Resilience and riverine landscapes: An introduction

Resilience is a powerful lens to understand complex natural and human systems and the major issues they face. The concept of resilience is implicit to the study and management of riverine landscapes as dynamic social–ecological systems. Despite strong overlaps between river science, social systems and the concept of resilience, translating resilience from a body of academic thought to adoption and application has its challenges. This chapter outlines the development and structure of the edited volume on resilience and riverine landscapes. There are four main sections to the volume. The first section explains why rivers are ideal landscapes to study resilience and why studying rivers from a resilience perspective is important for our understanding of these landscapes and for society. The second and third sections focus on the biophysical and social–ecological character of resilience in riverine landscapes. Section 4 considers the applications and implications of riverine landscape from a resilience perspective. With the increased recognition of the need to prepare for anticipated and unanticipated shocks, there has been an increasing application of resilience as the guiding principle to the study and management of riverine landscapes as social–ecological systems.