TY  - JOUR
T1  - How do land-use legacies affect ecosystem services in United States cultural landscapes?
JF  - Landscape Ecology
Y1  - 2017
A1  - Ziter, Carly
A1  - Graves, Rose A.
A1  - Turner, Monica G.
KW  - Agricultural ecosystems
KW  - Exurban ecosystems
KW  - Historical ecology
KW  - land-use change
KW  - Urban ecosystems
AB  - Landscape-scale studies of ecosystem services (ES) have increased, but few consider land-use history. Historical land use may be especially important in cultural landscapes, producing legacies that influence ecosystem structure, function, and biota that in turn affect ES supply. Our goal was to generate a conceptual framework for understanding when land-use legacies matter for ES supply in well-studied agricultural,urban, and exurban US landscapes. We synthesized illustrative examples from published literature in which landscape legacies were demonstrated or are likely to influence ES. We suggest three related conditions in which land-use legacies are important for understanding current ES supply. (1) Intrinsically slow ecological processes govern ES supply, illustrated for soil-based and hydrologic services impaired by slowly processed pollutants. (2) Time lags between land-use change and ecosystem responses delay effects on ES supply, illustrated for biodiversity-based services that may experience an ES debt. (3) Threshold relationships exist, such that changes in ES are difficult to reverse,and legacy lock-in disconnects contemporary landscapes from ES supply, illustrated by hydrologic services. Mismatches between contemporary landscape patterns and mechanisms underpinning ES supply yield unexpected patterns of ES. Today’s land-use decisions will generate tomorrow’s legacies, and ES will be affected if processes underpinning ES are affected by land-use legacies. Research priorities include understanding effects of urban abandonment, new contaminants, and interactions of land-use legacies and climate change. Improved understanding of historical effects will improve management of contemporary ES, and aid in decision-making as new challenges to sustaining cultural landscapes arise.
SN  - 1572-9761
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10980-017-0545-4
JO  - Landscape Ecology
ER  - 

TY  - JOUR
T1  - Historical foundations and future directions in macrosystems ecology
JF  - Ecology Letters
Y1  - 2016
A1  - Rose, Kevin C.
A1  - Graves, Rose A.
A1  - Hansen, Winslow D.
A1  - Harvey, Brian J.
A1  - Qiu, Jiangxiao
A1  - Wood, Stephen A.
A1  - Ziter, Carly
A1  - Turner, Monica G.
KW  - Hierarchy theory
KW  - landscape ecology
KW  - macrosystems ecology
KW  - space–time
KW  - spatio-temporal
AB  - Macrosystems ecology is an effort to understand ecological processes and interactions at the broadest spatial scales and has potential to help solve globally important social and ecological challenges. It is important to understand the intellectual legacies underpinning macrosystems ecology: How the subdiscipline fits within, builds upon, differs from and extends previous theories. We trace the rise of macrosystems ecology with respect to preceding theories and present a new hypothesis that integrates the multiple components of macrosystems theory. The spatio-temporal anthropogenic rescaling (STAR) hypothesis suggests that human activities are altering the scales of ecological processes, resulting in interactions at novel space–time scale combinations that are diverse and predictable. We articulate four predictions about how human actions are “expanding”, “shrinking”, “speeding up” and “slowing down” ecological processes and interactions, and thereby generating new scaling relationships for ecological patterns and processes. We provide examples of these rescaling processes and describe ecological consequences across terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. Rescaling depends in part on characteristics including connectivity, stability and heterogeneity. Our STAR hypothesis challenges traditional assumptions about how the spatial and temporal scales of processes and interactions operate in different types of ecosystems and provides a lens through which to understand macrosystem-scale environmental change.
SN  - 1461-0248
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.12717
ER  -