Dissertation Defence: Bridging ecological resilience and cumulative effects assessment to support integrated approaches to landscape-scale ecosystem management

Corrie Greaves, supervised by Dr. Lael Parrott, will defend their dissertation titled “Bridging ecological resilience and cumulative effects assessment to support integrated approaches to landscape-scale ecosystem management” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies – Sustainability Theme.

An abstract for Corrie Greaves’ dissertation is included below.

Examinations are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Please email lael.parrott@ubc.ca to receive the Zoom link for this exam.

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Abstract

In an era of accelerating human- and climate-driven ecosystem change, maintaining ecological resilience, or the ability of ecosystems to adapt and transform alongside change, is critical for safeguarding the ecological values and services on which society depends. However, ecological resilience remains a challenging concept to integrate into decision-making processes, particularly for multi-use landscapes shaped by extensive past and ongoing cumulative effects. Cumulative effects assessments (CEA) have long been used in British Columbia and Canada as a decision-support tool in such landscapes to understand how the totality of past, ongoing, and future human-caused and naturally-occurring disturbances impact important values. Though it has been suggested that bridging ecological resilience and CEA holds considerable potential, this remains an effectively unexplored opportunity. In this dissertation, I leverage this opportunity to explore how the concept of ecological resilience and CEA can be bridged to simultaneously advance resilience-based landscape-scale management while also overcoming longstanding challenges with compartmentalized and fragmented methods in the CEA arena. More specifically, this work explores how ecological resilience can be defined and operationalized to better understand how cumulative effects influence the ability of ecosystems to adapt and transform to an uncertain future, and advances theory and tools needed to integrate ecological resilience into cumulative effects assessments. The results of this dissertation have three key intellectual contributions. First, I propose a series of shifts needed to situate CEA in ecological resilience: a shift from valued ecological components to values/identity (resilience pivots); a shift from baseline assessments to ecological trajectories; and a shift from management thresholds to safe operating spaces. Second, I put forward a framework for measuring cumulative effects relative to a safe operating space grounded in ecological resilience and explore practical considerations for implementing this framework based on the attributes of a resilient ecosystem. Last, I use remote sensing coupled with machine learning to demonstrate how cumulative effects accumulate over space and time to influence the trajectory of ecosystems at landscape scales. The findings of this body of work underscore the importance of bridging ecological resilience into cumulative effects assessments as a means of cultivating the conditions needed for ecological adaption and transformation in an era of rapid environmental change.