Achieving Ecological Resilience Through Regime Shift Management

Abstract

Resilience has come to mean several things in the system sciences. The term is used to describe systems whose function is robust with respect to external disturbances. It is used to describe systems that tolerate faults in some internal component. It is also used to describe systems that have the capacity to recover after a complete collapse of system function. This monograph defines resilience in the last sense. This notion of resilience is often called ecological resilience. For a system to be ecologically resilient, one first accepts system collapse as being inevitable and then requires that the resources for subsequent system recovery be buried in the wreckage of that collapse. The ecological concept of a regime shift plays an important role in describing abrupt shifts in ecosystem behavior. In particular, the collapse of system function may be seen as an instance of a regime shift. Restoring a collapsed ecosystem often involves walking the system through a sequence of alternative states before full recovery can be achieved. The transitions between these alternative states are also regime shifts. But in this case, these regime shifts are purposefully M. D. Lemmon (2020), “Achieving Ecological Resilience Through Regime Shift Management”, Foundations and Trends © in Systems and Control: Vol. 7, No. 4, pp 384–499. DOI: 10.1561/2600000021. Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/2600000021