Regime Shift Influential Factors And Robustness Of Rural Social-Ecological Systems

With the impact of internal and external interference, regime shiftcan occur in social-ecological systems (SESs), leading to changes in the provision of ecosystem services, and can therefore have significant impacts on human well-being. In order to explore the regime features, factors influencing regime shift of rural SESs, and the system stability when faced with disturbance, in this paper, Hongjia Town in Changwu County is chosen as the study area, and the data is gained through on-siteinspection and semi-structured interviews. According to the train of thoughtf"scale division of SESs—recognition of system regime and state—influencing factors identification and analysis of system regime shift—robustness evaluation of system—management countermeasures", based on the scale of village (community) and farmers, selecting state variables to identify system regime and state, using the Multinomial Logistic model to identify the influential factors of system regime shift, building robustness evaluation index system, to evaluate the system robustness.The results showed that:(1)Scale dependence exists in regime shift of rural SESs.Due to different time to consume and threshold to across of different scales, at the village domain scale (the large scale), villages of Hongjia Town alone with the whole system of town domain shiftfrom the traditional agricultural regime into the new agriculture regime, being in four different states respectively;while at the farmer scale (the small scale),system regime shift shows the phenomenon of divergent and aggregation, that is, system regime and stateof farmerspresent diversity.(2)At the village domain scale, system regime shift is influenced by its own various factors.Geographical feature variables are the basic factors, social characteristic variables are the key factors,and economic characteristic variables also have certain influence on system regime shift. Atthe farmerscale, decision-making of farmers is mainly influenced by their family characteristic variables.Farmer type, algebra of farmer family, and family size are the basis factors of the peasant household regimeshift;while quality of cultivated land, the number of labor, the proportion of labor, culture level of labor are the key factorsof peasant household regimeshift;and householder age, farmer network are important factors of peasant household regime shift.(3)At the village domain scale, due to the differences of exposure to natural disasters, community responsiveness, connectedness, livelihood diversity and collective memory, different states of SESs present different robustness in the face of disturbance;at the farmer scale, because of different internal and external disturbance and inner buffer capacity, there are differences of robustness between different types of farmers.Whether at the village domain scale or the farmer scale, diversity of livelihood activities and source of income can improve the robustness of the system, while the single way of livelihood or land use can increase the risk of system.(4)Aim at reducing vulnerability, improving resilience, maintaining robustness of the rural SESs, this paper gives the local government some countermeasures and suggestions including enrich land use typesof farmers, improve the ability of response to natural disaster, establish and improve the production-sale networks, adjust industrial structure and improve the quality of the non-agricultural labors,et al, to ensure sustained and healthy development of the local SES.