Ecological resilience: what to measure and how

Abstract The question of what and how to measure ecological resilience has been troubling ecologists since Holling 1973s seminal paper in which he defined resilience as the ability of a system to withstand perturbations without shifting to a different state. This definition moved the focus from studying the local stability of a single attractor to which a system always converges, to the idea that a system may converge to different states when perturbed. These two concepts have later on led to the definitions of engineering (local stability) vs ecological (non-local stability) resilience metrics. While engineering resilience is associated to clear metrics, measuring ecological resilience has remained elusive.…