Article Interactions among ecosystem stressors and their importance ...

Not all wetlands are the same. Some are isolated, some connected to or with adjacency to surface waters, some fed by just rain or groundwater. Some as the Okeefenokee Swamp will burn infrequently, but severely during periods of drought (such as the Big Turn Around and other fires in 2007), so fire protection zones and associated activities may be needed to protect communities. Various infrequent hazards of wildfire may include evacuation needs, smoke, visability, snags - hazard trees, health and safety. How to manage these varied systems is helpful with adequate mapping and inventories of soils, habitats, vegetation and hydrology, as well as community boundaries, facilities, roads, etc. Altering hydrology by various means accidently or intentionally is a major stressor, as are invasive species and development activities. Including various technical specialists in analysis for management decisions will help address not only the physical geology, soils, vegetation, wildlife and hydrology, but also the social aspects related to community decisions. Wetland resilience is sometimes lost when activities or actions failed to consider them. However, damaged wetlands can sometimes be rehabilated or restored. Some wetlands provide critical habitats for sensitive or endangered species, so important to know enough about these systems to address their level of importance to ecosystem management.

Chinmaya, I may not be fully understanding your questions so let me see if I can restate them. You want to know if there is a relationship between how wetlands are governed (e.g., policies that affect the use, management, and potentially conversion of wetlands) and how resilient human communities are to disturbances given the governance (which in turn affects the degree to which wetlands can be altered by human management)? If I have that stated correctly, then it would seem to me that if you want to address this question empirically, then you would need to define wetland/human community linkages (i.e., identify where you can associated a particular community with a particular wetland system). Then you would need to quantify how the governance and human management of those wetlands varies across your identified wetland/community observation units. The final piece would then be data on disturbances to the human community (e.g., floods), and if possible, some measure of recovery following that disturbance (the return time to some measure of pre-disturbance economic output, farm production, or direct harvest of some provisioning resource from the wetland system). I have attached a paper that looked at the likelihood of wetland conversion given the landscape context that the wetland occurs in. If there were a way to define the governance context, then perhaps a similar approach could be taken to start addressing your questions (assuming I have understood them properly).

Chinmaya, You're working on an interesting problem. If you are speaking of 'correlation' in the quantitative sense, then I am not entirely clear on what you are measuring on the 'governance' axis. Is it the number of laws or regulations tied to the usage of the wetland? If you can state how you quantify the degree of governance for a particular wetland I think that would help. From the 'resilience' axis...you might look into the Gini coefficient which would indicate the equality of assets derived from a wetland. The idea would be, I think, that a more equitable distribution of asset classes derived from a wetland, the more resilient the community will be in the face of climate change. I suspect that governance (regulation) may either limit or facilitate the asset classes that could be derived from a particular wetland, so its not clear in my mind what the a priori expectation might be. Perhaps you have some expectations given your understanding of the system you are studying. -- Curt

Chinmaya, I'll respond to your two requests:

"[C]an you provide me any suggested model which incorporate both?"

If you have some theory that would drive some expected relationships, then I would use that theory to specify the functional form for the relationship between governance and resilience. I am an ecologist, not an economist. But if economists are anything like ecologists then there are likely competing expectations for the relationship you are exploring. That will put you squarely into the realm of model selection and multimodel inference (see two books on the subject by Ken Burnham and David Anderson (2nd edition is titled: Model section and multimodel inference: a practical information-theoretic approach). These books will have an ecological bias, but the application to your setting should be straighforward.

Can you "...provide any supporting document regarding the usage of Gini coefficient in the assessment of resilience."

I have attached a paper that may be helpful.

Chinmaya, A paper on wetland policy (under the set of papers that are coming out under the "Scientists Warning) just came out in Wetlands. Thought it would be relevant to your work. -- Curt

As mentioned, there are various types of wetlands, with hydric soils, hydrophytic plants and hydrology. Some types as loblolly and longleaf pine wetlands, can supply wood, pasture if thinned sufficiently and grazed properly, rare species as red cockaded woodpecker, etc. There are other types of wetlands that provide for rare or endangered plant or animal associations. I am not aware, due to wetland soil anoxic condition, if very many provide fishery habitat, but certain salamander and frog, some quite rare, prefer select wetlands. In most cases, if one drains, develops or modifies wetlands, there is some likelihood that the wetland is lost, damaged or otherwise limited function. Without knowing the specifics and visiting the sites with other professionals such as ecologists, as well as the intentions of developers and managers, it is not appropriate to generalize on potential effects to specific wetlands. Functional wetlands may have substantial limits to development and management, and very worthwhile endeavor to analyze effects and mitigations needed before changes are made.