Abstract
Conservation thinking will benefit from the incorporation of a resilience perspective of landscapes as social-ecological systems that are continually changing due to both internal dynamics and in response to external factors such as a changing climate. The examination of two valley oak stands in Southern California provides an example of the necessity of this systems perspective where each stand is responding differently as a result of interactions with other parts of the landscape. One stand is experiencing regeneration failure similar to other stands across the state, and is exhibiting shifts in spatial pattern as a response to changing conditions. A nearby stand is regenerating well and maintaining spatial and structural patterns, likely due to the availability of imported water associated with upstream urban development. Valley oak stands have a capacity for reorganization as a response to changes in the landscape and environmental conditions. This reorganization can benefit conservation efforts; however, we must ask what limits there are to valley oak’s capacity to reorganize and still maintain its ecological function in face of increasing changes in climate and land cover. The usefulness of resilience as a concept in conservation is discussed at several scales from the stand to the landscape.
Highlights
Climate change and other human-induced modifications in land use and land cover are presenting novel conditions to which ecosystems and conservationists must respond [1,2]
One result of this improved understanding is efforts to focus on connecting habitats across larger areas, developing regional conservation plans to allow for the continued dispersal of organisms, abiotic flows, and processes, through landscapes that are filling in with new types of habitat or land cover that might act as barriers or alter these processes (e.g., The Rim of the Valley Corridor in southern California (US National Park Service) [18]
Other historical land uses, such as grazing, mowing, or use of the land in film production can be understood as connections between landscape elements that introduced energy, matter, or information to effectively reduce the resilience of QULO in this location by directly or indirectly retarding regeneration
Summary
Climate change and other human-induced modifications in land use and land cover are presenting novel conditions to which ecosystems and conservationists must respond [1,2]. Landscape ecology has improved our understanding of the importance of spatial phenomena including the heterogeneity, size, shape, and connectedness of landscape elements [15,16,17] One result of this improved understanding is efforts to focus on connecting habitats across larger areas, developing regional conservation plans to allow for the continued dispersal of organisms, abiotic flows, and processes, through landscapes that are filling in with new types of habitat or land cover that might act as barriers or alter these processes (e.g., The Rim of the Valley Corridor in southern California (US National Park Service) [18]. Even as these ideas of landscape ecology are implemented, conservation practices within the assembled mosaic of habitats and corridors tend still to focus on facilitating or retarding particular flows, maintaining a particular composition and structure of species and populations, or to restore a historical composition and structure from a past point in time [2]
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