WHAT DOES RESILIENCE LOOK LIKE IN WORKING AQUATIC LANDSCAPES?

Resilience has become a foundational concept in efforts to understand how ecosystems respond to stressors and maintain flows of goods and services to people. A principal goal of modern conservation and restoration is often to protect and restore resilience. Despite its broad conceptual appeal, it is not clear that ecologists know what resilience looks like in objective and practical terms. I will provide a series of case studies from the salmon-producing rivers of western Alaska to highlight the remarkable diversity of space and time scales at which ecological variation is expressed in response to changes in climate. It is the complexity associated with the hierarchical expression of spatial and temporal variation that is ultimately critical for sustaining commercial and subsistence fisheries, and maintaining fish-wildlife interactions. A major challenge for watershed management and restoration is to develop robust strategies for dealing with ongoing climate change and its effects on aquatic ecosystems. A common approach is to advance prescriptive management plans based on specific forecasts of future ecosystem states or environmental conditions. This approach is likely prone to failure as our ability to forecast future responses of ecosystems is distinctly limited, particularly when considering the complexity associated with the hierarchical structure of ecosystems. An alternative approach is to focus on protecting and restoring the processes that generate heterogeneity in watersheds and ultimately produce the ‘options’ rivers and their biota have for reorganizing and adapting to ongoing climate change and other regional stressors.  

Primary Presenter: Daniel Schindler, University of Washington (deschind@uw.edu)

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