1. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes Craig R. Allen Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit

2. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Resilience Climate change: non-linear surprises following changes in slow variables UNL and the Resilience Alliance UNL Resilience Research / Adaptive Management Approaches Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes An adaptive management approach for selecting habitat improvement targets in the shortgrass prairie Adaptive harvest management for greater prairie-chicken harvest in Southeast Nebraska Overview

3. Climate Change Workshop 2007 “A public Domain, once a velvet carpet of rich Buffalo-grass and grama, now an illimitable waste of rattlesnake-bush and tumbleweed, too impoverished to be accepted as a gift by the states within which It lies. Why? Because the ecology of the Southwest happened to be set on a hair trigger.” Aldo Leopold, The Conservation Ethic, 1935

4. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Freshwater Lakes Clear

5. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Freshwater Lakes Clear Algae

6. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Rangelands in Australia Grass

7. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Rangelands in Australia Grass Shrubs

8. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Sandhills in Nebraska Grass

9. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Sandhills in Nebraska Grass Dunes or Brush

10. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Observed Ecosystem Shifts FROM: Clear water lake Benthic Vegetation Grassland Forest Pest outbreak Hard Coral TO: Turbid water lake Algae Shrubland No outbreak Algae

11. Climate Change Workshop 2007 A measure of the amount of “disturbance” needed to “flip” an ecosystem from one stable state to a different stable state Both undesirable and desirable system states can be highly resilient, i.e., hard to shift to another state Resilience

12. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Threshold Response

13. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Threshold Response

14. Climate Change Workshop 2007 The Resilience Alliance www.resalliance.org Multidisciplinary network focused on –Understanding of complex environmental systems –Combining social, economic, and ecological factors –Extensive involvement in Adaptive Management –Regional case studies linked with theory development

15. Climate Change Workshop 2007 The Resilience Alliance www.resalliance.org Multidisciplinary network focused on –Understanding of complex environmental systems –Combining social, economic, and ecological factors –Extensive involvement in Adaptive Management –Regional case studies linked with theory development –Paradigm shift from top-down (command-and-control) optimization to resilience and self-organization –Explores complex dynamics in social-ecological systems –Research focus on managing for resilience, adaptability, and transformability in systems of people and nature

16. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Resilience Video

17. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Arizona State University Center for Environmental Studies Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique Indiana University, Center for the Study of Institutions Stockholm University, Center for Transdisciplinary Research James Cook University, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reefs The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems Emory University McGill School of the Environment South Africa node Stockholm Environmental Institute Dutch Node University of Wisconsin University of Nebraska-Lincoln The Resilience Alliance www.resalliance.org

18. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Arizona State University Center for Environmental Studies Beijer International Institute for Ecological Economics Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique Indiana University, Center for the Study of Institutions Stockholm University, Center for Transdisciplinary Research James Cook University, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reefs The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems Emory University McGill School of the Environment South Africa node Stockholm Environmental Institute Dutch Node University of Wisconsin University of Nebraska-Lincoln The Resilience Alliance www.resalliance.org

19. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Resilience Questions How does resilience manifest itself in different systems? What are the properties of systems that make them more or less resilient? How do we measure resilience? How do we recover resilience and adaptability in systems where they are being eroded, and enhance them in systems undergoing change?

20. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Resilience and Climate Change - What’s the Connection? How does resilience manifest itself in different systems? Some systems will be more or less affected by climate change. What are the properties of systems that make them more or less resilient? How do we recognize which systems are vulnerable and which aren’t vulnerable, and how do we decrease the vulnerability of systems to the threat of climate change? How do we lessen the chance of unpleasant ecological or economic surprise driven by climate change?

21. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Hysterisis: When the Path Out is not the same as the Path In What Insights Might Resilience Thinking Bring to the Understanding and Anticipation of Climate Change?

22. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Linear changes (inputs) can have non-linear responses Thresholds

23. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Unanticipated reactions to efforts to control variation Surprise

24. Climate Change Workshop 2007 UNL Resilience Projects Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes NSF Proposed – Resilience of Water Resources USDA NRI – Resilience in Working Landscapes Sandhills Biocomplexity

25. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Understanding Resilience in Working Agricultural Landscapes The contribution of high diversity patches in an agricultural landscape How does diversity relate to – Pollination – Herbivory – Soil development – Invasion resistance And are some of these ecosystem services exported to adjacent row crop agriculture? If so, how does this contribute to the resilience of the landscape?

26. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Invasion Resistance

27. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Herbivory

28. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Adaptive Resource Management (and Adaptive Governance) A method to experimentally probe systems to determine key uncertainties, with experiments where it is ok to fail An approach that “…views policy as hypotheses: that is, most policies are really questions masquerading as answers. Because policies are questions, then management actions become treatments, in an experimental sense." UNL projects: –Adaptive harvest management for greater prairie-chicken harvest in Southeast Nebraska –An adaptive management approach for selecting habitat improvement targets in the shortgrass prairie ecosystem Establishing MS and PhD options in ARM

29. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Adaptive Harvest Management for Greater Prairie-Chicken Harvest in Southeast Nebraska Adaptive Resource Management Using harvests and surveys to gain information about harvest mortality

30. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Adaptive Harvest Management Process Determine objectives Define regulatory options Define set of models to represent uncertainties Design annual monitoring program Define way to measure model credibility

31. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Comparing Model Predictions to Survey Data Reducing model uncertainty

32. Climate Change Workshop 2007 Resilience and Climate Change Questions How will the intensification of agriculture driven by increased demand for ethanol affect the resilience of agricultural landscapes to change driven by climate warming? How will climate change affect water availability in the Great Plains, and how will this affect the resilience of this system? How will climate change affect the distribution and diversity of animals and plants, and how will this influence the resilience of Great Plains ecosystems. http://calmit.unl.edu/invasives/ What surprises might we anticipate? How might we mitigate potential negative changes. What scenarios should we envision? Thank you!