This is a great reading list and a nice summary of some of the latest thinking. I'll certainly be trying to track down these papers. Unfortunately, most people (me included) won't be able to access them directly because they're behind paywalls. Oh, well.
One issue they didn't mention in their introduction is confusion around the definition of "resilience". It seems intuitively straightforward but there are a dozen different definitions of resilience and stability and some of them appear contradictory. I'm working on resilience and stability in a particular grassland ecosystem. I'm pretty sure that "non-resilient and unstable" doesn't describe my study area. But I can't decide whether my data indicate that the system is resilient and stable, resilient but unstable, or stable but not resilient.
So, I'll have to do a lot more reading to get a handle on the differences between resilience and stability. I think part of the problem is that they are very much relative concepts. A system can be "unstable" compared to a similar system (say, a badly-managed grassland versus an adjacent well-managed grassland) but would be considered "stable" by, say, an ecologist from an arid ecosystem accustomed to wild fluctuations in conditions.
This is a great reading list and a nice summary of some of the latest thinking. I'll certainly be trying to track down these papers. Unfortunately, most people (me included) won't be able to access them directly because they're behind paywalls. Oh, well.
One issue they didn't mention in their introduction is confusion around the definition of "resilience". It seems intuitively straightforward but there are a dozen different definitions of resilience and stability and some of them appear contradictory. I'm working on resilience and stability in a particular grassland ecosystem. I'm pretty sure that "non-resilient and unstable" doesn't describe my study area. But I can't decide whether my data indicate that the system is resilient and stable, resilient but unstable, or stable but not resilient.
So, I'll have to do a lot more reading to get a handle on the differences between resilience and stability. I think part of the problem is that they are very much relative concepts. A system can be "unstable" compared to a similar system (say, a badly-managed grassland versus an adjacent well-managed grassland) but would be considered "stable" by, say, an ecologist from an arid ecosystem accustomed to wild fluctuations in conditions.