Development and Application of Panarchy Theory in Managed Resource Systems

Humans are changing our environment at unprecedented scales. Moreover, environmental change is becoming more unpredictable due to cross scale interactions of biophysical processes. Such cross-scale interactions led to development of panarchy theory to account for observed failures in systems of people and nature. Applications of panarchy can be a powerful approach to management of social-ecological systems with high uncertainty and high controllability of key biophysical processes. This is particularly true when managing for multiple social and ecological goals. The iterative nature of an adaptive approach has the capacity to accommodate tradeoffs among different stakeholder priorities and multiple ecosystem attributes within and across scales.