Resilience: Cooperation of Social and Ecological Systems

Within recent years there has been a monumental awareness put towards environmental sustainability and resilience in response to the effects of humankind’s continued imposition on existent ecological processes. Weather they be industrial developments or more specifically agricultural practices, continued fragmentation of complex adaptive systems creates radical changes in ecological systems that extend far beyond a given developmental footprint. If adequate balances can be reached between agriculture and natural processes more aspects of landscape resilience can successfully adapt to the inevitable changes in the worlds ecology. Allowing ecological systems to continue is crucial to the preservation of all life and progression planet wide. An assessment and synthesis of complex adaptive systems across the Western Wild Rice Watershed, an approximate 800,000 acres in South Eastern North Dakota, will be condensed and explained in the following texts to illustrate the interactions among social-ecological components in a given landscape.