Social and ecological factors and land-use land-cover diversity in two provinces in southeast Asia

Diversity, as a key component of complex adaptive systems (CASs), provides the range of responses that determine how the system can adapt and change. We test how land-use land-cover (LULC) diversity, as a generalization for cross-site comparison of social-ecological systems (SESs), responds spatially to elevation, distance to roads, and distance to market – factors known to influence change in individual LULC types. We compare these responses in adjacent, but different landscapes in Thailand and Cambodia. Both SESs exhibit overall trends of decreasing LULC diversity in response to increasing elevation, distance to roads, and distance to market at all scales. At the micro-scale LULC diversity's relation to distance to roads is more linear than hypothesized, whereas that to distance to markets and to elevation reflects the hypothesized inverted U with tailing decrease. Differences between the two SESs are attributed to how internally connected they are in terms of infrastructure. Change in the strengths of relationships between LULC diversity and different factors provides quantified information on the importance of those factors in the SES, and the opportunity to assess the system's state.