Ecosystem Resilience and Sustainability in a Dynamically Changing Environment

Abstract

The concept of resilience has conventionally been defined as the ability of a system to recover to a previous state after a disturbance. The influence of changing climate patterns now also, in addition to the effects of human activities, impact on ecosystem resilience, which refers to the ability of a system to persist dynamically and to adapt to changing environmental conditions. This relates to two natural units with different complexity and dynamics, namely populations and ecosystems, whose attributes contribute to ecosystem resilience and stability. In general, flows of energy maintain the organization and functioning of the ecosystem and constitute the entropy of the system, that is, the energy that the ecosystem uses to deal with disturbances and to maintain a thermodynamic balance. In an environment that naturally changes along a trend, such as can be observed today in many climatic patterns, populations adapt through their biomass production capacity, and this, in turn, causes the reconfiguration of ecosystems through adjustments in the dynamics of energy flows through predator‒prey relationships. This process of sustained change and continual reconfiguration of the ecosystem defines the attributes of dynamic resilience and sustainability, properties that are in need for adaptive strategies in the use of ecosystem resources.