Self-organization is a prominent theme of complexity studies that has been applied in studies of urban evolution and land-cover change. Little work has investigated the potential of self-organization to describe and explain landscape dynamics in frontier settings. The principal aims of this paper are: (a) to present a general theoretical framework of landscape dynamics for a frontier setting in Rondônia, Brazil based on a specific theory of self-organization known as self-organized criticality (SOC), (b) to describe the settlement pattern of a recently settled landscape by focusing on spatial fluctuations of landscape metrics as signatures, and (c) to discuss how plausible mechanisms with clear links to SOC may be considered by investigators of landscape evolution. A general SOC framework is situated within prevailing frameworks that feature proximate and distant drivers of land-cover change. Fourier techniques are used to assess spatial fluctuations of pattern metrics in multiple directions as landscape signatures. Periodicity and 1/f signatures consistent with SOC are simultaneously present dependent on directional orientation. Settings where SOC may serve as an important yet ultimately partial framework for pattern-oriented description and process-oriented explanation are discussed.
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