NATURAL CAPITAL SECURITY/VULNERABILITY RELATED TO DISTURBANCE IN A PANARCHY OF SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES

Ecosystem health and integrity are here framed into the more general concept of environmental security and thus enriched by explicitly addressing objective and subjective risk to ecosystem services by human activities. Environmental security, as the opposite of environmental vulnerability (fragility), is multi-layered, multi-scale and complex, existing in both the objective physical, biological, and social realm, and the subjective realm of individual human perception. In this paper, we detect and quantify the scales and spatial patterns of human land use as ecosystem disturbances at different hierarchical levels in a panarchy of social-ecological landscapes (SELs) by using a conceptual framework that characterizes multi-scale disturbance patterns exhibited on satellite imagery over a four-year time period in Apulia (South Italy). We advance the measure of the functional importance of ecosystem service providers (ESPs) provided by natural areas and permanent cultivations based on their effectiveness at performing the services. Any landscape element contributes to the overall proportion of disturbance in the region, through its composition and configuration of disturbed locations. Such landscape elements represent, in turn, functional units for assessing functional contributions of ESPs at different scales of operation of the service. We assume that such effectiveness at performing the services will result directly affected by how much disturbance surrounds ESP locations at different neighborhoods. Multi-scale measurements of the composition and spatial configuration of disturbance are the basis for evaluating vulnerability of ecosystem services through multi-scale disturbance profiles concerning land-use locations where most of ecosystem service providers reside. Vulnerability estimates are derived from the identification of scale range couplings or mismatches among land-use disturbances related to different land uses and revealed by trajectories from the global profile to local spatial patterns. Scale mismatches of disturbances in space and time determine the role of land use as a disturbance source or sink, and may govern the triggering of landscape changes affecting ESPs at the scales of operation of the service. The role of natural areas and permanent cultivations (olive groves and vineyards) in providing disturbance regulation across scales in Apulia has consequences for regional SELs since it may govern if and how disturbances associated with land-use intensification (sources) will affect the functional contribution of ESPs.