We review the concept of ecosystem resilience in its relation to ecosystem integrity from an information theory approach. We summarize the literature on the subject identifying three main narratives: ecosystem properties that enable them to be more resilient; ecosystem response to perturbations; and complexity. We also include original ideas with theoretical and quantitative developments with application examples. The main contribution is a new way to rethink resilience, that is mathematically formal and easy to evaluate heuristically in real-world applications: ecosystem antifragility. An ecosystem is antifragile if it benefits from environmental variability. Antifragility therefore goes beyond robustness or resilience because while resilient/robust systems are merely perturbation-resistant, antifragile structures not only withstand stress but also benefit from it.

Equihua Zamora M, Espinosa M, Gershenson C, López-Corona O, Munguia M, Pérez-Maqueo O, Ramírez-Carrillo E. 2019. Ecosystem antifragility: Beyond integrity and resilience. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27813v1

Source: peerj.com