accounting for the role of human stewardship of the cultural landscape, will most likely fail. In a social inventory of the area, we identify 69 local user and interest groups currently involved in the NUP area. Of these, 25 are local stewardship associations that have a direct role in managing habitats within the park that sustain such services as recreational landscapes, seed dispersal, and pollination. We propose that incentives should be created to widen the current biodiversity management paradigm, and actively engage local stewardship associations in adaptive co-management processes of the park and surrounding green spaces."
Indigenous Institutions, Resilience and Failure of Co-Management of Rain Forest Preserves in Samoa
(2000) Elmqvist, Thomas
"In Samoa, an archipelago in the western part of Polynesia, local societies use an array of institutions and management techniques to cope with uncertainties in their environment. Tropical cyclones are highly unpredictable, both on a temporal and spatial scale, and may cause widespread destruction of villages and plantations. Examples of institutions and resource management systems used under these circumstances include a sophisticated land tenure system enabling a buffer capacity for growing crops, the use of taboos for protecting specific species and techniques for long-term storage of food. The extent of damage to crops by cyclones is extremely variable both within and between crop species. Interviews of farmers support the idea that the polyculturing of many crops species in fact may be a system maintained as part of a strategy to increase resilience in the face of large unpredictable disturbances. "After cyclones, species-specific taboos are often used to protect certain forest species that show marked declines. In addition, this traditional taboo system has also recently been applied on the ecosystem level. Several local indigenous initiatives to conserve biodiversity were undertaken in the early 1990s and resulted in village-based rain forest preserves that are owned, controlled and managed by the villagers. Although these preserves appear to be a robust local approach to rain forest conservation, their establishment resulted in significant conflicts between the villagers and Western NGOs that assisted in raising funds for the preserves. The principles of indigenous control were unexpectedly difficult to accept by some western conservation organizations that ultimately were unwilling to cede decision-making authority to the indigenous leaders. In this case, co-management failed completely when a village decided to sever all relationships and refuse any further financial assistance from the Western NGOs. The reasons for co-management failure need to be analyzed in the context of the crucial role of local institutions and the importance of mutual trust."
Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effect
(2006) Kinzig, Ann P.; Ryan, Paul; Etienne, Michel; Allison, Helen; Elmqvist, Thomas; Walker, Brian H.
"Most accounts of thresholds between alternate regimes involve a single, dominant shift defined by one, often slowly changing variable in an ecosystem. This paper expands the focus to include similar dynamics in social and economic systems, in which multiple variables may act together in ways that produce interacting regime shifts in social-ecological systems. We use four different regions in the world, each of which contains multiple thresholds, to develop a proposed 'general model' of threshold interactions in social-ecological systems. The model identifies patch-scale ecological thresholds, farm- or landscape-scale economic thresholds, and regional-scale sociocultural thresholds. 'Cascading thresholds,' i.e., the tendency of the crossing of one threshold to induce the crossing of other thresholds, often lead to very resilient, although often less desirable, alternative states."
The Role of Local Taboos in Conservation and Management of Species: The Radiated Tortoise in Southern Madagascar
(2003) Lingard, Marlene; Raharison, Nivo; Rabakonandrianina, Elisabeth; Rakotoarisoa, Jean-Aime; Elmqvist, Thomas
"The radiated tortoise, Geochelone radiata, is endemic to the semi-arid region of southern Madagascar. Despite formal protection by law since 1960 and listing in CITES since 1975, tortoise populations have been reported to be in rapid decline, mainly due to illegal harvesting for food and commercial trade. The Tandroy people, inhabitants of the Androy region, which covers approximately half the tortoise distribution range, do not, however, exploit the species. The Tandroy prohibition against tortoise consumption is expressed as a taboo or fady. The aim of this study was to document the narratives, rules and enforcement mechanisms linked to the taboo, and to assess the potential role of the taboo for the protection and management of the radiated tortoise. Interviews revealed that the Tandroy perception of the animal as dirtyunderlies the Tandroy taboo, although one informant suggested that the taboo once originated in notions of sacredness. Estimated tortoise abundances ranged from 20 tortoises per ha in an area with no harvesting to 0.6 per ha in an area where a significant proportion of residents were reported to violate the taboo. Infrastructure changes and increasing numbers of immigrants to the region are sources of new pressures on the tortoise."
Scale Mismatches in Management of Urban Landscapes
(2006) Borgström, Sara T.; Elmqvist, Thomas; Angelstam, Per K.; Alfsen-Norodom, Christine
"Urban landscapes constitute the future environment for most of the world's human population. An increased understanding of the urbanization process and of the effects of urbanization at multiple scales is, therefore, key to ensuring human well-being. In many conventional natural resource management regimes, incomplete knowledge of ecosystem dynamics and institutional constraints often leads to institutional management frameworks that do not match the scale of ecological patterns and processes. In this paper, we argue that scale mismatches are particularly pronounced in urban landscapes. Urban green spaces provide numerous important ecosystem services to urban citizens, and the management of these urban green spaces, including recognition of scales, is crucial to the well-being of the citizens. From a qualitative study of the current management practices in five urban green spaces within the Greater Stockholm Metropolitan Area, Sweden, we found that 1) several spatial, temporal, and functional scales are recognized, but the cross-scale interactions are often neglected, and 2) spatial and temporal meso-scales are seldom given priority. One potential effect of the neglect of ecological cross-scale interactions in these highly fragmented landscapes is a gradual reduction in the capacity of the ecosystems to provide ecosystem services. Two important strategies for overcoming urban scale mismatches are suggested: 1) development of an integrative view of the whole urban social-ecological landscape, and 2) creation of adaptive governance systems to support practical management."
Social Movements and Ecosystem Services: The Role of Social Network Structure in Protecting and Managing Urban Green Areas in Stockholm
(2008) Ernstson, Henrik; Sörlin, Sverker; Elmqvist, Thomas
"Exploitation and degradation of urban green areas reduce their capacity to sustain ecosystem services. In protecting and managing these areas, research has increasingly focused on actors in civil society. Here, we analyzed an urban movement of 62 civil-society organizations--from user groups, such as boating clubs and allotment gardens, to culture and nature conservation groups--that have protected the Stockholm National Urban Park. We particularly focused on the social network structure of the movement, i.e., the patterns of interaction between movement organizations. The results reveal a core-periphery structure where core and semi-core organizations have deliberately built political connections to authorities, whereas the periphery gathers all user groups involved in day-to-day activities in the park. We show how the core-periphery structure has facilitated collective action to protect the park, but we also suggest that the same social network structure might simultaneously have constrained collaborative ecosystem management. In particular, user groups with valuable local ecological knowledge have not been included in collaborative arenas. Our case points out the inherent double-nature of all social networks as they facilitate some collective actions, yet constrain others. The paper argues for incorporating social network structure in theories and applications of adaptive governance and co-management."
Toward a Network Perspective of the Study of Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
(2006) Janssen, Marco A.; Bodin, Örjan; Anderies, John M.; Elmqvist, Thomas; Ernstson, Henrik; McAllister, Ryan R.J.; Olsson, Per; Ryan, Paul
"Formal models used to study the resilience of social-ecological systems have not explicitly included important structural characteristics of this type of system. In this paper, we propose a network perspective for social-ecological systems that enables us to better focus on the structure of interactions between identifiable components of the system. This network perspective might be useful for developing formal models and comparing case studies of social-ecological systems. Based on an analysis of the case studies in this special issue, we identify three types of social-ecological networks: (1) ecosystems that are connected by people through flows of information or materials, (2) ecosystem networks that are disconnected and fragmented by the actions of people, and (3) artificial ecological networks created by people, such as irrigation systems. Each of these three archytypal social-ecological networks faces different problems that influence its resilience as it responds to the addition or removal of connections that affect its coordination or the diffusion of system attributes such as information or disease."
Tropical Forest Reorganization after Cyclone and Fire Disturbance in Samoa: Remnant Trees as Biological Legacies
(2002) Elmqvist, Thomas; Wall, Maria; Berggren, Anna-Lena; Blix, Lisa; Fritoff, Asa; Rinman, Ulrika
"In disturbed rain forests, large, living remnant trees may be of significant importance for postdisturbance reorganization either directly, by producing large quantities of seeds, or indirectly, by attracting vertebrate seed dispersers. In addition, remnant trees may also be important in providing a favorable microhabitat for seedlings of late-successional species. This study focused on the role of large remnant trees (> 40 cm dbh) in patterns of regeneration after cyclone and fire damage in the Tafua and Falealupo Rain Forest Preserves, Savaii, Samoa. At Tafua, 10 large trees at each of two sites (one site burned in 1990) were investigated with regard to numbers of species and densities of plants from three different size classes at different distances from remnant trees. At the burned site, both species richness and the densities of plants < 1cm dbh were significantly higher inside the canopies of remnant trees than outside of them. At the unburned site, no or only marginally significant differences were observed. At Falealupo, two burned sites (burned in 1993 and 1998) were investigated using seed traps. At both sites, the seed rain from vertebrate dispersers was disproportionally higher under the canopies of remnant trees than in outside areas. No differences in soil characteristics were found when comparing samples taken from inside and outside canopies. Our results are congruent with the prediction that large remnant trees surviving in severely disturbed rain-forest areas represent biological legacies and serve as nuclei for reorganization. Based on this study and our previous work, we suggest that three factors represent essential components of the spatial resilience of tropical forest ecosystems and should be targeted for active management in tropical forests exposed to large-scale disturbances, particularly fire: remnant trees, refugia, and vertebrate dispersers."
Urban Ecological and Social-Ecological Research in the City of Cape Town: Insights Emerging from an Urban Ecology CityLab
(2012) Anderson, Pippin M.L.; Elmqvist, Thomas
"There is an ecology that is particular to the urban. Urban ecological systems are deeply situated in the functioning of society, and as such have unique drivers and selection pressures. What has emerged in recent work is a complex of in- and of- city ecologies which strive to address sustainability at multiple scales, often in the context of joint anthropogenic and conservation agendas. In the City of Cape Town there are multiple demands on urban land use to meet development and conservation needs. The consequences of an unjust history are still very much evident in the City of Cape Town today where development discrepancies are acute and the demand for short term delivery high. The City is also host to exceptional, and geographically restricted, biodiversity, on a scale that gives it international conservation attention. Like other cities around the world, Cape Town has seen phenomenal population growth in the last century, growing from just over 630,000 in 1951, to 3.7 million today. This developing City, situated in the south, with its myriad of social and environmental issues, playing out at various scales, makes Cape Town both a relevant and exciting place to further the field of urban ecology."