Irene Petrosillo

Informing landscape planning and design for sustaining ecosystem services from existing spatial patterns and knowledge

Over the last decade we have seen an increased emphasis in environmental management and policies aimed at maintaining and restoring multiple ecosystem services at landscape scales. This emphasis has resulted from the recognition that management of specific environmental targets and ecosystem services requires an understanding of landscape processes and the spatial scales that maintain those targets and services. Moreover, we have become increasingly aware of the influence of broad-scale drivers such as climate change on landscape processes and the ecosystem services they support. Studies and assessments on the relative success of environmental policies and landscape designs in maintaining landscape processes and ecosystem services is mostly lacking. This likely reflects the relatively high cost of maintaining a commitment to implement and maintain monitoring programs that document responses of landscape processes and ecosystem services to different landscape policies and designs. However, we argue that there is considerable variation in natural and human-caused landscape pattern at local to continental scales and that this variation may facilitate analyses of how environmental targets and ecosystem services have responded to such patterns. Moreover, wall-to-wall spatial data on land cover and land use at national scales may permit characterization and mapping of different landscape pattern gradients. We discuss four broad and interrelated focus areas that should enhance our understanding of how landscape pattern influences ecosystem services: (1) characterizing and mapping landscape pattern gradients; (2) quantifying relationships between landscape patterns and environmental targets and ecosystem services, (3) evaluating landscape patterns with regards to multiple ecosystem services, and (4) applying adaptive management concepts to improve the effectiveness of specific landscape designs in sustaining ecosystem services. We discuss opportunities as well as challenges in each of these four areas. We believe that this agenda could lead to spatially explicit solutions in managing a range of environmental targets and ecosystem services. Spatially explicit options are critical in managing and protecting landscapes, especially given that communities and organizations are often limited in their capacity to make changes at landscape scales. The issues and potential solutions discussed in this paper expand upon the call by Nassauer and Opdam (Landscape Ecol 23:633–644, 2008) to include design as a fundamental element in landscape ecology research by evaluating natural and human-caused (planned or designed) landscape patterns and their influence on ecosystem services. It also expands upon the idea of “learning by doing” to include “learning from what has already been done.”

Highlighting order and disorder in social–ecological landscapes to foster adaptive capacity and sustainability

Landscape sustainability can be considered in terms of order and disorder, where order implies causality, well-defined boundaries and predictable outcomes, while disorder implies uncertain causality, shifting boundaries and often-unpredictable outcomes. We address the interplay of order and disorder in social–ecological landscapes (SELs) using spatiotemporal analysis of entropy-related indices of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index time-series. These indices can provide insights for complex systems analysis for the evaluation of adaptive capacity in SELs. In particular, our overarching aim is to help interpret what an increase of order/disorder means with regards to SELs and the underlying drivers and causes of conditions in SELs. The approach can be used to increase spatially explicit anticipatory capability in environmental science and natural resource management based on how the system has responded to stress in the past. Such capability is crucial to address SEL adaptive capacity and for sustainable planning given that surprises may increase as a consequence of both climate change and multiple interacting anthropogenic stressors. These advancements should greatly contribute to the application of spatial resilience strategies in general, and to sustainable landscape planning in particular, and for the spatially explicit adaptive comanagement of ecosystem services.

Source/sink patterns of disturbance and cross-scale mismatches in a panarchy of social-ecological landscapes

Land-use change is one of the major factors affecting global environmental change and represents a primary human effect on natural systems. Taking into account the scales and patterns of human land uses as source/sink disturbance systems, we describe a framework to characterize and interpret the spatial patterns of disturbances along a continuum of scales in a panarchy of nested jurisdictional social- ecological landscapes (SELs) like region, provinces, and counties. We detect and quantify those scales through the patterns of disturbance relative to land use/land cover exhibited on satellite imagery over a 4- yr period in the Apulia region, South Italy. By using moving windows to measure composition (amount) and spatial configuration (contagion) of disturbance, we identify multiscale disturbance source/sink trajectories in the pattern metric space defined by composition and configuration of disturbance. We group disturbance trajectories along a continuum of scales for each location (pixel) according to broad land-use classes for each SEL level in the panarchy to identify spatial scales and geographical regions where disturbance is more or less concentrated in space indicating disturbance sources, sinks, and mismatches. We also group locations by clustering, and results are compared in the same pattern space and interpreted with respect to disturbance trajectories derived from random, multifractal and hierarchical neutral models. We show that in the real geographical world spatial mismatches of disturbances can occur at particular scale ranges because of cross scale disparities in land uses for the amount and contagion of disturbance, leading to more or less exacerbation of contrasting source/sink systems along certain scale domains. All cross-scale source/sink issues can produce both negative and positive effects on the scales above and below their levels, i.e., cross-scale effects. Through the framework outlined in our examples, managers, as well as stakeholders belonging to SELs in the panarchy, can be aware of specific scale ranges of disturbance where mismatches might occur and that will help them to value where and how to intervene in the panarchy of SELs to enhance the benefits and to minimize negative effects.

Contributions of Landscape Sciences to the Development of Environmental Security

determinant of security, especially given the emergence of new political, economic, social, and environmental challenges since the end of the cold war. The relationship between environment and security now is a common interest among both the scientific and policymaking communities, supported by the fact that the traditional security concepts based on territorial integrity and political sovereignty have been revisited following the changes in the geopolitical landscape at the end of the last century. Security generally is related to both a perception of freedom from risk and freedom from anxiety or fear. Security aims at providing expected services, safety, and protecting valuable assets from harm, even during times of increased threat or risk. Security is achieved through both prospective (preventative) and retrospective (mitigation) actions on the part of governments, agencies, and people. Perceptions of security by individuals, communities, and societies are strongly linked to human well-being and to the satisfaction of the population. The notion of environmental security has been historically linked to inter-national conflicts caused by environmental degradation, e.g. through overuse of renewable resources, pollution, or impoverishment in the space of living (Tuchel, 2004; Herrero, 2006; Liotta, 2006). In this context, the concept of environmental security has been developed mainly by international policy researchers and has focused on the role of the scarcity of renewable resources such as cropland, forests, water, and fish stocks. Statistical data demonstrate that agriculture and natural resource availability plays an important role in many events of acute violence, which often occur in rural areas (De Soysa et al., 1999). Therefore, attention has been devoted to the theoretical analysis of possible pathways that lead to loss of environmental security, beginning with scarcity and leading to outbreaks of violence. Thus, environmental security has been discussed as a concept of international security policy (Brauch, 2006). This debate began in the late 1980s and has been quite intense. Recently, environmental security issues received increasing worldwide interest by govern-ments, scientific institutions, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovern-mental groups, calling for greater attention to the potential threats to security posed by environmental problems (Dabelko, 2004; Matthew et al., 2004, UNEP, 2004). The decrease in quantity and quality of resources, rapid global population growth, and unequal access to resources are the basic drivers behind increasing environment-related security risks. Notably renewable resources like water and land are crucial factors in security issues, especially with respect to instability and migration between and within countries or regions. Moreover, environmental degradation often results in changes in important ecological and landscape processes that can have irreversible impacts to critical renewable resources such as water, fiber, food, and clean air. This can lead to a relatively permanent loss

Spectral entropy, ecological resilience, and adaptive capacity for understanding, evaluating, and managing ecosystem stability and change

Spectral entropy, ecological resilience, and adaptive capacity for understanding, evaluating, and managing ecosystem stability and change G IOVANNI ZURL IN I 1 , BA I L IAN L I 2 , N ICOLA ZACCARELL I 1 and IRENE PETROSILLO Landscape Ecology Laboratory, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Ecotekne, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy, Ecological Complexity and Modeling Laboratory, Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0124, USA

Ecological Risk Assessment Through Landscape Science Approaches

Risk assessment of landscape biological integrity, associated with ecotypes or ecotype mosaics, is addressed by simple multi-scale conceptual models incorporating metrics related to current human disturbance, based on native species most threatened with extinction and reduction. We aim at identifying gaps in the Italian existing reserve network to establish new reserves and protected areas to get a more representative network of regional biological diversity, based on (1) their “natural values”, and (2) “fragility”. Distribution maps of habitat sensitivity and fragility give policy makers and land managers information on impacts their land-use decisions will have on existing risks to biological integrity. Such approaches have application in Central Asian ecological evaluation and environmental decision-making.

Environmental security as related to scale mismatches of disturbance patterns in a panarchy of social-ecological landscapes

Environmental security, as the opposite of environmental fragility (vulnerability), is multilayered, multi-scale and complex, existing in both the objective realm of biophysics and society, and the subjective realm of individual human perception. For ecological risk assessments (ERAs), the relevant objects of environmental security are social-ecological landscapes (SELs). ERAs, in this case, are less precise than traditional ERAs, but provide results that are more comprehensive and understandable by stakeholders. In this paper, we detect and quantify the scales and spatial patterns of human land use as ecosystem disturbances at different hierarchical levels in a panarchy of SELs by using a conceptual framework that characterizes multi-scale disturbance patterns exhibited on satellite imagery over a four-year time period in Apulia (South Italy). Multi-scale measurements of the composition and spatial configuration of disturbance are the basis for evaluating fragility through multi- scale disturbance profiles, and the identification of scale mismatches revealed by trajectories diverging from the global profile to local spatial patterns. Scale mismatches of disturbances in space and time determine the role of land use as a disturbance source or sink, and may govern the triggering of landscape changes affecting regional biodiversity. This study clarifies the potential roles

Sustainable landscape development and value rigidity: the Pirsig‘s monkey trap

New broader, adaptable and accommodating sets of themes have been proposed to help to identify, understand and solve sustainability problems. However, how this knowledge will foster decisions that lead to more desirable outcomes and analyses necessary to transition to sustainability remains a critical theoretical and empirical question for basic and applied research. We argue that we are still underestimating the tendency to lock into certain patterns that come at the cost of the ability to adjust to new situations. This rigidity limits the ability of persons, groups, and companies to respond to new problems, and can make it hard to learn new facts because we pre-select facts as important, or not, in line with our established values. Changing circumstances demand to reappraise values like in the case of Pirsigs monkey and its rice. There is an urgent need to go beyond such local, static and short-term conceptions, where landscape sustainability has been incorrectly envisioned as a durable, stable condition that, once achieved, could persist for generations. We argue that to manage a global transition toward more environmentally efficient and, therefore, more sustainable land-use we have to reappraise societal values at the root of overregulation and rigidity.

Investigating landscape phase transitions in Mediterranean rangelands by recurrence analysis

ContextSocio-ecological landscapes typically characterized by non-linear dynamics in space and time are difficult to be analyzed using standard quantitative methods, due to multiple processes interacting on different spatial and temporal scales. This poses a challenge to the identification of appropriate approaches for analyzing time series that can evaluate system properties of landscape dynamics in the face of disturbances, such as uncontrolled fires.ObjectiveThe purpose is the application of non-linear methods such as recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to landscape ecology. The examples concern the time series of burnt and unburnt Mediterranean rangelands, to highlight potential and limits of RQA.MethodsWe used RQA together with joint recurrence analysis (JRA) to compare the evolutionary behavior of different land uses.ResultsTime series of forests and grasslands in rangelands present both periodic and chaotic components with a rather similar behavior after the fire and clear transitions from less to more regular/predictable dynamics/succession. Results highlight the impacts of fire, the recovery capacity of land covers to pre-burnt levels, and the decay of synchronization towards the previous regime associated with vegetation secondary succession consistent with early successional species.ConclusionsRQA and JRA with their set of indices (recurrence rate: RR, laminarity: LAM, determinism: DET, and divergence: DIV) can represent new sensitive measures that may monitor the adaptive capacity and the resilience of landscapes. However, future applications are needed to standardize the analysis by strengthening the accuracy of this approach in describing the ongoing transformations of natural and man-managed landscapes.

Coastal dynamics vs beach users attitudes and perceptions to enhance environmental conservation and management effectiveness

This work carries out a landscape analysis for the last 60years to compare the degree of preservation of two areas on the same Italian coastline characterized by different environmental protection levels: a National designated protected areas and a highly tourist coastal destination. The conversion of natural land-covers into human land uses were detected for protected and unprotected coastal stretches highlighting that the only establishment of a protected area is not enough to stem undesirable land-use outcomes. A survey analysis was also conducted to assess attitudes of beach users and to evaluate their perception of natural habitats, beach and coastal water quality, and coastal dynamic over time. The results of 2071 questionnaires showed that there is similarity between subjective and objective data. However, several beach users perceived a bad quality of coastal water in the legally unprotected coastal area. The implications from a planning and management perspective are discussed.