Generic Indicators of Ecological Resilience: Inferring the Chance of a Critical Transition

Ecological resilience is the ability of a system to persist in the face of perturbations. Although resilience has been a highly influential concept, its interpretation has remained largely qualitative. Here we describe an emerging family of methods for quantifying resilience on the basis of observations. A first set of methods is based on the phenomenon of critical slowing down, which implies that recovery upon small perturbations becomes slower as a system approaches a tipping point. Such slowing down can be measured experimentally but may also be indirectly inferred from changes in natural fluctuations and spatial patterns. A second group of methods aims to characterize the resilience of alternative states…