Towards a Comparative Framework of Demographic Resilience

Abstract

In the current global biodiversity crisis, the development of tools to define, quantify, compare, and predict resilience is essential for understanding the responses of species to global change. However, disparate interpretations of resilience have hampered the development of a common currency to quantify and compare resilience across natural systems. Most resilience frameworks focus on upper levels of biological organization, especially ecosystems or communities, which complicates measurements of resilience using empirical data. Surprisingly, there is no quantifiable definition of resilience at the demographic level. We introduce a framework of demographic resilience that draws on existing concepts from community and population ecology, as well as an accompanying set of metrics that are comparable across species.

Keywords: global change; life-history strategies; population model; regime shifts; stability; stage-structured.