Sunday, August 2, 2009: 9:00 AM-1:00 PM
Dona Ana, Albuquerque Convention Center
WK 10 - The Self-Identity of Ecological and Social-Ecological Systems: A Tool to Assess Resilience, System Functioning, and Other Sustainability Goals
Global change has led to an increasing demand for concepts connecting ecological and societal targets for environmental quality. Concepts such as ecosystem functioning or resilience are ciphers for such targets. Practitioners are, however, often left with vague recommendations to maintain the “functioning of ecosystems”, or the “resilience of land-use systems”. The precise meaning of these concepts often remains elusive. As a tool for operationalizing these concepts, the approach of systems-identity has been suggested. Determining the (self-)identity of an ecosystem means to formulate the essential characteristics of an ecological system in an unambiguous way – as a baseline to assess changes and the question if the system is still the same. Several such approaches have been formulated, focussing, for example, on the resilience of social-ecological systems (Cumming et al. 2005) or the self-identity of ecological systems (Jax et al. 1998). The identity-methodology is considered a tool for explicating and communicating concepts such as “ecosystem functioning” or “resilience” and for identifying targets of conservation or resource management. This workshop will discuss the methodology of self-identity within the environmental sciences. We will address the following questions: (1) (How) can the identity-method be applied to empirical systems? (2) Does it help to explicate sustainability-related concepts, such as “functioning” or “resilience”? (3) Can identity foster communication among scientists and between theory and practice? and (4) What differences exist between applying the method to ecological, social, or social-ecological systems? One outcome of the workshop might be the preparation of a corporate publication and/or a symposium.
Organizer:Fridolin S. Brand, Technische Universität München
Co-organizer:Kurt Jax, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ
9:00 AMWK 10-1Anthropological and philosophical perspectives on ‘identity’
Philip Loring, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
9:20 AMWK 10-2The concept of self-identity of ecological systems and its application to sustainability objectives
Kurt Jax, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

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See more of The 94th ESA Annual Meeting (August 2 -- 7, 2009)