C.s. Holling

University of Florida | UF · Department of Biology

There is a fundamental difference between the ways in which ecologists and lawyers view uncertainty: in the study of ecology, uncertainty provides a catalyst for exploration, whereas uncertainty is antithetical to the rule of law. This issue is particularly troubling in environmental management, where the tensions between law and ecology become app...

The concept of panarchy provides a framework that characterizes complex systems of people and nature as dynamically organized and structured within and across scales of space and time. It has been more than a decade since the introduction of panarchy. Over this period, its invocation in peer-reviewed literature has been steadily increasing, but its...

A dramatic paradigm shift in American law occurred in 1970, as Congress began to target hazardous waste, water pollution, and protection of endangered species with sweeping new legislation (Lazarus 2004). Preceding this new era of environmental protection, federal policies had already begun to shift resource use from private interests for economic...

The scaling of physical, biological, ecological and social phenomena is a major focus of efforts to develop simple representations of complex systems. Much of the attention has been on discovering universal scaling laws that emerge from simple physical and geometric processes. However, there are regular patterns of departures both from those scalin...

The scaling of physical, biological, ecological, and social phenomena is a major focus of efforts to develop simple representations of complex systems. Much of the attention has been on discovering universal scaling laws that emerge from simple physical and geometric processes. However, there are regular patterns of departures both from those scali...

Growing a resilient landscape depends heavily on finding an appropriate match between the scales of demands on ecosystems by human societies and the scales at which ecosystems are capable of meeting these demands. While the dynamics of environmental change and ecosystem service provision form the basis of many landscape ecology studies, enhancing l...

We present a conceptual framework that explores some of the forces creating innovation and novelty in complex systems. Understanding the sources of variability and novelty may help us better understand complex systems. Understanding complex phenomena such as invasions, migration, and nomadism may provide insight into the structure of ecosystems and...

The scaling of physical, biological, ecological and social phenomena has become a major focus of efforts to develop simple representations of complex systems. Much of the attention has been on discovering universal scaling laws that emerge from simple physical and geometric processes. But there are regular patterns of departures both from those sca...

"The case studies of Kristianstads Vattenrike, Sweden; the Northern Highlands Lake District and the Everglades in the USA; the Mae Nam Ping Basin, Thailand; and the Goulburn-Broken Catchment, Australia, were compared to assess the outcome of different actions for transforming social-ecological systems (SESs). The transformations consisted of two ph...

We review the evidence of regime shifts in terrestrial and aquatic environments in relation to resilience of complex adaptive ecosystems and the functional roles of biological diversity in this context. The evidence reveals that the likelihood of regime shifts may increase when humans reduce resilience by such actions as removing response diversity...

"The concept of resilience has evolved considerably since Holling's (1973) seminal paper. Different interpretations of what is meant by resilience, however, cause confusion. Resilience of a system needs to be considered in terms of the attributes that govern the system's dynamics. Three related attributes of social-ecological systems (SESs) determi...

Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors underpinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable....

Strong inference is a powerful and rapid tool that can be used to identify and explain patterns in molecular biology, cell biology, and physiology. It is effective where causes are single and separable and where discrimination between pairwise alternative hypotheses can be determined experimentally by a simple yes or no answer. But causes in ecolog...

The scaling of physical, biological, ecological and social phenomena has become a major focus of efforts to develop simple representations of complex systems. Much of the attention has been on discovering universal scaling laws that emerge from simple physical and geometric processes. But there are regular patterns of departures both from those sca...

o set of issues has tended to separate economists and ecologists, especially in the mind of the public, more than those surrounding the linkages between economic growth, human carrying capacity, and the envi- ronment. The general lack of interest among the majority of economists in problems of the environment and a par- allel lack of interest among...

Little empirical information exists about how birds respond to urban landscape structure across multiple scales. We explored how the variation in percent tree canopy cover, at four different scales, affected the abundance of bird species across various urban sites in North America. Bird counts were derived from previous studies, and tree patches we...

We, as a society, find ourselves confronted with a spectrum of potentially catastrophic and irreversible environmental problems, for which conventional approaches will not suffice in providing solutions. These problems are characterized, above all, by their unpredictability. This means that surprise is to be expected, and that sudden qualitative sh...

"The purpose of this essay is to define and refine the concepts of stability and resilience and to demonstrate their value in understanding the behavior of exploited systems. Some ecological systems display several possible stable states. They may also show a hysteresis effect in which, even after a long time, the state of the system may be partly...

This paper considers the significance of biological diversity in relation to large-scale processes in complex and dynamic ecological-economic systems. It focuses on functional diversity, and its relation to production and maintenance of ecological services that underpin human societies. Within functional groups of organisms two important categories...

As the human population grows and natural resources decline, there is pressure to apply increasing levels of top-down, command-and-control management to natural resources. This is manifested in attempts to control ecosystems and in socioeconomic institutions that respond to erratic or surprising ecosystem behavior with more control. Command and con...

National and international economic policy has usually ignored the environment. In areas where the environment is beginning to impinge on policy, as in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it remains a tangential concern, and the presumption is often made that economic growth and eco...

This volume reports key findings of the Biodiversity Program of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Beijer Institute. The program brought together a number of eminent ecologists and economists to consider the nature and significance of the biodiversity problem. In encouraging collaborative work between these closely related disciplines it sought...

This volume reports key findings of the Biodiversity Program of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Beijer Institute. The program brought together a number of eminent ecologists and economists to consider the nature and significance of the biodiversity problem. In encouraging collaborative work between these closely related disciplines it sought...

income goes upthere isincreasing environ- mental degradation uptoa point, after whichenvironmental quality improves. (Therelation hasan"inverted-U" shape.) Oneexplanation ofthis finding isthat people inpoorcountries cannot afford to emphasize amenities overmaterial well-be- ing. Consequently, intheearlier stages of economic development, increased p...

What significance does biodiversity have for humanity? How much does the loss of biodiversity matter? What resources should we be committing to its conservation? One reason why these are such difficult questions to answer lies in the enormous uncertainty associated with the loss of biodiversity. Extraordinarily little is known about the diversity o...

We began by posing these questions: What significance does biodiversity have for humanity? How much does the loss of biodiversity matter? What resources should we be committing to its conservation? The answers to all three questions presuppose that we can value biodiversity, and the valuation of biological resources has in fact been a recurrent foc...

The Everglades system is configured by processes operating across a wide range of scales in space and time. Major land use conversions associated with development have occurred during the past century, tranforming a once vast wetland landscape scarcely 5000 yr old. The natural controls of the system have been replaced by human ones, resulting in a...

We began by posing these questions: What significance does biodiversity have for humanity? How much does the loss of biodiversity matter? What resources should we be committing to its conservation? The answers to all three questions presuppose that we can value biodiversity, and the valuation of biological resources has in fact been a recurrent foc...

This volume is one of a number of publications to carry the results of the first research programme of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science's Beijer Institute. The Institute was formed in 1991 in order to promote interdisciplinary research between natural and social scientists on the interdependency between economic and ecological systems. In its f...

Ecosystem change has usefully been seen as controlled by two functions: exploitation, where rapid colonization of recently disturbed land is emphasized, and conservation where slow accumulation and storage of energy and material is emphasized. Analysis of a series of ecosystems — managed and unmanaged — indicates there are two additional functions....

For several billion years, the kinds of global changes addressed at this symposium reflected interactions among physical, geological, chemical and biological processes in which human activities played no significant role. Only within the last few centuries have changes at the global scale also begun to reflect the processes of economic and social d...

(1) Semi-arid savannas, wherever they occur, have generally been overgrazed and encroached on by bush. A model is developed which accounts for the growth of woody vegetation and of grasses, and analyses the competition between them for available soil water. (2) The model is based on Walter's two layer hypothesis. Woody vegetation and grasses compet...

(1) A procedure has been described for the qualitative analysis of insect outbreak systems using spruce budworm and balsam fir as an example. This consists of separating the state variables into fast and slow categories. (2) The dynamics of the fast variables are analysed first, holding the slow variables fixed. Then the dynamics of the slow variab...

THIS REVIEW EXPLORES BOTH ECOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE BEHAVIOR OF NATURAL SYSTEMS TO SEE IF DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF THEIR BEHAVIOR CAN YIELD DIFFERENT INSIGHTS THAT ARE USEFUL FOR BOTH THEORY AND PRACTICE. THE RESILIENCE AND STABILITY VIEWPOINTS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS CAN YIELD VERY DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCES...

The case studies of Kristianstads Vattenrike, Sweden; the Northern Highlands Lake District and the Everglades in the USA; the Mae Nam Ping Basin, Thailand; and the Goulburn-Broken Catchment, Australia, were compared to assess the outcome of different actions for transforming social-ecological systems (SESs). The transformations consisted of two pha...