Abstract
Many definitions of resilience have been proffered for natural and engineered ecosystems, but a conceptual consensus on resilience in microbial communities is still lacking. We argue that the disconnect largely results from the wide variance in microbial community complexity, which range from compositionally simple synthetic consortia to complex natural communities, and divergence between the typical practical outcomes emphasized by ecologists and engineers. Viewing microbial communities as elasto-plastic systems that undergo both recoverable and unrecoverable transitions, we argue that this gap between the engineering and ecological definitions of resilience stems from their respective emphases on elastic and plastic deformation, respectively. We propose that the two concepts may be fundamentally united around the resilience of function rather than state in microbial communities and the regularity in the relationship between environmental variation and a community's functional response. Furthermore, we posit that functional resilience is an intrinsic property of microbial communities and suggest that state changes in response to environmental variation may be a key mechanism driving functional resilience in microbial communities.
Highlights
Microorganisms collectively exceed the biomass of all macrobiota on the planet (Whitman et al, 1998)
Moving toward an integrated framework for understanding microbial community resilience, we propose reconciling concepts of engineering and ecological resilience through (1) consideration of microbial communities as systems that undergo both elastic and plastic deformation, and (2) defining resilience as the rate of recovery of a function of interest
Redundancy, diversity, and modularity are frequently advanced as mechanisms for robustness in complex systems (Kitano, 2004), but in some cases, and in structurally simple consortia, they may not be directly related to resilience
Summary
Microorganisms collectively exceed the biomass of all macrobiota on the planet (Whitman et al, 1998). The diversity of environments in which communities are investigated, the large array of functions of interest, and the range of research objectives concerning stability beg the question of whether a single definition of resilience can be universally applied across systems and scales for microbial communities.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call