ecological resilience

ecological resilience, the ability of an ecosystem to maintain its normal patterns of nutrient cycling and biomass production after being subjected to damage caused by an ecological disturbance. The term resilience is a term that is sometimes used interchangeably with robustness to describe the ability of a system to continue functioning amid and recover from a disturbance.

The resilience or robustness of ecological systems has been an important concept in ecology and natural history since the time of British naturalist Charles Darwin, who described the interdependencies between species as an “entangled bank” in his influential work On the Origin of Species (1859). Since then, the concept has come to hold special importance in the areas of environmental conservation and management. Its significance to the well-being of humans and human societies has also been recognized. The loss of an ecosystem’s ability to recover from a disturbance—whether due to natural events such as hurricanes or volcanic eruptions or due to human influences such as overfishing and pollution—endangers the benefits (e.g., food, clean water, and aesthetics) that humans derive from that ecosystem.

However, resilience is not always a positive feature of a system. For example, an ecosystem may be locked in an undesirable state, such as in the case of a eutrophic lake, where an overabundance of nutrients results in hypoxia (depleted oxygen levels), which can lead to the demise of desirable fish species and the proliferation of undesirable pests.

Development of the concept

In 1955 Canadian-born American ecologist Robert MacArthur proposed a measure of community stability that was related to the complexity of an ecosystem’s food web. He stated that ecosystem stability increased as the number of interactions (complexity) between the different species within the ecosystem also increased. His collaborator, Australian theoretical physicist Robert May, later showed that communities of species that were more diverse and more complex were actually less able to maintain an exact stable numerical balance among species. This seemingly counterintuitive idea occurs because resilience or robustness at the level of the ecosystem is actually enhanced by a lack of rigidity at the level of its individual components (i.e., the populations or species within the ecosystem). This elasticity means that ecosystem properties, such as changes in nutrient flow or the number of species, are more resilient due to changes in species composition. For example, the disappearance of the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) in many forests in eastern North America due to chestnut blight has been largely compensated for by the expansion of oak (Quercus) and hickory (Carya) species, although there are certainly commercial consequences of this replacement.

In 1973 Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling wrote a paper that focused on the dichotomy between a type of resilience inherent in an engineered device (that is, the stability that comes from a machine designed to operate within a narrow range of expected circumstances) and the resilience that emphasizes an ecosystem’s persistence as a particular ecosystem type (e.g., a forest as opposed to grassland), the latter being affected by substantially more factors than the former. Holling recognized the importance of the qualities that allowed a forest to persist as a functioning forest rather than its ability to harbour particular species at fixed levels or to maintain an arbitrary level of primary production. Holling’s seminal paper brought heightened attention to the resilience of ecological systems and influenced other disciplines, such as economics and sociology. It has resonated in particular with the perspectives of individuals such as American biophysicist and geographer Jared Diamond, who is known for his examination of the conditions under which human societies developed, thrived, and collapsed.

Resilience and the development of management tools

Ecological resilience or robustness has also become central to conservation practices and ecosystem management, particularly as the latter has shifted its attention to the importance of ecosystem services. Such services include the provision of food, fuel, and natural products (e.g., substances for pharmaceutical development); the mediation of climate; the removal of toxic materials from environmental reservoirs; and the aesthetic enjoyment that humans derive from the natural world. Although many species retain importance within the framework of ecosystem services, much of the focus of conservation has moved from individual species to the maintenance of the ecosystem as a whole, especially its ability to retain its structure and rate of productivity.

Many lakes, for example, are managed to remain oligotrophic (relatively nutrient poor), with ample oxygen to support species such as lake trout, rather than managed to retain excess nutrients and algae. In addition, many terrestrial dryland ecosystems are managed to keep a richly vegetated area from undergoing desertification. Ecologists continue to look for ways to manage forests, such as those in Africa, to resist the transformation into a savanna through periods of extended drought or frequent wildfire episodes. Furthermore, in the ocean, where individual fish species have long been the subject of regulation, there is growing recognition of the need to expand efforts to manage large areas as integrated ecosystems.

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Predicting the onset of disturbances such as eutrophication, desertification, and the collapse of fisheries has become an important component of ecosystem management. A greater emphasis on the identification of early-warning indicators, such as statistical fluctuations or correlations, has emerged. In particular, the ideas and techniques are being applied to medicine (such as in the onset of migraines or cardiac problems), research into climate change, and the operation of financial systems and markets. These indicators might serve as aids to management, much the same way that the detection of swarms of small earthquakes near a fault or an active volcano may portend the arrival of a larger seismic or eruptive event in the near future.

Equally important is the identification of the system’s structural features that might impede the risk of systemic collapse or endow a system with the ability to recover from a disturbance. In ecological systems, ecologists might consider the diversity and heterogeneity among individual components (such as whole species, populations, or individual organisms) and landscape features within an ecosystem. Forest managers, for example, try to prevent the spread of wildfires throughout a forest by building firebreaks that follow changes in the landscape, such as those that separate one patch of trees from another. In addition, redundancy (niche overlap between species) and modularity (the interconnectedness of a system’s components) are considered to be important factors that determine an ecosystem’s resilience.