Accounting for Complexity in Resilience Comparisons: A Reply to Yeung and Richardson, and Further Considerations

摘要

Transferring any conceptual approach to real-world systems requires accounting for the complexity of real-world situations in an appropriate way. For conceptual clarity, in our recent paper [1] we adopted the simplest possible set of cases, and (i) depicted the baseline state of an undisturbed reference system as a constant, (ii) did not account for overshooting recovery responses, in other words when during recovery from disturbance an ecosystem state exceeds that of an undisturbed reference system, and (iii) restricted our discussion to cases when disturbance leads to a reduction in ecosystem state. In the following we discuss, for each of these points, how more complex system behavior can be considered in a bivariate resilience framework to address both science- and management-related questions. Finally, we demonstrate how a bivariate approach can be applied to the identification of crucial impacts which lead to alternative stable states.