Exploring spatial and temporal resilience in socio‐ecological systems: evidence from sacred forests in Epirus, Greece

Socio-ecological resilience is the capacity of a system to adapt to changing eco-logical and social disturbances. Its assessment is extremely important to integrate long-term management of ecological and social features of natural ecosystems. This is especially true for Sacred Natural Sites, such as sacred forests and groves, where it can reveal the influence of social processes in ecosystem recovery or degradation. Using tree ages determined through dendrochronology and tree population size- class distributions collected in five sacred forests in Epirus (NW Greece), we explore spatial and temporal dynamics of resilience in a socio-ecological system, identifying which cultural and social elements characterize resilience in space and time. Our main results show that over past centuries sacred forests in Epirus underwent periods of varying tree establishment rate, depending on the intensity of human activities and historical disturbance events. We also identified strong evidence of the role of the social component (i.e. the church and associated cultural praxis) in determining the spatial extent of the forests' current recovery phase, and thus the overall resilience of the system. Policy implications. Appreciation of the ways sacred forests' ecological resilience is linked to changing socio-cultural praxis over both temporal and spatial scales is crucial for guiding conservation and restoration strategies. We argue that greater attention should be paid to the role of the social component of socio-ecological systems and specifically for sacred natural sites that provide both a nucleus of established forest habitat and the conditions necessary for forest recovery and restoration.