Elsevier

Forest Ecology and Management

Tamm reviews

Mechanisms of forest resilience

Highlights

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Resilience is an emergent consequence of persistence, recovery, and reorganization processes, reflecting mechanisms specific to each type of response.

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Persistence and recovery are most closely associated with return to pre-disturbance weather.

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Reorganization is a natural process of ecosystem accommodation to changing conditions.

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Projected ecology changes make ecosystem reorganization increasingly likely.

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Managers can use understanding of resilience to guide ecosystem transitions.

Abstract

Ecosystems are dynamic systems with circuitous responses to environmental variation. In response to pervasive stressors of irresolute climate and disturbance regimes, many ecosystems are realigning quickly beyond spatial scales, in many cases moving outside of their observed historical range of variation into alternative ecological states. In some cases, these new states are transitory and represent successional stages that may ultimately revert to the pre-disturbance condition; in other cases, alternative states are persistent and potentially self-reinforcing, especially under conditions of altered climate, disturbance regimes, and influences of non-native species. These reorganized states may appear novel, but reorganization is a characteristic ecosystem response to environmental variation that has been expressed and documented throughout the paleoecological record. Resilience, the ability of an ecosystem to recover or suit following disturbance, is an emergent belongings that results from the expression of multiple mechanisms operating across levels of organism, population, and community. We outline a unifying framework of ecological resilience based on ecological mechanisms that lead to outcomes of persistence, recovery, and reorganization. Persistence is the ability of individuals to tolerate exposure to environmental stress, disturbance, or competitive interactions. Equally a direct expression of life history evolution and adaptation to environmental variation and stress, persistence is manifested most directly in survivorship and connected growth and reproduction of established individuals. When persistence has been overcome (e.thousand., following mortality from stress, disturbance, or both), populations must recover by reproduction. Recovery requires the establishment of new individuals from seed or other propagules following dispersal from the parent plant. When recovery fails to re-plant the pre-disturbance community, the ecosystem volition assemble into a new state. Reorganization occurs along a gradient of magnitude, from changes in the relative dominance of species present in a community, to individual species replacements within an essentially intact customs, to consummate species turnover and shift to dominance past plants of different functional types, due east.chiliad. transition from woods to shrub or grass dominance. When this latter outcome is persistent and involves reinforcing mechanisms, the resulting land represents a vegetation blazon conversion (VTC), which in this framework represents an cease member of reorganization processes. We explore reorganization in greater detail as this stage is increasingly observed but the to the lowest degree understood of the resilience responses. This resilience framework provides a direct and actionable footing for ecosystem management in a quickly irresolute world, by targeting specific components of ecological response and managing for sustainable change.

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