Resilience Fundamentals

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Resilience Fundamentals

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Created by: Shana Sundstrom, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

These are some of the seminal papers and books that comprise the development of ecological resilience from a concept into a field of science. For those interested in where Holling’s ideas originally came from, read his predator/prey papers in the Memoirs of the Entomological Society of Canada from the mid-1960’s.

Ecological Resilience
  • Holling, CS. 1973. Systems resilience and its policy consequences: Proposal for work at
    IIASA. IIASA Working Paper WP-73-001. IIASA, Austria. Available at https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/44/7/WP-73-001.pdf.
    • Note: This is not peer reviewed, but it is a fascinating and brief document that makes clear how advanced his ideas were even before publishing the 1973 paper later in the year.
  • Holling, CS. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 4: 1–23.
Expansion on Resilience
  • Holling, C.S. 1986. The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: Local surprise and global change. Pages 292-320 in Sustainable development of the biosphere. Cambridge University Press.
    • Note: He also introduces adaptive cycles in this book chapter.
  • Gunderson LH. 2000. Ecological resilience: In theory and application. Annual Review of
    Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 31:425-439.
Adaptive Management
  • Holling, C.S. 1978. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Walters, CJ. 1986. Adaptive management of renewable resources. Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK.
  • Holling, CS and Meffe GK. 1996. Command and control and the pathology of natural resource management. Conservation Biology 10:328-337.
  • Gunderson L. 1999. Resilience, flexibility and adaptive management: Antidotes for
    spurious certitude? Conservation Ecology 3:Art 7.
Adaptive Governance
  • Dietz T, Ostrom E and Stern PC. 2003. The struggle to govern the commons. Science 302:1091015
  • Chaffin B, Gosnell H and Cosens BA. 2014. A decade of adaptive governance scholarship: synthesis and future directions. Ecology and Society 19: Art 56.
Textural Discontinuity Hypothesis
  • Holling, CS. 1992. Cross-scale morphology, geometry, and dynamics of ecosystems. Ecological Monographs 62: 447-502.
  • Allen CR, Forys EA and Holling CS. 1999. Body mass patterns predict invasions and extinctions in transforming landscapes. Ecosystems 2:114-121.
  • Allen CR and Holling CS. 2008. Discontinuities in ecosystems and other complex
    systems. Columbia University Press, New York.
Cross-Scale Resilience
  • Folke C, Holling CS and Perrings C. 1996. Biological diversity, ecosystems and the human scale. Ecological Applications 6:1018-1024.
  • Peterson G, Allen CR and Holling CS. 1998. Ecological resilience, biodiversity and scale. Ecosystems 1:6-18.
Panarchy and Adaptive Cycles
  • Gunderson LH and Holling CS. 2002. Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press, Washington.
  • Sundstrom SM and Allen CR. 2019. The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor. Ecological Complexity 39:100767.
SES Thinking
  • Berkes F and Folke C. 1998. Linking social and ecological Systems: Management practices and social mechanisms for building resilience, Cambridge University Press.
  • Carpenter S, Brock W and Hanson P. 1999. Ecological and social dynamics in simple models of ecosystem management. Ecology and Society 3: Art 4.
    • Note: Like so many foundational papers, it discusses multiple resilience concepts, including alternative stable states, adaptive cycles and panarchy, because they are all interconnected.
  • Carpenter S, Walker B, Anderies JM and Abel N. 2001. From metaphor to measurement: Resilience of what to what? Ecosystems 4:765-781.
  • Folke C. 2006. Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analysis.
Regime Shifts / Alternative Stable States / Early Warning Indicators
  • Hughes TP. 1994. Catastrophes, phase shifts, and large-scale degradation of a Caribbean coral reef. Science 265:1547-1550.
  • Scheffer M, Carpenter S, Foley JA, Folk C, and Walker B. 2001. Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems. Nature 413:591-596.
  • Brock WA and Carpenter SR. 2006. Variance as a leading indicator of regime shift in ecosystem services. Ecology and Society 11:Art 9.
  • Scheffer M et al. 2009. Early-warning signals for critical transitions. Nature 461:53-59.
  • Scheffer M. 2009. Critical transitions in nature and society. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
  • Steffen W et al. 2018. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. PNAS 115:8252-8259.
Planetary Boundaries
  • Rockstrom J et al. 2009. Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operation space for humanity. Ecology and Society 14:Art 32.
SES as CAS
  • Preiser R, Biggs R, De Vos A and Folke C. 2018. Social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems: organizing principles for advancing research methods and approaches. Ecology and Society 23:Art 46.
Nonstationarity
  • Twidwell et al. 2018. The perpetual state of emergency that sacrifices protected areas in a changing climate. Conservation Biology 32:905-915.