Future scenarios of landscape vulnerability and resilience to global change

Background/Question/Methods

The LTER network is committed to integrated socio-ecological research designed to foster a sustainable future.  Overarching questions include: How will global change alter the futures of regional social-ecological systems? And, how and why do regional social-ecological systems differ in vulnerability, resilience and adaptability to global change? Addressing these questions poses many new challenges. Indeed, research to anticipate ecological change within coupled human and natural systems is met by massive uncertainties, reciprocal feedbacks, and surprises. Scenario thinking to inform quantitative modeling of landscape change and attending ecological responses is among the most promising approaches to emerge.  Scenarios typically begin as suites of qualitative narratives—developed by regional stakeholders in­cluding social and ecological scientists—that describe an envelope of plausible futures based on con­trasting assumptions. The narratives inform and are, in turn, informed by integrated spatial models of so­cio-ecological change. Scientists have developed a diversity of approached for coupling qualitative scenarios and quantitative simulations. We review LTER-affiliated scenario projects from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, the North Temperate Lakes program in Wisconsin, the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts and Bonanza Creek research site in Alaska. This work has informed prescient planning and policy and generated a rich set of fundamental research questions.  

Results/Conclusions

After thirty years, the LTER Network is at the forefront of understanding long-term environmental change.  Accordingly, the LTER community of scientists is poised to focus on forward-looking socio-ecological research that can identify areas of vulnerability and resilience to future global change. The core strengths of the LTER—its history of long-term, place-based studies, its commitment to integrative research across disciplines, and the diversity of landscapes, stakeholders, and disturbance regimes represented by the sites—make it ideally suited to address these questions in a scenario framework.