Environmental Risk Assessment and Management from a Landscape Perspective (Kapustka/Environmental Risk) || Quantitative Measures and Ecological Hierarchy

✍ Scribed by Kapustka, Lawrence A.; Landis, Wayne G.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 667 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 0470089970
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470593028.ch5

✦ Synopsis

Societies are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the multiple negative impacts associated with environmental changes. Societal vulnerability includes both (a) the risks associated with disturbances and (b) coping measures available to mitigate the consequences of disturbances (Turner et al. 2003). Because risks and availability of coping measures vary spatially and temporally, understanding the spatiotemporal pattern of vulnerability is central to managing environmental changes. Quantifying vulnerability is challenging because the social and ecological processes that respond to and cause vulnerability vary at scales from individuals to the entire earth. Meeting this challenge requires an interdisciplinary approach reconciling pattern, process, and scale between social and ecological sciences. Landscape ecology provides both a guiding theory and methodology for conducting such interdisciplinary research. In this chapter we provide a conceptual framework for the quantification of ecological hierarchies and then discuss the uses of different quantitative approaches to understand these hierarchies. We conclude by describing how these approaches can be used and identifying important problem domains where quantitative analyses of ecological hierarchies are needed to better understand vulnerability.