Resilience and robustness: from sub-organismal responses to communities.

Abstract

Coping with challenges is essential to life on earth. Determining the processes that generate resilience and robustness to disturbance across levels of biological organization is increasingly important as the pace of global change accelerates; however, to date, multiscale models have primarily focused on population to ecosystem scales. In this opinion article we combine conceptual models from different fields to develop a unified a framework of resilience and robustness that explicitly links sub-organismal responses with higher-level outcomes. This framework predicts that interactions among sub-organismal response components - including their temporal dynamics and the plasticity of homeostatic regulatory networks - are key drivers of current and future resilience.