Browsing by Author "Kinzig, Ann P."

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The Effects of Human Socioeconomic Status and Cultural Characteristics on Urban Patterns of Biodiversity
(2005) Kinzig, Ann P.; Warren, Paige; Martin, Chris; Hope, Diane; Katti, Madhusudan
"We present evidence that there can be substantial variation in species richness in residential areas differing in their socioeconomic and cultural characteristics. Many analyses of the impacts of urbanization on biodiversity rely on traditional 'urban-to-rural' gradient measures, such as distance from urban center or population density, and thus can fail to account for the ways in which human socioeconomic and cultural characteristics are shaping the human-environment interaction and ecological outcomes. This influence of residential values and economic resources on biodiversity within the urban matrix has implications for human quality of life, for urban conservation strategies, and for urban planning."
Fifteen Weddings and a Funeral: Case Studies and Resilience- based Management
(2006) Anderies, John M.; Walker, Brian H.; Kinzig, Ann P.
"'Resilience theory' is a systematic methodology for understanding the dynamics of coupled social-ecological systems (SESs). Its ongoing development requires that resilience theory be confronted with case studies to assess its capacity to help understand and develop policy for SESs. This paper synthesizes the findings from several papers in the special feature 'Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems' that do just this. It then highlights key challenges facing resilience as a theory for understanding SESs and provides some avenues for future research."
Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems
(2006) Walker, Brian H.; Gunderson, Lance; Kinzig, Ann P.; Folke, Carl; Carpenter, Stephen; Schultz, Lisen
"This paper is a work-in-progress account of ideas and propositions about resilience in socialecological systems. It articulates our understanding of how these complex systems change and what determines their ability to absorb disturbances in either their ecological or their social domains. We call them 'propositions' because, although they are useful in helping us understand and compare different social-ecological systems, they are not sufficiently well defined to be considered formal hypotheses. These propositions were developed in two workshops, in 2003 and 2004, in which participants compared the dynamics of 15 case studies in a wide range of regions around the world. The propositions raise many questions, and we present a list of some that could help define the next phase of resilience-related research."
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."
Resilience of Past Landscapes: Resilience Theory, Society, and the Longue Duree
(2003) Redman, Charles L.; Kinzig, Ann P.
"Resilience theory is an expanding body of ideas that attempts to provide explanations for the source and role of change in adaptive systems, particularly the kinds of change that are transforming. Scholars from various disciplines have contributed to the current state of this formulation. This article proposes that resilience theory would benefit from an increasing collaboration with archaeologists, who would provide a long-term perspective on adaptive cycles. Although archaeologists and anthropologists have written provocatively about studying the resilience of past and present societies, such an approach has not become common in these disciplines. We suggest, however, that a resilience framework offers a potential mechanism for reinvigorating the conceptual base of archaeological and anthropological disciplines. To make this case, we (1) highlight three features of resilience theory, including cross-scale interactions, information flow, and phases of the adaptive cycle; (2) examine the extent to which purely natural or social science analyses would give complementary or contradictory conclusions; and (3) discuss the implications of using a long-term integrative perspective for understanding linked social and ecological systems."
Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems
(2004) Walker, Brian H.; Holling, C.S.; Carpenter, Stephen; Kinzig, Ann P.
"The concept of resilience has evolved considerably since Holling's (1973) seminal paper. Different interpretations of what is meant by resilience, however, cause confusion. Resilience of a system needs to be considered in terms of the attributes that govern the system's dynamics. Three related attributes of social-ecological systems (SESs) determine their future trajectories: resilience, adaptability, and transformability. Resilience(the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks) has four components-latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy-most readily portrayed using the metaphor of a stability landscape. Adaptability is the capacity of actors in the system to influence resilience (in a SES, essentially to manage it). There are four general ways in which this can be done, corresponding to the four aspects of resilience. Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable. "The implications of this interpretation of SES dynamics for sustainability science include changing the focus from seeking optimal states and the determinants of maximum sustainable yield (the MSY paradigm), to resilience analysis, adaptive resource management, and adaptive governance."
Resisting Diversity: A Long-Term Archaeological Study
(2011) Nelson, Margaret C.; Hegmon, Michelle; Kulow, Stephanie R.; Peeples, Matthew A.; Kintigh, Keith; Kinzig, Ann P.
"The value of 'diversity' in social and ecological systems is frequently asserted in academic and policy literature. Diversity is thought to enhance the resilience of social-ecological systems to varied and potentially uncertain future conditions. Yet there are trade-offs; diversity in ecological and social domains has costs as well as benefits. In this paper, we examine social diversity, specifically its costs and benefits in terms of decision making in middle range or tribal societies, using archaeological evidence spanning seven centuries from four regions of the U.S. Southwest. In these nonstate societies, social diversity may detract from the capacity for collective action. We ask whether as population density increases, making collective action increasingly difficult, social diversity declines. Further, we trace the cases of low diversity and high population density across our long-temporal sequences to see how they associate with the most dramatic transformations. This latter analysis is inspired by the claim in resilience literature that reduction of diversity may contribute to reduction in resilience to varied conditions. Using archaeological data, we examine social diversity and conformity through the material culture (pottery styles) of past societies. Our research contributes to an enhanced understanding of how population density may limit social diversity and suggests the role that this association may play in some contexts of dramatic social transformation."
Uncertainty, Climate Change, and Adaptive Management
(1997) Peterson, Garry D.; De Leo, Giulio Alessandro; Hellmann, Jessica J.; Janssen, Marco A.; Kinzig, Ann P.; Malcolm, Jay R.; O'Brien, Karen; Pope, Shealagh E.; Rothman, Dale S.; Shevliakova, Elena; Tinch, Robert
"Humanity's transformation of the Earth has increased the concentration of greenhouse gases, thereby altering Earth's climate. The drivers and the potential consequences of climate change are interwoven with a huge variety of biogeophysical and human-caused processes that complicate the analysis of policies designed to mitigate and adapt to climate change. In this paper, we explore how adaptive management can be used to grapple with the regional and global scientific, economic, and political uncertainties of climate change."