Understanding and applying biological resilience, from genes to ecosystems

Abstract

The natural world is under unprecedented and accelerating pressure. Much work on understanding resilience to local and global environmental change has, so far, focussed on ecosystems. However, understanding a system's behaviour requires knowledge of its component parts and their interactions. Here we call for increased efforts to understand 'biological resilience', or the processes that enable components across biological levels, from genes to communities, to resist or recover from perturbations. Although ecologists and evolutionary biologists have the tool-boxes to examine form and function, efforts to integrate this knowledge across biological levels and take advantage of big data (e.g. ecological and genomic) are only just beginning. We argue that combining eco-evolutionary knowledge with ecosystem-level concepts of resilience will provide the mechanistic basis necessary to improve management of human, natural and agricultural ecosystems, and outline some of the challenges in achieving an understanding of biological resilience.

Fig. 1

Biological resilience (mechanisms and processes across biological levels that enable systems to resist disturbance and/or recover over time back to a steady state after perturbations) is mediated by connections within and among levels of organisation (simplified to genes and genomes, cells and organelles, organisms and populations, communities and ecosystems; depicted by multi-coloured shading and lines), and recognises that the present state (expanded in centre of figure) is shaped by ecological and evolutionary responses to past biotic (multi-coloured) and abiotic (grey) disturbance and selection (note that time is represented by a log-scale). Resistance (change) and recovery (time, state and rate) can be measured using properties of different biological levels (inset) to provide a ‘common currency’ for integration, and then enhance the translation horizon (vertical dashed line, close in time) by providing more readily measurable indicators and improving accuracy of forecast outcomes (grey arrows and question marks within circles). Note that the resistance and recovery trajectories of biological levels to a disturbance event may differ in both amplitude and temporal scale (inset), and that ‘recovery’ is also sometimes referred to in the literature as a measure of resilience (e.g. refs. ^,).

BOX FIGURE Overview of an ongoing worked example investigating biological resilience in Atlantic salmon. Text in red indicates next steps for research, see Box text for details.