Trends in Ecology & Evolution
Volume 34, Issue 12, December 2019, Pages 1080-1091
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Opinion
Linking Traits across Ecological Scales Determines Functional Resilience

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.07.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • With globally accelerating extinction rates, ecologists and society are focussed on protecting ecosystem function.

  • Resilience of ecosystem function occurs at multiple scales of ecological organisation: individual, population, and community.

  • Attributes at the individual species scale increase resistance, while attributes at the landscape scale (population and community) influence recovery.

  • We explore how different combinations of scale-dependent resilience attributes are linked to resilience as disturbance regimes vary in their intensity, spatial extent, and frequency.

  • Considering multiple scales of resilience attributes allows exploration of how, when, and why different aspects of biodiversity enable the persistence of function under future scenarios of multiple, cumulative, and intensified disturbance regimes.

Under globally accelerating rates of ecosystem degradation, maintaining ecosystem function is a priority to avoid loss of valuable ecosystem services. Two factors are important: changes to the disturbance regime (stresses imposed) and resilience of biodiversity and ecosystem functions (the ecosystem’s capacity to respond to change). Various attributes at different scales of ecological organisation confer resilience (from individual species to communities at landscape scales), but it is critical to understand how these attributes interact to inform how ecosystem function changes with disturbances that vary in intensity, spatial extent, and frequency. Individual species attributes influence their resistance, while attributes at the landscape-scale influence recovery of communities and function. Understanding resilience to disturbances requires defining the characteristics of a resilient community at multiple scales.

Section snippets

The Complexities of Resilience

Species extinction rates are estimated to be 100–1000 times greater than those prior to the domination of Earth by humans [1]. Anthropogenic activities not only deplete species diversity, but fragment and homogenise habitats, disassemble communities, and reduce the number of ecosystem functions (see Glossary) that underpin most ecosystem services 2, 3. Many ecologists, management agencies, and international policies (e.g., UN Aichi biodiversity targets) have shifted management frameworks from

A Holistic Functional Redundancy Concept Incorporating Multiple Scales of Resilience

A range of attributes characterise communities that contribute to resilient ecosystem functions and, although scale-specific, these attributes are fundamental in assessing ecosystem vulnerability to disturbance [5]. For example, in terrestrial ecosystems, response diversity links the number of different responses within a functional group to resilience of the group and the functions it underpins (review by [21]). At the landscape scale, marine ecologists have described how spatial structure in

Resilience Attributes at Multiple Scales of Ecological Organisation

Individual-level attributes are biological traits that alter an individual species’ physiological tolerance to stress (or ‘response traits’ that increase response diversity 21, 30, 41, 42). These traits will be specific to the disturbance regime and the species in question (see Table 1 for seafloor examples). Population-level attributes are those that increase the ability of the population to occupy space and colonise disturbed areas (Table 1) 34, 37, 43, 44, 45. Community-level attributes are

Resilience under Different Disturbance Regimes

Ecological disturbances vary along a continuum of intensity (low to high), frequency (one-off to chronic), and spatial extent (metres to entire ecosystem) 32, 35, 47, and these factors characterise disturbance regimes (Figure 1A) [47]. The ecological attributes that confer resilience to disturbance are unlikely to contribute equally to resilience under different disturbance regimes. Bringing together these attributes across scales of ecological organisation integrates both the spatial and the

Resilience under Multiple and Repeated Disturbances

Ecosystems or communities that are adapted to dealing with relatively infrequent natural disturbances now have to cope with increased frequency, intensity, and spatial extent of disturbance 49, 50, and it is these communities that are particularly susceptible. On top of these intensified individual disturbances, multiple and cumulative disturbances further impact communities 51, 52, 53. Each disturbance type selects for attributes at a different scale of ecological organisation (e.g.,

Concluding Remarks and Future Perspectives

The capacity for biodiversity to maintain ecosystem function requires holistic assessment of resilience attributes across scales of ecological organisation. Functional groups can be resilient to certain disturbances at one scale, but not another. Our framework provides a way forward in operationalising the ‘of what and for what’ resilience issue, also delving into the ‘over what scale’ do we care about resilience question 10, 57. It does this in a biodiversity–ecosystem function context by

Acknowledgements

The Tipping Points project in the Dynamic Seas programme of the New Zealand Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge supported the authors (CO1x1515 4.2.1) during the writing of this manuscript. We thank the editor and four anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback that substantially improved this piece.

Glossary

Disturbance
a force or process that causes a response in the biodiversity and/or ecosystem function (e.g., a reduction in species biomass, abundance, or ability to carry out functions). Whilst many definitions and synonyms of disturbance exist, we characterise disturbances across a continuum of time, space, and intensity.
Ecosystem function
combinations of biological, geochemical, and physical processes that take place or occur within an ecosystem. Ecosystem functions are the processes that

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