Concept Of Ecological Resilience Research Articles

Promoting urban ecological resilience through the lens of avian biodiversity

The significance of urban landscapes in safeguarding biodiversity is often disregarded, even though a considerable amount of conservation focus is directed toward biodiversity hotspots where urban land conversion is happening at the fastest pace. Maintaining biodiversity in urban areas not only benefits the environment, but along with social, economic, and technological factors can increase the stability of urban systems to disturbance, a concept known as “urban resilience”. In this synthesis paper, we explore the ecological dimension of urban resilience and specifically focus on avian biodiversity because birds are easy to observe, relatively abundant, and can serve as an indicator of the overall health of urban environments. We first examine the concept of ecological resilience and discuss the role of environmental stressors associated with urbanization in the ongoing avian biodiversity crisis. We then provide an overview of characteristics of the urban environment that may promote ecological resilience in birds, and associations between social and economic factors and urban ecological resilience. Finally, we provide recommendations on future research regarding strategies to improve urban ecological resilience and thus, urban resilience as a whole, at the intersections of urban ecology, ecosystem ecology, environmental justice, and urban planning. Since 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050, it is imperative that scientists, urban planners, civil engineers, architects, and others consider urban ecological resilience as a dimension of both environmental health and the resilience of cities to future natural and anthropogenic stressors.

Gut microb-aging and its relevance to frailty aging

This review explores ‘microb-aging’ in the gut and its potential link to frailty aging. We explore this connection through alterations in microbiota's taxonomy and metabolism, as well as with concepts of ecological resilience, pathobionts emergence, and biogeography. We examine microb-aging in interconnected body organs, emphasizing the bidirectional relationship with ‘inflammaging’. Finally, we discuss how targeting microb-aging could improve screening, diagnostic, and therapeutic approaches in geriatrics.

Re-grounding cumulative effects assessments in ecological resilience

Cumulative effects assessments (CEA) evolved to holistically understand and account for the impact of a spectrum of human and natural disturbances on ecosystems. Yet, the practice of CEA has struggled to overcome siloed and reductionist underpinnings common in the impact assessment arena. One way to move CEA towards more integrated approaches is by drawing on the concept of ecological resilience. Despite gaining considerable attention in other academic spheres, however, ecological resilience remains largely unexplored in CEAs. Motivated by this gap, the objective of this article is to explore how CEAs can be reimagined through an ecological resilience lens to cultivate more integrated and holistic CEA practices. We provide a brief synthesis of CEA theory and practice, highlighting where reductionist, disciplinary, and siloed approaches prevail. Then, we explore three shifts that could recast CEA through the concept of ecological resilience: (1) a shift from valued ecological components to values/identity (resilience pivots), (2) a shift from baseline assessments to ecological trajectories, and (3) a shift from management thresholds to safe operating spaces. We argue that intersecting the practice of CEA with the concept of ecological resilience offers a real opportunity to extend beyond simply being passive respondents to an incremental “death by 1000 cuts” to cultivating the conditions needed for ecological adaption and transformation along desirable pathways.

The regional difference, dynamic evolution, and multidimensional inequality of China's ecological environment quality from the concept of ecological resilience.

Based on the concept of ecological resilience, this paper systematically constructs an evaluation system of ecological environment quality and dynamically measures the ecological environment quality (EQI) and its dimensional oriented indices: environmental pollution production (PPI), environmental pollution management (PMI), and ecological environment restoration (ERI). Then, the dynamic evolution of EQI, PPI, PMI, and ERI could be analyzed by the kernel density estimation and Markov chain, and the multidimensional inequality and its sources of ecological environment quality are studied by Maasoumi index. The main conclusions are as follows: China's EQI shows a tendency of slow growth despite swings. In terms of dimensional-oriented indices, PPI exhibits a slow decreasing trend, and PMI and ERI exhibit an ongoing upward trend. There are showing signs of sustained improvement of EQI across regions, especially in the southwest and northwest. Meanwhile, EQI has the evolutionary characteristics of increasing internal regional synergy and inter-regional differentiation effects. The multidimensional inequality of EQI shows a downward trend first and then an upward trend, and its contribution decreases in turn with "PPI-ERI-PMI." There are obvious differences in the multidimensional inequality of EQI across regions. The intra-regional inequality is absolutely dominant. The marginal contribution of this paper is to construct an evaluation framework of ecological environment quality based on the concept of ecological resilience and to conduct empirical research on China's ecological environment quality, so as to further explain the spatial distribution, evolutionary path, and formation mechanism of China's ecological environment quality.

The multidimensional differences and driving forces of ecological environment resilience in China

Improving the ecological environment resilience is the key path to continuously improve the ecological environment quality and ensure the steady progress of ecological civilization construction in China. Based on the concept of ecological resilience, this paper constructs an evaluation system of ecological environment resilience (ERI) from the three dimensions of environment pollution production (PPI), environment pollution management (PMI) and ecological safeguard (ESI).The longitudinal and horizontal pull-out grading method is used to measure the ecological environment resilience and its dimensional oriented indices, and the dynamic regression and Shapley value decomposition are used to identify the driving forces of the multidimensional differences of ecological environment resilience and its dimensional oriented indices. The study found that: China's ERI reveals a tendency of slow growth despite swings. The PPI exhibits a slow decreasing trend and rises the explicit pressure, the ESI and the PMI exhibit an ongoing upward trend and an expanding upward trend of the implicit carrying capacity and resilience coordination. The regional ERI exhibit a general trend of continuous growth, and there is a positive correlation between PPI and PMI in each region; the higher the pollution produced, the stronger the management capacity. The overall explanatory power of the driving forces on the intuitive differences of ERI, PPI, ESI and PMI reaches 52.39%, 80.33%, 76.50%, and 71.47%, among which such as environmental improvement investment, sewage levies, green technological innovation and industrial upgrading are the main driving forces.

Resilience of Avian Communities to Urbanization and Climate Change: an Integrative Review

The concept of ecological resilience is widely used to assess how species and ecosystems respond to external stressors but is applied infrequently at the level of the community or to chronic, ongoing disturbances. In this review, we first discuss the concept of ecological resilience and methods for quantifying resilience in ecological studies. We then synthesize existing evidence for the resilience of avian communities to climate change and urbanization, two chronic disturbances that are driving global biodiversity loss, and conclude with recommendations for future directions. We only briefly discuss the theoretical framework behind ecological resilience and species-specific responses to these two major disturbances, because numerous reviews already exist on these topics. Current research suggests strong heterogeneity in the responses and resilience of bird communities to urbanization and climate change, although community disassembly and reassembly is high following both disturbances. To advance our understanding of community resilience to these disturbances, we recommend five areas of future study (1) the development of a standardized, comprehensive community resilience index that incorporates both adaptive capacity and measures of functional diversity, (2) measurement/modeling of both community resistance and recovery in response to disturbance, (3) multi-scale and/or multi-taxa studies that include three-way interactions between plants, animals, and climate, (4) studies that incorporate interactions between disturbances, and (5) increased understanding of interactions between ecological resilience and socio-ecological dynamics. Advancement in these areas will enhance our ability to predict and respond to the rapidly accelerating effects of climate change and urbanization.

Towards an Ethic of Ecological Resilience

ABSTRACT In this paper I use the concept of ecological resilience as a basis for a moral approach to the environment. Particularly, I propose a reformulation of Leopold'ss moral principle, central to ecocentrism, through the lense of ecological resilience. I will do this by, first, reviewing the main assumptions of ecocentrism and resilience ethics. I will then focus on the concept of resilience and its philosophical description, and I will try to further develop resilience ethics by reformulating the resilience principle and answering some potential problems by proposing the notion of ecological desirability.

Corrigendum: Quantifying Coral Reef Resilience to Climate Change and Human Development: An Evaluation of Multiple Empirical Frameworks

The integrity of coral reefs has increasingly been threatened by human development and climate change. As a result, the concept of ecological resilience – an ecosystem’s capability to resist and recover from environmental stressors – has become an important aspect of coral reef conservation. In this study, coral reef resilience was quantitatively scored in Kenting National Park (KNP), Taiwan, using four different assessment frameworks: the first uses the opinions of local reef experts, the second includes metrics specific to the local reef context, the third combines the previous two approaches, and the fourth relies solely on ecological metrics from biodiversity surveys. To evaluate the accuracy of each assessment, the resulting resilience scores were compared with historical coral recovery rates, which served as a proxy for resilience. While each approach to measuring resilience has its merits and drawbacks, the picture of resilience became clearest when a few key indicators were included to reflect core ecosystem processes. Trends in resilience scores varied depending on the makeup of the assessment's indicators, and there was little correlation between the baseline metrics measured using different data collection methods. However, all resilience assessment trends indicated that KNP’s Nanwan area is high in resilience. This is likely due to the effects of local tidally-induced upwelling, which significantly relieve the growing thermal stress placed on surrounding coral communities. Ultimately, the most successful assessments were those that empirically quantified ecological processes and local factors with only a few indicators, rather than broader approaches that measured many indicators. These findings are particularly relevant for reef managers to consider as they develop and employ resilience-based management strategies.

Quantifying Coral Reef Resilience to Climate Change and Human Development: An Evaluation of Multiple Empirical Frameworks

The integrity of coral reefs has increasingly been threatened by human development and climate change. As a result, the concept of ecological resilience – an ecosystem's capability to resist and recover from environmental stressors – has become an important aspect of coral reef conservation. In this study, coral reef resilience was quantitatively scored in Kenting National Park (KNP), Taiwan, using four different assessment frameworks: the first uses the opinions of local reef experts, the second includes metrics specific to the local reef context, the third combines the previous two approaches, and the fourth relies solely on ecological metrics from biodiversity surveys. To evaluate the accuracy of each assessment, the resulting resilience scores were compared with historical coral recovery rates, which served as a proxy for resilience. While each approach to measuring resilience has its merits and drawbacks, the picture of resilience became clearest when a few key indicators were included to reflect core ecosystem processes. Trends in resilience scores varied depending on the makeup of the assessment's indicators, and there was little correlation between the baseline metrics measured using different data collection methods. However, all resilience assessment trends indicated that KNP's Nanwan area is high in resilience. This is likely due to the effects of local tidally-induced upwelling, which significantly relieve the growing thermal stress placed on surrounding coral communities. Ultimately, the most successful assessments were those that empirically quantified ecological processes and local factors with only a few indicators, rather than broader approaches that measured many indicators. These findings are particularly relevant for reef managers to consider as they develop and employ resilience-based management strategies.

Editorial: Operationalizing the Concepts of Resilience and Resistance for Managing Ecosystems and Species at Risk

Ecological resilience is essential for maintaining ecosystem services in an era of rapid global change, but successful attempts to operationalize it for managing ecosystems at risk have been limited. Clear formulation and application of ecological resilience concepts can guide ecosystem management so that it enhances the capacity of ecosystems to resist and recover from disturbances and provides adaptive space for periods of ecological reorganization. As originally defined, ecological resilience measures the amount of perturbation required to change an ecosystem from one set of processes and structures to a different set of processes and structures, or the amount of disturbance that a system can withstand before it shifts into a new regime or alternative stable state (Holling, 1973). In applied ecology, ecological resilience is increasingly used to evaluate the capacity of ecosystems to absorb, persist, and adapt to inevitable and often unpredictable change, and to use that information to determine the most effective management strategies.

When Climate Turns Nasty, What Are Recent and Future Implications? Ecological and Human Health Review of Climate Change Impacts

The impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the last three decades have increasingly assumed from significant to threatening proportions and this causes major global concerns. This study aims at examining the recent and future impacts of global climate change on both ecological resources and human well-being. This review study is based on the general concept of ecological resilience: that coping with climate change stresses and disturbances depends on social resilience, political and environmental strategies accessible in a community. The study assessed over 300 peer-reviewed publications, both articles and books, which linked climate change impacts on ecosystems to social/health resilience of people in the specific regions. Publications on that were focused on general impacts of climate change on global ecology, ecosystem distribution shifts and phenology change; the ecological and social/health resilience, in the tropic and polar regions, were reviewed. The major finding of this study is that there is considerable variation in magnitudes and patterns of responses to climate change in different regions, even with an overall review of scientific studies on the global ecosystem and human health. Despite this, what is obvious is that change in the ecosystem in Polar Regions will continue to have significant impacts on the global environment, flora, fauna and ultimately human well-being. There are many uncertainties, though, on the possible effects of climate change ecosystem and soils and their severe biological, social, cultural and economic consequences. Notwithstanding these uncertainties, the impacts of climate change on both ecosystem and human socio-cultural activities are very likely to become even more widespread in the near future.

Metrics and Models for Quantifying Ecological Resilience at Landscape Scales

An explicit link between the abiotic environment, the biotic components of ecosystems, and resilience to disturbance across multiple scales is needed to operationalize the concept of ecological resilience. To accomplish this, managers must be able to measure the ecological resilience of current conditions and project resilience under future scenarios of landscape change. The goal of this paper is to present metrics and describe a process for using geospatial data, landscape pattern analysis and landscape dynamic simulation modeling to evaluate ecosystem resilience at management scales. The dynamic equilibria of species abundances, community structure, and landscape patterns that are produced under a given combination of abiotic conditions, such as topography, soils, and climate, can form a foundation to define desired conditions and measure resistance and resilience. The degree of forcing required to push the system from this dynamic range is a measure of resistance, and the rate of return to the dynamic range after the perturbation is a measure of the resilience and recovery of the system. Several tools from the field of landscape ecology are useful in defining the dynamic range of an ecosystem under natural regulation and to measure the forcing required to drive departure and the rate of recovery. Simulation models provide means to quantify the expected range of species abundance, community structure, and landscape patterns under a variety of scenarios, including the natural disturbance regime, current disturbance regime, and possible future regimes under alternative management and climate scenarios. Landscape pattern analysis and multivariate trajectory analysis provide a means to quantify conditions and change vectors relative to this desired range. Together this combination of tools provides a means to define the conditions of a desired state for an ecosystem, to quantify the degree of resistance and resilience of the system to perturbation, and to measure and monitor the departure from the range of natural variability in the system dynamics.

A Framework for Quantifying Resilience to Forest Disturbance

The concept of ecological resilience is an invaluable tool to assess the risk of state transitions and predict the impact of management on an ecosystem’s response to future disturbances. However, resilience is difficult to quantify and the factors contributing to resilience are often unknown in systems subject to multiple disturbances. Here, we develop and demonstrate a framework to assess the potential of ponderosa pine and dry mixed conifer forests to be resilient to future disturbance (recover as the same forest type within a managerially significant timeframe) by combining indicators of short-term resilience (ability to withstand disturbance) to fire, insect, and drought disturbances using data from the Rio Tusas-Lower San Antonio landscape in northern New Mexico. The dry mixed conifer forests displayed an average resilience score of 4.54, while ponderosa pine forests had an average score of 3.45 (total possible of nine points) Stand density index was the most important driver of the overall score in the dry mixed conifer type. In the ponderosa pine type, overall basal area was the strongest driver of the overall score. These indicators have the greatest impact on the resilience score and provide the most effective targets for management to increase the possibility of resilience in these forest types. We applied the model in both forest types by comparing individual stands to an ‘ideal’ score for a stand that is within the historic range of variation (HRV) of forest structure for each forest type and confirmed that stands outside of HRV had a low possibility of resilience and stands that had received restoration-based treatments were more likely to be resilient. Our results provide evidence that the changes to forest structure and species composition that have occurred since the onset of fire exclusion have degraded the potential of these forest types to be resilient to future fire, insect, and drought-related disturbances. By modifying disturbances and resilience indicator thresholds this model can be applied to assess resilience to other disturbances within these forest types and across various regions and ecosystem types.

Resilience Analysis for Competing Populations.

Ecological resilience refers to the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations or parameter changes. While understanding and quantifying resilience is crucial to anticipate the possible regime shifts, characterizing the influence of the system parameters on resilience is the first step toward controlling the system to avoid undesirable critical transitions. In this paper, we apply tools of qualitative theory of differential equations to study the resilience of competing populations as modeled by the classical Lotka-Volterra system. Within the high interspecific competition regime, such model exhibits bistability, and the boundary between the basins of attraction corresponding to exclusive survival of each population is the stable manifold of a saddle point. Studying such manifold and its behavior in terms of the model parameters, we characterized the populations resilience: While increasing competitiveness leads to higher resilience, it is not always the case with respect to reproduction. Within a pioneering context where both populations initiate with few individuals, increasing reproduction of one population leads to an increase in its resilience; however, within an environment previously dominated by one population and then invaded by the other, an increase in the resilience of a population is obtained by decreasing its reproduction rate. Besides providing interesting insights for the dynamics of competing populations, this work brings near to each other the concepts of ecological resilience and the methods of differential equations and stimulates the development and application of new tools for ecological resilience.

Operationalizing Ecological Resilience Concepts for Managing Species and Ecosystems at Risk

This review provides an overview and integration of the use of resilience concepts to guide natural resources management actions. We emphasize ecosystems and landscapes and provide examples of the use of these concepts from empirical research in applied ecology. We begin with a discussion of definitions and concepts of ecological resilience and related terms that are applicable to management. We suggest that a resilience-based management approach facilitates regional planning by providing the ability to locate management actions where they will have the greatest benefits and determine effective management strategies. We review the six key components of a resilience-based approach, beginning with managing for adaptive capacity and selecting an appropriate spatial extent and grain. Critical elements include developing an understanding of the factors influencing the general and ecological resilience of ecosystems and landscapes, the landscape context and spatial resilience, pattern and process interactions and their variability, and relationships among ecological and spatial resilience and the capacity to support habitats and species. We suggest that a spatially explicit approach, which couples geospatial information on general and spatial resilience to disturbance with information on resources, habitats, or species, provides the foundation for resilience-based management. We provide a case study from the sagebrush biome that illustrates the use of geospatial information on ecological and spatial resilience for prioritizing management actions and determine effective strategies.

How do ecological resilience metrics relate to community stability and collapse?

The concept of ecological resilience (the amount of disturbance a system can absorb before collapsing and reorganizing) holds potential for predicting community change and collapse—increasingly common issues in the Anthropocene. Yet neither the predictions nor metrics of resilience have received rigorous testing. The cross-scale resilience model, a leading operationalization of resilience, proposes resilience can be quantified by the combination of diversity and redundancy of functions performed by species operating at different scales. Here, we use 48 years of sub-continental avian community data aggregated at multiple spatial scales to calculate resilience metrics derived from the cross-scale resilience model (i.e., cross-scale diversity, cross-scale redundancy, within-scale redundancy, and number of body mass aggregations) and test core predictions inherent to community persistence and change. Specifically, we ask how cross-scale resilience metrics relate community stability and collapse. We found low mean cross-correlation between species richness and cross-scale resilience metrics. Resilience metrics constrained the magnitude of community fluctuations over time (mean species turnover), but resilience metrics but did not influence variability of community fluctuations (variance in turnover). We show shifts in resilience metrics closely predict community collapse: shifts in cross-scale redundancy preceded abrupt changes in community composition, and shifts in cross-scale diversity synchronized with abrupt changes in community composition. However, we found resilience metrics only weakly relate to maintenance of particular species assemblages over time. Our results distinguish ecological resilience from ecological stability and allied concepts such as elasticity and resistance: we show communities may fluctuate widely yet still be resilient. Our findings also differentiate the roles of functional redundancy and diversity as metrics of resilience and reemphasize the importance of considering resilience metrics from a multivariate perspective. Finally, we support the contention that ecological stability is nested within ecological resilience: stability predicts the behavior of systems within an ecological regime, and resilience predicts the maintenance of regimes and behavior of systems collapsing into alternative regimes.

Discontinuity Analysis Reveals Alternative Community Regimes During Phytoplankton Succession

Phytoplankton develops recurring spring and summer blooms, a well-recognized model in plankton succession theory. We used a 5-year (2007-2011) plankton data set and utilized discontinuity analysis to assess the cross-scale biomass (carbon content) structure in the sampled plankton data, a surrogate of ecological resilience and regime shifts. We hypothesized that spring and summer blooms comprise alternative community regimes, manifested in distinct cross-scale structure between these blooms. We also hypothesized that cross-scale structure within blooms is stable, indicating resilient regimes of individual blooms. Both hypotheses were supported by our analyses. Results show that discontinuity analysis provides complementary information about phytoplankton community succession compared to traditional taxonomic studies. This highlights that traditional phytoplankton successional models and ecological resilience concepts are not mutually exclusive. Combined they offer a broader view of ecological dynamics that may help refine theoretical ecology which in turn can inform management.

The notions of resilience in spatial planning for drought - flood coexistence (DFC) at regional scale

The notions of urban resilience and resilient city has been developed in the 2000s [1], four decades since the first concept of ecological resilience was originally introduced in the 1970s by ecologist C.S. Holling [2]. However, they have attracted great attentions and interests, in both academia and urban governance, then in planning practice over recent years. The first two sections of this paper examine the term resilience in ecological systems, urban systems, in spatial planning and in urban design. Specific attention of the paper, introduced in the third part, is to investigate resilience in the context of drought-flood coexistence (DFC), revolving two key objects and their interactions: DFC and urban at regional scale. Flood and drought events, in their turns intertwine in natural correlation, which is also reviewed. These relationships are literally investigated, to prove that they interplay mutually with each other, and that once a city develops in relation with water cycle at a regional context, in arid zone, not only hydrological drought could be regionally decreased, but human-induced floods could be ecologically regulated.The study concludes in the fourth, together with lessons from relevant case studies in America, China, with some principles on spatial planning, resilient/adaptive to DFC, which could be ecologically managed in correlation with urban development on a sustainable pathway.

Transformation of rural communities: lessons from a local self-initiative for building resilience in the Solomon Islands

ABSTRACTSolomon Islands is vulnerable to negative impacts from climate change, where people’s livelihoods and their well-being are threatened, especially the viability of isolated communities. Realising the increasing risks from climate change on communities, government, in partnership with aid-donor partners, has invested millions of dollars in climate change projects, through mitigation and adaptation strategies. As a form of adaptation, the government invests in programmes aimed at increasing the adaptive capacity of the vulnerable communities through landscape and seascape projects across the rural communities. Focusing on the “transformation concept” as a long-term adaptation strategy and enlargement of climate engineering and ecological resilience concepts, the paper discusses why building resilience from transformation of rural communities, as well as from landscape and seascape projects, would benefit communities and relevant authorities. This paper describes the findings of a study on two rural villages, Keigold and Mondo, from Ranogha Islands, Western Province, in Solomon Islands, where 80% of households decided to relocate from their old village “Mondo” to their new home “Keigold” after an earthquake in 2007, as part of a self-initiative. The reallocation process can be seen as a case of pro-active community transformation that provides valuable lessons to other rural communities that may be forced to move due to impacts from natural catastrophes, including those explained by climate change risks. Lessons from this experience suggest that policy-makers and non-government organisations should consider and empower local transformation initiatives as a way to building long-term adaptation to climate change.

To be (or not to be) resilient over time: facts and causes

This study provides novel evidence on the resilience of regional labour markets in Italy by applying the nonlinear smooth transition autoregressive modelling approach to newly released data on total, female and industrial employment. Five main conclusions derive from the empirical results. The concept of ecological resilience describes regional evolution in Italy over the past 40 years. Spatial differences in resilience result significant across Italian regions. Female employment registers low resilience dynamics and increasing vulnerability during shocks. Since the first half of nineties national and international destabilizing events contributed to amplify regional divergences. The uneven evolution and performance of the manufacturing sector across Italy provides some explanations on the asymmetric geographical distribution of resilience in this country. The concluding section summarizes the main findings of the work and proposes future avenues of research.