Abstract
Resilience is a key concept in the study of the recovery of ecosystems affected by disturbances. Currently, there are numerous indices to measure resilience, but many of them do not show the accuracy of the resilience value or the behaviour of ecological parameters in the face of disturbances. New approaches and technologies enable large amounts of information to be obtained, facilitating the proposal of new resilience indices that work consistently and intuitively for a wide variety of ecological response variables under different scenarios after pulse-disturbances. In this study, we propose and verify a new resilience index, comparing its performance with others previously published. We validated the performance of the new index using real data based on field measurements of changes in soil bacterial OTUs diversity and abundance after a wildfire. The new resilience index provided an automatic and robust functional classification of the behaviour of ecosystems after disturbances, supported by a bootstrap analysis. We identified 5 scenarios of ecosystem resilience performance according to their behaviour after a pulse-disturbance: resilient, non-resilient, recovering, rebound, and continuing.
Highlights
The ecological impacts of disturbances on the functioning, compo sition and structure of ecosystems are dependent on their intensity and frequency, as well as the spatial distribution and size of the disturbed patches
Orwin and Wardle (2004) proposed two indices to quantify the resistance and resilience or recovery of soil biota after different types of disturbances, which have been used in numerous studies
The indices were designed to analyse the response of soil microbial parameters, they have sometimes been used with variables other than soil microorganism diversity, e.g. by Wyszkowska et al (2021) to measure maize yield resistance to herbicide applications; or indices to quantify the resistance (iRS) and iRL by Borowik et al (2019) to explore the effects of contamination by diesel oil and unleaded petroleum in Elymus elongatus yields
Summary
The ecological impacts of disturbances on the functioning, compo sition and structure of ecosystems are dependent on their intensity and frequency, as well as the spatial distribution and size of the disturbed patches These impacts can move through a wide range from unaltered to completely altered. Together with the resistance concept, resilience is defined as the capacity of communities to return to their original state prior to the disturbance, both concepts forming the com ponents of ecological stability (Allison and Martiny, 2008). Orwin and Wardle (2004) proposed two indices to quantify the resistance (iRS) and resilience or recovery (iRL.OW, these indices were labelled as RS and RL in the Orwin and Wardle original paper) of soil biota after different types of disturbances, which have been used in numerous studies (more than 240 citations in Scopus). The indices were designed to analyse the response of soil microbial (frequently, bacterial) parameters, they have sometimes been used with variables other than soil microorganism diversity, e.g. by Wyszkowska et al (2021) to measure maize yield resistance to herbicide applications; or iRS and iRL by Borowik et al (2019) to explore the effects of contamination by diesel oil and unleaded petroleum in Elymus elongatus yields
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