Theory
Ecologists Brian Walker, C S Holling and others describe four critical aspects of resilience: latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy.
The first three can apply both to a whole system or the sub-systems that make it up.
- Latitude: the maximum amount a system can be changed before losing its ability to recover (before crossing a threshold which, if breached, makes recovery difficult or impossible).
- Resistance: the ease or difficulty of changing the system; how “resistant” it is to being changed.
- Precariousness: how close the current state of the system is to a limit or “threshold.”.
- Panarchy: the degree to which a certain hierarchical level of an ecosystem is influenced by other levels. For example, organisms living in communities that are in isolation from one another may be organized differently than the same type of organism living in a large continuous population, thus the community-level structure is influenced by population-level interactions.
Closely linked to resilience is adaptive capacity, which is the property of an ecosystem that describes change in stability landscapes and resilience. Adaptive capacity in socio-ecological systems refers to the ability of humans to deal with change in their environment by observation, learning and altering their interactions.
Read more about this topic: Resilience (ecology)
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