Moving beyond the panarchy heuristic

Abstract

Panarchy is a heuristic of complex system change rooted in resilience science. The concept has been rapidly assimilated across scientific disciplines due to its potential to envision and address sustainability challenges, such as climate change and regime shifts, that pose significant challenges for humans in the Anthropocene. However, panarchy has been studied almost exclusively via qualitative research. Quantitative approaches are scarce and preliminary but have revealed novel insights that allow for a more nuanced understanding of the heuristic and resilience science more generally. In this roadmap we discuss the potential for future quantitative approaches to panarchy. Transdisciplinary development of quantitative approaches, combined with advances in data accrual, curation and machine learning, may build on current tools. Combined with qualitative research and traditional approaches used in ecology, quantification of panarchy may allow for broad inference of change in complex systems of people and nature and provide critical information for management of social-ecological systems.

Keywords: cross-scale structure; dynamic change; ecosystems; information flow; panarchy; quantitative ecology; social-ecological systems.

Figure 1:

A roadmap towards moving beyond the panarchy model. The schematic shows how the heuristic can be extended through the development of a quantitative framework, based on current and novel modeling approaches and advances in data collection and processing. Implications for management and resilience science are indicated. The conceptualization is not exhaustive and meant as a basis to inspire future quantitative research.