From resilience to potential transition risk: Exploring the spatial dynamics of species diversity across multiple regimes

Arid and semi-arid regions, as complex social-ecological systems, are not static states but a landscape in a condition of continuous “transition,” in which biodiversity is constantly reorganized through the nonlinear interaction between environmental constraints and human pressures. This study aimed to uncover the dynamic patterns of species diversity, social-ecological resilience, and regime transition risk in an arid basin of Kerman Province, Iran. The results showed that species diversity displays a strongly mosaic and non-stationary structure, ranging from 0 to 0.89. The Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model revealed that ecological control over the system varies spatially: environmental factors, with a mean coefficient of 1.67, play the dominant role in driving diversity, whereas the effects of exploitation (0.824), socio-economic factors (0.759), and management (0.263) are markedly heterogeneous and strongly location-dependent. Transition risk analysis indicated that the landscape is in a “semi-critical” condition: 32% of the area lies at the threshold of transition, 27% is in a critical state, and 16% faces a high risk of regime shift, together, 43% of the region is moving along a transition of structural instability. At the same time, the socio-ecological transition-risk matrix showed that only 28% of the region remains in a stable transitional state, while 38% has already entered degraded or critical regimes, a pattern that reflects the simultaneous coexistence of “fragile stability” and “gradual collapse” at the landscape scale. Taken together, these findings show that the study area functions as an active transition landscape, in which the balance between environmental and human forces is being continually renegotiated, and even small shifts in exploitation pressure or management capacity could redirect the system toward either stable or collapsed regimes.