摘要：This paper explores approaches of applying the panarchy perspective to a case study of natural resourcemanagement in the cultural landscape of upland alpine pastures in northern Italy. The close interaction within the culturallandscape between alpine pasture ecology and the management regimes offers a strong fit with the concept of social-ecologicalsystems and provides insights to appropriate and adaptive management of sites of conservation interest. We examine the limitedliterature available that offers a resilience understanding of such landscapes and address apparent gaps in the application throughour interpretation and use of adaptive cycles and panarchy. We draft conceptual models of adaptive cycles considering ecologicaland socioeconomic information as acting in separate but interacting domains. Notwithstanding the difficulties in defining andmeasuring quantitative state variables, we found that a panarchy model can offer a powerful metaphor with practical implicationsfor the maintenance of such alpine cultural landscapes. In effect, our panarchy interpretation of interacting adaptive cyclesprovides new insights into the description of and the future options for land use in our case study area. Some issues are onlypartly developed. We hypothesized measurable parameters that could be related to system resilience, such as alternative states,shifting thresholds, and regime stability, which are all dependent on adaptive processes; but we found quantification difficulteven at a conceptual level. Nevertheless, we found it helpful to use nature conservation evaluation as a useful surrogate formeasures of capital in adaptive cycles of vegetation. However, care is needed to distinguish between the descriptive metaphorusing selective surrogate measures and real ecological behavior. Additionally we recognize the need to integrate this ecologicalunderstanding with cycles in socioeconomic domains and consider that interactions between the loss of both social and ecologicalcapital would be interesting issues to explore further in our case study.We suggest that resilience theory, through its focus on adaptive cycles interacting at different speeds and across varyinggeographic scales, offers useful insights into resource management and in particular for nature conservation interest sites, byfocusing more on dynamics than on an optimal state of species assemblages. This may help to define sites and to achieve theobjectives of Natura 2000 through the European Habitats Directive, offering a basis to guide a conservation of processes, inwhich cultural tradition and local ecological knowledge are valued
关键词：adaptive cycles; alpine pastures; cultural landscapes; Natura 2000; natural resource management; panarchy
