Resilience

Resilience is a central concept in ecology and biodiversity. The ability of ecological systems to resist, recover, and in some cases even benefit from disturbances is of integral importance in our ability to predict how biodiversity and its ecoservices may change in the future. However, the term resilience is often debated by ecologists (as well as many other peripheral disciplines). In the SalGo Team we are developing approaches to quantify and predict how ecological systems (from individuals, to populations, to whole communities) respond to disturbances. These approaches are primarily (but not uniquely) based on the examination of non-leading eigenvalues of structured systems, and in the combination of functional trait dimensions to predict fitness components.

We are currently examining, based on a recent framework developed in the team, how the resilience ability of species varies as a fucntion of their proximity to urban settlements, the relative importance of recent vs. deep-time disturbances in species resilience and biodiversity, and the role of functional-traits in predicting transient vs. long term system responses to disturbances such as droughts and fires.