Ecological resilience: what to measure and how

Abstract

The question of what and how to measure ecological resilience has been troubling ecologists since Holling 1973's seminal paper in which he defined resilience as the ability of a system to withstand perturbations without shifting to a different state. This definition moved the focus from studying the local stability of a single attractor to which a system always converges, to the idea that a system may converge to different states when perturbed. These two concepts have later on led to the definitions of engineering (local stability) vs ecological (non-local stability) resilience metrics. While engineering resilience is associated to clear metrics, measuring ecological resilience has remained elusive. As a result, the two notions have been studied largely independently from one another and although several attempts have been devoted to mapping them together in some kind of coherent framework, the extent to which they overlap or complement each other in quantifying the resilience of a system is not yet fully understood. In this perspective, we focus on metrics that quantify resilience following Holling's definition based on the concept of a stability landscape. We explore the relationships between different engineering and ecological resilience metrics derived from bistable systems and show that, for low dimensional ecological models, the correlation between engineering and ecological resilience can be high. We also review current approaches for measuring resilience from models and data, and we outline challenges which, if answered, could help us make progress towards a more reliable quantification of resilience in practice.

Development of Urban Waste Recycling Industry from the Perspective of Ecology

“…Utilization and Industrialization of Urban Construction Waste in China [17,18]. erefore, considering the structural characteristics of the current demolished buildings, it is determined that the demolition of 1 m 2 of buildings will produce about 1.30 t construction waste.…”

Scaling up our understanding of tipping points

“…A better understanding of these relationships could help us identify how many and which metrics need to be measured in natural systems [24,25,63]. This is especially true for metrics related to abrupt transitions for which we need to understand the relations between each other but also with other stability metrics [62].…”

“…In the same way as the stability of ecological communities has been estimated in a variety of ways using many different metrics [24,25,61], this is also true for resilience and more generally for metrics related to catastrophic shifts [62]. This multiplicity of metrics used to quantify the concepts of stability and resilience in ecological studies raises the question of how the different metrics relate to each other [24].…”

Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years

“…The recent incorporation of genomics can further help assessing and monitoring restoration efforts [75,76]. Since ecosystem degradation or even collapse is connected to loss of resilience, an ambitious goal would be to define a reliable sensing method that provides a measurable index [77,78]. Using as a working definition of resilience, namely the capacity of a system to recover from perturbations, Lenton et al [68] have suggested a practical implementation.…”