Abstract:Social-ecological systems are dynamic, non-equilibrium and hierarchical and as such require multi-scale analyses to reveal how they are structured and to formulate hypotheses about possible regulatory mechanisms. The resilience of social-ecological systems is the magnitude of exogenous disturbance that a system can experience without undergoing a regime shift under specified conditions, functions or processes. Here the disturbance which plays a utilitarian role in the study of resilience refers to any relatively discrete event in space and time that disrupts ecosystem, community, or population structure and changes resources, substrates, or the physical environment. Based on remotely sensed response index——NDVI and moving window algorithm——we describe an evaluation technique to quantify multi-scale disturbance that has resulted from long-term natural and man-induced interactive disturbance regimes. We use this technique to investigate how human disturbance may affect environmental conditions of areas at different spatial scales. Together the technique represents an operational framework for defining critical landscape thresholds as provided by scale domains, habitat adaptive cycles, and resilience by which scale-dependent ecological models could be developed, and applied. The potential of this approach for planning and management of habitats mosaics is also discussed.