Resilience (ecology)

Resilience in ecology refers to the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks. The concept was developed by C.S. Holling to distinguish between engineering resilience (bouncing back to a stable equilibrium) and ecological resilience (persisting through transformation into alternative states). Resilience is not the absence of change but the system's ability to generate novelty without collapsing into dysfunction. A resilient forest does not resist fire; it requires fire to maintain the disturbance regime that shaped its evolution. The study of resilience has expanded through the framework of panarchy to describe how adaptive systems cycle through phases of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal across scales.