Understanding and applying biological resilience, from genes to ecosystems

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. H...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Npj Biodiversity 2023-08, Vol.2 (1), p.16-13, Article 16
Main Authors: Thorogood, Rose, Mustonen, Ville, Aleixo, Alexandre, Aphalo, Pedro J, Asiegbu, Fred O, Cabeza, Mar, Cairns, Johannes, Candolin, Ulrika, Cardoso, Pedro, Eronen, Jussi T, Hällfors, Maria, Hovatta, Iiris, Juslén, Aino, Kovalchuk, Andriy, Kulmuni, Jonna, Kuula, Liisa, Mäkipää, Raisa, Ovaskainen, Otso, Pesonen, Anu-Katriina, Primmer, Craig R, Saastamoinen, Marjo, Schulman, Alan H, Schulman, Leif, Strona, Giovanni, Vanhatalo, Jarno
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropogenic factors
Biological activity
Climate change
Drought
Ecology
Ecosystem biology
Ecosystems
Genes
Genetic diversity
Genomes
Habitat fragmentation
Human influences
Human populations
Land pollution
Land use
Natural resources
Neurosciences
Nonnative species
Organelles
Overexploitation
Perturbation
Physiology
Population density
Resilience
Review
Urbanization
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2731-4243
2731-4243
DOI:10.1038/s44185-023-00022-6