Regional planning for sustainability is predicated on an ability to create and maintain resilient social-ecological systems that are adaptable in the face of surprise and change. One of the central challenges is to understand, articulate and manage the connections between social systems and the physical environment. Over the last fifty years economic 'booms' associated with abundant oil and gas resources have driven rapid regional population growth and large scale landscape change in the Calgary region. However, the region is a semi-arid and temperate area where growth-related land use planning is quite literally water dependent. Climate change modeling suggests even warmer and drier conditions in the region making the critical relationship between land-use and water increasingly acute. A voluntary regional partnership of local municipal governments has emerged over the past six years to address common land use planning concerns emerging from the rapid anthropogenic and natural changes affecting the region. In this paper we explore some of the critical socialecological couplings that have emerged as drivers for sustainability and resilience in the Calgary region of southwestern Alberta, Canada. We posit critical social-ecological and spatial couplings involving: 1) the intersection of built infrastructure (transportation, irrigation and utility corridors) and ecological infrastructure (landscape connectivity), and 2) regional ecohydrology and human water use.

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The Calgary region of south western Alberta, Canada, like other areas of western North America, is experiencing dramatic population growth. The cumulative effects of rapid urbanization and land use intensification, specifically related to water use in a semi-arid region, are poorly understood. But, this needs to be considered in sustainable land use planning and policy development at a regional scale. There is a growing awareness among the municipalities in the Calgary area that a coordinated inter-municipal 'partnership' approach is needed to address long term regional growth management. We present an innovative methodology to incorporate landscape ecology and ecological infrastructure into strategic policy planning for regional development. Our approach involves the identification of critical ecological infrastructure related to landscape hydrology, the development of ecological performance criteria and preferred spatial development patterns related to landscape heterogeneity and connectivity and ecological infrastructure capacity. The methodology incorporates current urban ecology and landscape ecology thinking and encompasses both the 'gray' and 'green' infrastructure needs necessary to support regional population growth patterns. Three methodological tools are used to spatially 'link' ecological infrastructure performance, landscape heterogeneity and land use change over time. The methodology will be coupled with cellular automata scenario modelling at a watershed scale. The paper demonstrates key principles by focusing on two critical ecological facets of the Calgary area's regional landscape: landscape connectivity and landscape hydrology.

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