Exploring panarchy in alpine grasslands: an application of adaptive cycle concepts to the conservation of a cultural landscape

This paper explores approaches of applying the panarchy perspective to a case study of natural resource management in the cultural landscape of upland alpine pastures in northern Italy. The close interaction within the cultural landscape between alpine pasture ecology and the management regimes offers a strong fit with the concept of social-ecological systems and provides insights to appropriate and adaptive management of sites of conservation interest. We examine the limited literature available that offers a resilience understanding of such landscapes and address apparent gaps in the application through our interpretation and use of adaptive cycles and panarchy. We draft conceptual models of adaptive cycles considering ecological and socioeconomic information as acting in separate but interacting domains. Notwithstanding the difficulties in defining and measuring quantitative state variables, we found that a panarchy model can offer a powerful metaphor with practical implications for the maintenance of such alpine cultural landscapes. In effect, our panarchy interpretation of interacting adaptive cycles provides new insights into the description of and the future options for land use in our case study area. Some issues are only partly developed. We hypothesized measurable parameters that could be related to system resilience, such as alternative states, shifting thresholds, and regime stability, which are all dependent on adaptive processes; but we found quantification difficult even at a conceptual level. Nevertheless, we found it helpful to use nature conservation evaluation as a useful surrogate for measures of capital in adaptive cycles of vegetation. However, care is needed to distinguish between the descriptive metaphor using selective surrogate measures and real ecological behavior. Additionally we recognize the need to integrate this ecological understanding with cycles in socioeconomic domains and consider that interactions between the loss of both social and ecological capital would be interesting issues to explore further in our case study