Abstract
Cultural landscapes embody the interplay of human society and nature, shaping biocultural diversity, community identity, and their livelihoods through hubs of sustenance, trade, ecotourism, and cultural life; however, the resilience of these landscapes to the compounding effects of climate-driven and anthropogenic disturbances have entered a defining moment. Since 1980, the United States has endured 403 disaster events with costs exceeding $2.9 trillion and such events now occur on average every 19 days (NOAA). These figures underscore the urgency of assessing resilience, yet resilience assessments for cultural landscapes remain largely unexplored, particularly through community-based participatory research (CBPR) using mixed methods to generate quantifiable resilience metrics.
This dissertation addresses this gap by first outlining a framework that begins with CBPR methods. These methods identify community-based values and threats at biocultural assets and frame resilience in the American Beach landscape, providing the theoretical foundation for the composite resilience metric. Second, the framework then translates these ethnographic findings into quantifiable data through spatial analysis, mapping values and threats across the landscape and calculating metric components aligned with the OECD framework. The findings reveal that resilience in the American Beach landscape extends beyond the climate crisis and a return to an equilibrium state. Rather, resilience emerges as a collective construct shaped by historical and cultural continuity, stewardship, and resistance to development driven erasure. The resulting framework identifies the biocultural assets most at risk, helps target resource allocation and overall, offers a quantifiable, community-based approach for preserving biocultural diversity and promoting resilience decision-making.