Foundations of Ecological Resilience

by Lance H. Gunderson (Editor), Craig Reece Allen (Editor), C.S. Holling (Editor)

Ecological resilience provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how complex systems adapt to and recover from localized disturbances like hurricanes, fires, pest outbreaks, and floods, as well as large-scale perturbations such as climate change. Ecologists have developed resilience theory over the past three decades in an effort to explain surprising and nonlinear dynamics of complex adaptive systems. Resilience theory is especially important to environmental scientists for its role in underpinning
adaptive management approaches to ecosystem and resource management.



Foundations of Ecological Resilience is a collection of the most important articles on the subject of ecological resilience—those writings that have defined and developed basic concepts in the field and help explain its importance and meaning for scientists and researchers.



The book’s three sections cover articles that have shaped or defined the concepts and theories of resilience, including key papers that broke new conceptual ground and contributed novel ideas to the field; examples that demonstrate ecological resilience in a range of ecosystems; and articles that present practical methods for understanding and managing nonlinear ecosystem dynamics.



Foundations of Ecological Resilience is an important contribution to our collective understanding of resilience and an invaluable resource for students and scholars in ecology, wildlife ecology, conservation biology, sustainability, environmental science, public policy, and related fields.

496 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2009

Reviews

[Bradley]

I don't often abandon books, but the ones I do abandon are usually under a few specific categories.

A: Too Specialized, and I don't have the level of interest to maintain a read.
B: The information is repetitious and/or something I've already come to understand sufficiently and even agree with, thanks to other authors.
or
C: It's absolutely horrible.

Fortunately, this book only falls under the first two categories. It's a perfectly decent read if what you want is a little more than a handful of scientific journal articles telling you that system's ecologies can slide along different levels of resilience and too much specialization of species or groups of species, while rather impressive in certain circumstances, often leads to catastrophic diebacks if the situation tips.

The first hundred pages that I read was all about this and dropped a lot of bibliographies on me.
There are some nods to humanity trying to fix ecological problems with disastrous results as well as political implications on multiple sides of the fence, but for the most part, these are serious scientific papers dealing with long studies of real science dealing with real math.

It's great if you are invested in such. I can follow it fine. It's just a bit dry and I don't recognize any of the names in the field and there's definitely nothing in the way of language designed to captivate a lay-reader like me.

I'm not quitting this because it's the book's fault. I'm quitting because I'm just a tad outside of my interest level. A lay approach would have been perfectly wonderful for me. Even a rather heavy science lay approach, rather than an assumption that I've read all these myriad other science papers on the subject and therefore I should immediately grok the extremely subtle differences that are made in the current paper.

Put simply, however, ecologies on a high-level, meaning globally, tend to have a much greater ability to bounce back, assuming that there are plenty of mitigating factors such as a wide variety of species able to fill the open niches. If a rigid stratification occurs, the system is much less likely bounce back after a dieback.

These are the papers that broke that ground. Bravo.

[Ch'aska · Rating 3 out of 5]

Down in the weeds in the cult of ecological resilience...