Ecosystem health assessments are integral to monitoring and safeguarding landscapes, particularly in the face of rapid anthropogenic change. Many indicator frameworks exist, yet human/social systems are often only included as drivers of deleterious change. Interest in human land-use and stewardship as a driver of biodiversity conservation has been undervalued in conservation monitoring, despite substantial evidence for human activities that promote biodiversity at landscape scales, such as practices that create heterogeneity and structural complexity including grazing, biomass removal, and nutrient depletion.
To integrate human land-use into ecosystem function models, we developed a framework for the Santa Cruz Mountains (SCMs), a ~3000km2 ecoregion that supports diverse ecosystems and social systems. By assessing existing ecological, social, and social-ecological frameworks, we identified key attributes for monitoring landscapes characterized by a mosaic of land-uses and stewardship types. We developed a coupled, nested social-ecological system framework which characterizes ecological and human-social state variables within this landscape. We identified and mapped indicators of ecosystem condition and social goods/services utilizing geospatial data from diverse sources/stakeholders across the region and produced new datasets from remotely-sensed imagery. Finally, we explored whether stewardship activities contribute to social-ecological health by investigating how indicators track with variation in stewardship practices across this landscape.
Results/Conclusions
We developed the Stewardship Mosaic Social-Ecological System (SM-SES) framework, which defines landscape health as a composite of ecosystem condition (vigor, organization, resilience) and social goods/services (provisioning, regulating, cultural services). We identified nearly 50 indicators of social-ecological health. Indicators include focal habitats and species/taxonomic groups representing critical aspects of ecosystem organization and biodiversity within the region. We constructed a set of landscape-scale indicators of ecosystem vigor utilizing satellite imagery, including canopy water content and peak-season NDVI. Resilience indicators include stewardship commitments, such as legal protected status and stewardship practices, as well as landscape features such as reserve size and ecological heterogeneity. We measured social well-being and cultural sustainability utilizing indicators of provisioning services (e.g, food, fiber, jobs, livelihoods), regulating services (e.g., air and water quality), and cultural services (e.g., practices of Indigenous spirituality/stewardship, equitable access to nature).
Across the region, spatial patterns of ecosystem condition and social goods/services were highly variable, but ecological condition and social goods/services did not appear to trade-off. Moreover, some stewardship activities (e.g., grazing) were associated with positive social-ecological conditions (e.g., higher biodiversity and cattle production). All data and results, including dynamic maps and visualizations, are available to stakeholders as an online, interactive Stewardship Atlas.