Protected areas as social‐ecological systems: perspectives from resilience and social‐ecological systems theory

Abstract

Conservation biology and applied ecology increasingly recognize that natural resource management is both an outcome and a driver of social, economic, and ecological dynamics. Protected areas offer a fundamental approach to conserving ecosystems, but they are also social-ecological systems whose ecological management and sustainability are heavily influenced by people. This editorial, and the papers in the invited feature that it introduces, discuss three emerging themes in social-ecological systems approaches to understanding protected areas: (1) the resilience and sustainability of protected areas, including analyses of their internal dynamics, their effectiveness, and the resilience of the landscapes within which they occur; (2) the relevance of spatial context and scale for protected areas, including such factors as geographic connectivity, context, exchanges between protected areas and their surrounding landscapes, and scale dependency in the provision of ecosystem services; and (3) efforts to reframe what protected areas are and how they both define and are defined by the relationships of people and nature. These emerging themes have the potential to transform management and policy approaches for protected areas and have important implications for conservation, in both theory and practice.

Standardizing the evaluation of community‐based conservation success

“…). In addition to a comprehensive evaluation of both biological and socioeconomic outcomes, SPECCS uniquely incorporates the linkages between these two themes in line with a social‐ecological systems framework (Cumming and Allen ) and also distinguishes shorter‐term benefits from longer‐term resilience mechanisms.…”

Linking ecosystem services and circuit theory to identify ecological security patterns

“…However, disorderly expansion of urban construction land and significant loss of ecological land have restricted the sustainability of urban development (Peng et al, 2017a;Feist et al, 2017). As a result, hot to ensure the structural stability and functional security of natural ecosystems for sustainable urban development are global issues (Li et al, 2015;Cumming and Allen, 2017;Serra-Llobeet and Hermida, 2017). Especially in China, regional ecological security has faced a severe situation such as biodiversity loss (Zhang et al, 2016b;Peng et al, 2018), soil erosion and water resources scarcity (He et al, 2014;Qiu and Song, 2017;Li and Li, 2017).…”

The dynamics of proclaimed privately protected areas in South Africa over 83 years

“…In recent years, however, static views of PA targets have been increasingly criticized (Cook, Valkan, Mascia, & McGeoch, 2017), with widespread evidence of PA downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) (Cook et al, 2017;Mascia & Pailler, 2011). PAs are increasingly recognized as dynamic, social-ecological systems that respond to each other, the landscapes in which they exist, and to changes in and demands from society (Cumming & Allen, 2017). This perspective is leading conservation agencies to recognize the need to diversify their land protection strategies.…”

“…In the United States, extensive research has cast light on the effectiveness (e.g., Rissman et al, 2007) and socio-economic consequences (Horton, Knight, Galvin, Goldstein, & Herrington, 2017) of conservation easements, and the permanence of conservation covenants in Australia has also received recent attention (Hardy, Fitzsimons, Bekessy, & Gordon, 2017). Generally, however, we lack understanding of the permanence of private land rights transfers to the state (Cumming & Allen, 2017). It is thus unclear whether PPAs can be relied upon to conserve biodiversity in perpetuity.…”