SCIENCE@home

Operationalizing resilience for conservation objectives: the 4S's

Clare E. Aslan,Brian Petersen,A. Shiels,W. Haines,Christina T Liang

Published 2018 in Restoration Ecology

ABSTRACT

Although resilience thinking is increasingly popular and attractive among restoration practitioners, it carries an abstract quality that hinders effective application. Because resilience and its components are defined differently in social and ecological contexts, individual managers or stakeholders may disagree on the definition of a system's state, occurrence of a state change, preferred state characteristics, and appropriate methods to achieve success. Nevertheless, incentives and mandates often force managers to demonstrate how their work enhances resilience. Unclear or conflicting definitions can lead to ineffective or even detrimental decision‐making in the name of resilience; essentially, any convenient action can be touted as resilience‐enhancing in this case. We contend that any successful resilience management project must clearly identify up‐front the stressors of concern, state traits, scales of appropriate management, and success indicators (the 4S's) relevant to the management targets. We propose a deliberate process for determining these components in advance of resilience management for conservation. Our recommendations were inspired and informed by two case studies wherein different definitions of stressors, state, scales, and success would result in very different management choices, with potentially serious consequences for biodiversity targets.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2018

  • Venue

    Restoration Ecology

  • Publication date

    2018-08-22

  • Fields of study

    Business, Environmental Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1111/rec.12867
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-60 of 60 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-12 of 12 citing papers · Page 1 of 1