More is not always better: peat moss mixtures slightly enhance peatland stability.

Terrestrial wetland ecosystems challenge biodiversity-ecosystem function theory, which generally links high species diversity to stable ecosystem functions. An open question in ecosystem ecology is whether assemblages of co-occurring peat mosses contribute to the stability of peatland ecosystem processes. We conducted a two-species (Sphagnum cuspidatum, Sphagnum medium) replacement series mesocosm experiment to evaluate the resistance, resilience, and recovery rates of net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE) under mild and deep water table drawdown. Our results show a positive effect of mild water table drawdown on NEE with no apparent role for peat moss mixture. Our study indicates that the carbon uptake capacity by peat moss mixtures is rather resilient to mild water table drawdown, but seriously affected by deeper drought conditions. Co-occurring peat moss species seem to enhance the resilience of the carbon uptake function (i.e. ability of NEE to return to pre-perturbation levels) of peat moss mixtures only slightly. These findings suggest that assemblages of co-occurring Sphagnum mosses do only marginally contribute to the stability of ecosystem functions in peatlands under drought conditions. Above all, our results highlight that predicted severe droughts can gravely affect the sink capacity of peatlands, with only a small extenuating role for peat moss mixtures.

The Future of Plant-Based Diets: Aligning Healthy Marketplace Choices with Equitable, Resilient, and Sustainable Food Systems.

The future of plant-based diets is a complex public health issue inextricably linked to planetary health. Shifting the world's population to consume nutrient-rich, plant-based diets is among the most impactful strategies to transition to sustainable food systems to feed 10 billion people by 2050. This review summarizes how international expert bodies define sustainable diets and food systems and describes types of sustainable dietary patterns. It also explores how the type and proportion of plant- versus animal-source foods and alternative proteins relate to sustainable diets to reduce diet-related morbidity and mortality. Thereafter, we synthesize evidence for current challenges and actions needed to achieve plant-based sustainable dietary patterns using a conceptual framework with principles to promote human health, ecological health, social equity, and economic prosperity. We recommend strategies for governments, businesses, and civil society to encourage marketplace choices that lead to plant-rich sustainable diets within healthy, equitable, and resilient agroecological food systems.

The interacting effect of climate change and herbivory can trigger large-scale transformations of European temperate forests.

In many regions of Europe, large wild herbivores alter forest community composition through their foraging preferences, hinder the forest's natural adaptive responses to climate change, and reduce ecosystem resilience. We investigated a widespread European forest type, a mixed forest dominated by Picea abies, which has recently experienced an unprecedented level of disturbance across the continent. Using the forest landscape model iLand, we investigated the combined effect of climate change and herbivory on forest structure, composition, and carbon and identified conditions leading to ecosystem transitions on a 300-year timescale. Eight climate change scenarios, driven by Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5, combined with three levels of regeneration browsing, were tested. We found that the persistence of the current level of browsing pressure impedes adaptive changes in community composition and sustains the presence of the vulnerable yet less palatable P. abies. These development trajectories were tortuous, characterized by a high disturbance intensity. On the contrary, reduced herbivory initiated a transformation towards the naturally dominant broadleaved species that was associated with an increased forest carbon and a considerably reduced disturbance. The conditions of RCP4.5 combined with high and moderate browsing levels preserved the forest within its reference range of variability, defining the actual boundaries of resilience. The remaining combinations of browsing and climate change led to ecosystem transitions. Under RCP4.5 with browsing effects excluded, the new equilibrium conditions were achieved within 120 years, whereas the stabilization was delayed by 50-100 years under RCP8.5 with higher browsing intensities. We conclude that forests dominated by P. abies are prone to transitions driven by climate change. However, reducing herbivory can set the forest on a stable and predictable trajectory, whereas sustaining the current browsing levels can lead to heightened disturbance activity, extended transition times, and high variability in the target conditions.

Assessing the sensitivity and resistance of communities in a changing environment.

We propose that the ecological resilience of communities to permanent changes of the environment can be based on how variation in the overall abundance of individuals affects the number of species. Community sensitivity is defined as the ratio between the rate of change in the log expected number of species and the rate of change in the log expected number of individuals in the community. High community sensitivity means that small changes in the total abundance strongly impact the number of species. Community resistance is the proportional reduction in expected number of individuals that the community can sustain before expecting to lose one species. A small value of community resistance means that the community can only endure a small reduction in abundance before it is expected to lose one species. Based on long-term studies of four bird communities in European deciduous forests at different latitudes large differences were found in the resilience to environmental perturbations. Estimating the variance components of the species abundance distribution revealed how different processes contributed to the community sensitivity and resistance. Species heterogeneity in the population dynamics was the largest component, but its proportion varied among communities. Species-specific response to environmental fluctuations was the second major component of the variation in abundance. Estimates of community sensitivity and resistance based on data only from a single year were in general larger than those based on estimates from longer time series. Thus, our approach can provide rapid and conservative assessment of the resilience of communities to environmental changes also including only short-term data. This study shows that a general ecological mechanism, caused by increased strength of density dependence due to reduction in resource availability, can provide an intuitive measure of community resilience to environmental variation. Our analyses also illustrate the importance of including specific assumptions about how different processes affect community dynamics. For example, if stochastic fluctuations in the environment affect all species in a similar way, the sensitivity and resistance of the community to environmental changes will be different from communities in which all species show independent responses.

Ecosystem health assessment of East Kolkata Wetlands, India: Implications for environmental sustainability.

The East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW) in Kolkata, India, span 12,500 ha and are a vital ecological zone providing several benefits, including water purification, flood control, and biodiversity support. This study investigated land use and land cover (LULC) alterations in the EKW from 1991 to 2023, using a random forest (RF) machine learning model. Significant LULC changes were observed over the 32 years, with wetland areas decreasing from 91.2 km2 in 1991 to 33.4 km2 in 2023, reflecting substantial habitat loss and reduced ecosystem services. Conversely, agricultural land expanded from 27.8 km2 to 58.7 km2, driven by economic and food production needs, and built-up areas increased dramatically from 0.2 km2 to 10.5 km2, indicating rapid urbanization. This study evaluated the health, resilience, and ecosystem functionality of EKW by analysing human-induced land use changes and using ecological indicators and landscape metrics. Landscape and class level metrics such as PLAND, largest patch index (LPI), total edge (TE), edge density (ED), number of patches (NP), and patch density (PD) were used to analyse the spatiotemporal dynamics of the wetlands. This study revealed a significant increase in fragmentation, with the number of patches increasing from 2689 in 1991 to 4532 in 2023, despite a consistent decrease in core wetland areas. Ecosystem health indicators, such as the ecosystem structure index (ESI) and landscape deviation degree (LDD), were used to assess landscape metrics and fragmentation changes. The ESI and other metrics revealed significant temporal fluctuations, providing insights into landscape structure, connectivity, and heterogeneity. The ESI improved from 0.87 in 1991 to 1.03 in 2023, indicating enhanced connectivity and diversity. Conversely, the LDD increased from 20.6% to 56.85%, indicating a shift towards impervious surfaces. The vegetation productivity and ecosystem health index (EHI) decreased, indicating biodiversity loss and reduced carbon sequestration. The EHI also dropped from 0.67 to 0.55, signifying ongoing environmental stress. This study emphasizes the need for conservation efforts to maintain the ecological integrity of the EKW amidst urbanization and land use changes and recommends a balanced approach for sustainable urban development and enhanced wetland resilience.

Refuge-yeah or refuge-nah? Predicting locations of forest resistance and recruitment in a fiery world.

Climate warming, land use change, and altered fire regimes are driving ecological transformations that can have critical effects on Earth's biota. Fire refugia-locations that are burned less frequently or severely than their surroundings-may act as sites of relative stability during this period of rapid change by being resistant to fire and supporting post-fire recovery in adjacent areas. Because of their value to forest ecosystem persistence, there is an urgent need to anticipate where refugia are most likely to be found and where they align with environmental conditions that support post-fire tree recruitment. Using biophysical predictors and patterns of burn severity from 1180 recent fire events, we mapped the locations of potential fire refugia across upland conifer forests in the southwestern United States (US) (99,428 km2 of forest area), a region that is highly vulnerable to fire-driven transformation. We found that low pre-fire forest cover, flat slopes or topographic concavities, moderate weather conditions, spring-season burning, and areas affected by low- to moderate-severity fire within the previous 15 years were most commonly associated with refugia. Based on current (i.e., 2021) conditions, we predicted that 67.6% and 18.1% of conifer forests in our study area would contain refugia under moderate and extreme fire weather, respectively. However, potential refugia were 36.4% (moderate weather) and 31.2% (extreme weather) more common across forests that experienced recent fires, supporting the increased use of prescribed and resource objective fires during moderate weather conditions to promote fire-resistant landscapes. When overlaid with models of tree recruitment, 23.2% (moderate weather) and 6.4% (extreme weather) of forests were classified as refugia with a high potential to support post-fire recruitment in the surrounding landscape. These locations may be disproportionately valuable for ecosystem sustainability, providing habitat for fire-sensitive species and maintaining forest persistence in an increasingly fire-prone world.

A Metagenomic Time-Series Approach to Assess the Ecological Stability of Microbial Mats in a Seasonally Fluctuating Environment.

Microbial mats are complex ecological assemblages that have been present in the rock record since the Precambrian and can still be found in extant marginalized environments. These structures are considered highly stable ecosystems. In this study, we evaluate the ecological stability of dome-forming microbial mats in a modern, water-level fluctuating, hypersaline pond located in the Cuatro Ciénegas Basin, Mexico. We conducted metagenomic sampling of the site from 2016 to 2019 and detected 2250 genera of Bacteria and Archaea, with only <20 belonging to the abundant taxa (>1%). The microbial community was dominated by Proteobacteria, Euryarchaeota, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Cyanobacteria, and was compositionally sensitive to disturbances, leading to high taxonomic replacement even at the phylum level, with a significant increase in Archaea from [Formula: see text]1-4% to [Formula: see text]33% throughout the 2016-2019 study period. Although a core community represented most of the microbial community (>75%), relative abundances shifted significantly between samples, as demonstrated by changes in the abundance of Coleofasciculus from 10.2% in 2017 to 0.05% in 2019. Although functional differences between seasons were subtle, co-occurrence networks suggest differential ecological interactions between the seasons, with the addition of a new module during the rainy season and the potential shift in hub taxa. Functional composition was slightly more similar between samples, but basic processes such as carbohydrate, amino acid, and nucleic acid metabolisms were widely distributed among samples. Major carbon fixation processes included sulfur oxidation, nitrogen fixation, and photosynthesis (both oxygenic and anoxygenic), as well as the Wood-Ljundgahl and Calvin cycles.

A resilience view on health system resilience: a scoping review of empirical studies and reviews.

BACKGROUND: Prompted by recent shocks and stresses to health systems globally, various studies have emerged on health system resilience. Our aim is to describe how health system resilience is operationalised within empirical studies and previous reviews. We compare these to the core conceptualisations and characteristics of resilience in a broader set of domains (specifically, engineering, socio-ecological, organisational and community resilience concepts), and trace the different schools, concepts and applications of resilience across the health literature. METHODS: We searched the Pubmed database for concepts related to 'resilience' and 'health systems'. Two separate analyses were conducted for included studies: a total of n = 87 empirical studies on health system resilience were characterised according to part of health systems covered, type of threat, resilience phase, resilience paradigm, and approaches to building resilience; and a total of n = 30 reviews received full-text review and characterised according to type of review, resilience concepts identified in the review, and theoretical framework or underlying resilience conceptualisation. RESULTS: The intersection of health and resilience clearly has gained importance in the academic discourse with most papers published since 2018 in a variety of journals and in response to external threats, or in reference to more frequent hospital crisis management. Most studies focus on either resilience of health systems generally (and thereby responding to an external shock or stress), or on resilience within hospitals (and thereby to regular shocks and operations). Less attention has been given to community-based and primary care, whether formal or informal. While most publications do not make the research paradigm explicit, 'resilience engineering' is the most prominent one, followed by 'community resilience' and 'organisational resilience'. The social-ecological systems roots of resilience find the least application, confirming our findings of the limited application of the concept of transformation in the health resilience literature. CONCLUSIONS: Our review shows that the field is fragmented, especially in the use of resilience paradigms and approaches from non-health resilience domains, and the health system settings in which these are used. This fragmentation and siloed approach can be problematic given the connections within and between the complex and adaptive health systems, ranging from community actors to local, regional, or national public health organisations to secondary care. Without a comprehensive definition and framework that captures these interdependencies, operationalising, measuring and improving resilience remains challenging.

Spatial distribution characteristics of natural ecological resilience in China.

High-intensity exploitation of land resources and the natural environment can upset the balance of ecosystems, causing multiple ecological problems and affecting regional sustainable development. Recently, China has carried out integrated regional ecosystem protection and restoration governance. Ecological resilience (ER) is the foundation of and key to achieving sustainable regional development. Based on the significance of ER in ecological protection and restoration efforts and the necessity of conducting large-scale studies, we conducted relevant research on the ER in China. In this study, we selected typical impact factors to construct an assessment model of ER in China and quantitatively measured its large-scale spatial and temporal distribution characteristics, while also exploring the relationship between ER and land-use types. The country was zoned according to the ER contributions of each land-use type, and ER enhancement and ecological protection were discussed based on the characteristics of different regions. The ER in China shows clear spatial heterogeneity and spatial agglomeration, roughly represented by high and low ER in the southeast and northwest regions. The mean ER values of woodland, arable land, and construction land were all greater than 0.6, with more than 97% of the ER values at levels of medium or above. The country can be divided into three regions based on the degree of ER contributions of various land-use types, each with different ecological problems. This study provides a detailed understanding of and explores the important role of ER on the regional development process, and provides support and reference for regional ecological protection and restoration as well as sustainable development.

Potential heterogeneity of urban ecological resilience and urbanization in multiple urban agglomerations from a landscape perspective.

Rapid urbanization has reduced the capacity of cities to mitigate and withstand disasters. Strengthening urban ecological resilience (ER) is important for improving urban self-organization. Geographical characteristics and developmental status of different cities lead to a more complex relationship between urbanization and ER. Using the three major urban agglomerations in China, we constructed a new framework for assessing the ER from a landscape and ecological processes perspective, and analyzed the driving heterogeneity of urbanization on ER. The results indicated that the ER of Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Pearl River Delta (PRD) decreased continuously from 2000 to 2018, while the ER of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) decreased from 2000 to 2010, and then increased from 2010 to 2018. The resilience level of PRD was significantly lower than those of BTH and YRD. The urbanization process had a negative impact on ER, and the contribution of urbanization factors to ER varied significantly across cities, and population factors have the most direct influence. Curve fitting analysis further deepened our understanding of heterogeneity, investigating from the perspective of landscape and driving factors, and suggesting improvement measures. This study can deepen the understanding of the impact of urbanization on resilience and provide scientific guidance for achieving regional sustainability.

Assessment of water and carbon use efficiency in the SAARC region for ecological resilience under changing climate.

According to the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) assessment report released in 2021, South Asian countries were among the most vulnerable in the world to the effects of climate change on future generations. Hence it is become crucial to assess how resilient the ecosystems are to these changes. The current study incorporated a novel approach, the Combined Ecological Resiliency Indices Approach (CERIA), to assess ecological resiliency status at various scales during hydroclimatic disturbances. Water and carbon use efficiency (WUE and CUE, respectively) were used as indicators for the examination of ecological resilience. The standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was adopted to assess the initial stage of hydroclimatic disturbances (meteorological drought). A resiliency analysis based on combined Rd and Rd' indices (derived from WUE and CUE, respectively) revealed that just 1.87% land cover area of the entire SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) region's total 17 land cover classes was resilient to meteorological drought. At the river basin scale, only 16.58% of the total 62 river basins were found resilient. Only 11 (27.46%) of the 21 climate classes on the Koppen climate classification scale were resilient to the hydro-climatic disturbance period. To achieve the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs goal-2 and goal-13) of 'No Hunger' and 'Protect the Planet', the Joint Ecosystem Resiliency Enhancement Programme (JEREP) should be adopted in land cover, river basins, or climatic classes of the SAARC region that were highly affected.

Resilience and the shift of paradigm in ecology: a new name for an old concept or a different explanatory tool?

In the shift from the balance of nature to the flux of nature paradigm, the concept of resilience has gained great traction in ecology. While it has been suggested that the concept of resilience does not imply a genuine departure from the balance of nature paradigm, I shall argue against this stance. To do so, I first show that the balance of nature paradigm and the related conception of a single-state equilibrium relies on what Eliot Sober has named the "Natural State Model (NSM)", suggesting that the NSM has instead been dismissed in the flux of nature paradigm. I then focus on resilience as the main explanatory concept of the flux paradigm. After distinguishing between two main different understandings of "resilience", namely engineering resilience and ecological resilience, I argue that the former is close to the concept of balance or stability and still part of the NSM, while the latter is not. Finally, I claim that ecological resilience is inconsistent with the NSM, concluding that this concept-being incompatible with the NSM-is not part of the balance of nature paradigm but rather a genuinely new explanatory tool.

Managing for the unexpected: Building resilient forest landscapes to cope with global change.

Natural disturbances exacerbated by novel climate regimes are increasing worldwide, threatening the ability of forest ecosystems to mitigate global warming through carbon sequestration and to provide other key ecosystem services. One way to cope with unknown disturbance events is to promote the ecological resilience of the forest by increasing both functional trait and structural diversity and by fostering functional connectivity of the landscape to ensure a rapid and efficient self-reorganization of the system. We investigated how expected and unexpected variations in climate and biotic disturbances affect ecological resilience and carbon storage in a forested region in southeastern Canada. Using a process-based forest landscape model (LANDIS-II), we simulated ecosystem responses to climate change and insect outbreaks under different forest policy scenarios-including a novel approach based on functional diversification and network analysis-and tested how the potentially most damaging insect pests interact with changes in forest composition and structure due to changing climate and management. We found that climate warming, lengthening the vegetation season, will increase forest productivity and carbon storage, but unexpected impacts of drought and insect outbreaks will drastically reduce such variables. Generalist, non-native insects feeding on hardwood are the most damaging biotic agents for our region, and their monitoring and early detection should be a priority for forest authorities. Higher forest diversity driven by climate-smart management and fostered by climate change that promotes warm-adapted species, might increase disturbance severity. However, alternative forest policy scenarios led to a higher functional and structural diversity as well as functional connectivity-and thus to higher ecological resilience-than conventional management. Our results demonstrate that adopting a landscape-scale perspective by planning interventions strategically in space and adopting a functional trait approach to diversify forests is promising for enhancing ecological resilience under unexpected global change stressors.

Blazing the trail: Social innovation supporting wildfire-resilient territories in Catalonia (Spain).

Mediterranean territories have co-evolved and been shaped by fire throughout history. However, global environmental change conditions are increasing the size, intensity and severity of wildfires, which have gone from a regular natural disturbance to a serious threat for civil protection, surpassing firefighting capacities. Therefore, building resilience in fire-prone territories is an increasingly relevant policy and management objective. However, the notion of resilience has been criticized for paying insufficient attention to key social issues such as socio-political dynamics, power imbalances and societal change. At the same time, social science contributions to wildfire research are still rather limited. In this paper, we bridge social innovation theory to resilience theory in order to create a territorially embedded and socially sensitive framework for assessing socio-ecological resilience. From this perspective, we then examine how Forest Defence Groups (ADFs, by their Catalan acronym) have evolved from grassroots, bottom-up initiatives to well-established bottom-linked institutions and we evaluate their contributions to socio-ecological resilience in the territories where they operate. Our results show that ADFs contribute in several aspects to socio-ecological resilience and that the pave the way for opening up spaces of dialogue and collaboration through which local communities can engage with the issues that directly affect them, such as wildfires.

Critical transitions and ecological resilience of large marine ecosystems in the Northwestern Pacific in response to global warming.

Natural systems can undergo critical transitions, leading to substantial socioeconomic and ecological outcomes. "Ecological resilience" has been proposed to describe the capacity of natural systems to absorb external perturbation and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks. However, the mere application of ecological resilience in theoretical research and the lack of quantitative approaches present considerable obstacles for predicting critical transitions and understanding their mechanisms. Large marine ecosystems (LMEs) in the Northwestern Pacific are characterized by great biodiversity and productivity, as well as remarkable warming in recent decades. However, no information is available on the critical transitions and ecological resilience of LMEs in response to warming. Therefore, we applied an integrated resilience assessment framework to fisheries catch data from seven LMEs covering a wide range of regions, from tropical to subarctic, in the Northwestern Pacific to identify critical transitions, assess ecological resilience, and reconstruct folded stability landscapes, with a specific focus on the effects of warming. The results provide evidence of the occurrence of critical transitions, with fold bifurcation and hysteresis in response to increasing sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the seven LMEs. In addition, these LMEs show similarities and synchronies in structure variations and critical transitions forced by warming. Both dramatic increases in SST and small fluctuations at the corresponding thresholds may trigger critical transitions. Ecological resilience decreases when approaching the tipping points and is repainted as the LMEs shift to alternative stable states with different resilient dynamics. Folded stability landscapes indicate that the responses of LMEs to warming are discontinuous, which may be caused by the reorganization of LMEs as their sensitivity to warming changes. Our study clarifies the nonlinear responses of LMEs to anthropogenic warming and provides examples of quantifying ecological resilience in empirical systems at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales.

Drought effects on invertebrate metapopulation dynamics and quasi-extinction risk in an intermittent river network.

Ecological communities can remain stable in the face of disturbance if their constituent species have different resistance and resilience strategies. In turn, local stability scales up regionally if heterogeneous landscapes maintain spatial asynchrony across discrete populations-but not if large-scale stressors synchronize environmental conditions and biological responses. Here, we hypothesized that droughts could drastically decrease the stability of invertebrate metapopulations both by filtering out poorly adapted species locally, and by synchronizing their dynamics across a river network. We tested this hypothesis via multivariate autoregressive state-space (MARSS) models on spatially replicated, long-term data describing aquatic invertebrate communities and hydrological conditions in a set of temperate, lowland streams subject to seasonal and supraseasonal drying events. This quantitative approach allowed us to assess the influence of local (flow magnitude) and network-scale (hydrological connectivity) drivers on invertebrate long-term trajectories, and to simulate near-future responses to a range of drought scenarios. We found that fluctuations in species abundances were heterogeneous across communities and driven by a combination of hydrological and stochastic drivers. Among metapopulations, increasing extent of dry reaches reduced the abundance of functional groups with low resistance or resilience capacities (i.e. low ability to persist in situ or recolonize from elsewhere, respectively). Our simulations revealed that metapopulation quasi-extinction risk for taxa vulnerable to drought increased exponentially as flowing habitats contracted within the river network, whereas the risk for taxa with resistance and resilience traits remained stable. Our results suggest that drought can be a synchronizing agent in riverscapes, potentially leading to regional quasi-extinction of species with lower resistance and resilience abilities. Better recognition of drought-driven synchronization may increase realism in species extinction forecasts as hydroclimatic extremes continue to intensify worldwide.

Adapting western North American forests to climate change and wildfires: 10 common questions.

We review science-based adaptation strategies for western North American (wNA) forests that include restoring active fire regimes and fostering resilient structure and composition of forested landscapes. As part of the review, we address common questions associated with climate adaptation and realignment treatments that run counter to a broad consensus in the literature. These include the following: (1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive? (2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard? (3) Can forest thinning and prescribed burning solve the problem? (4) Should active forest management, including forest thinning, be concentrated in the wildland urban interface (WUI)? (5) Can wildfires on their own do the work of fuel treatments? (6) Is the primary objective of fuel reduction treatments to assist in future firefighting response and containment? (7) Do fuel treatments work under extreme fire weather? (8) Is the scale of the problem too great? Can we ever catch up? (9) Will planting more trees mitigate climate change in wNA forests? And (10) is post-fire management needed or even ecologically justified? Based on our review of the scientific evidence, a range of proactive management actions are justified and necessary to keep pace with changing climatic and wildfire regimes and declining forest heterogeneity after severe wildfires. Science-based adaptation options include the use of managed wildfire, prescribed burning, and coupled mechanical thinning and prescribed burning as is consistent with land management allocations and forest conditions. Although some current models of fire management in wNA are averse to short-term risks and uncertainties, the long-term environmental, social, and cultural consequences of wildfire management primarily grounded in fire suppression are well documented, highlighting an urgency to invest in intentional forest management and restoration of active fire regimes.

Special feature: measuring components of ecological resilience in long-term ecological datasets.

Ecological resilience has become a focal concept in ecosystem management. Palaeoecological records (i.e. the sub-fossil remains preserved in sediments) are useful archives to address ecological resilience since they can be used to reconstruct long-term temporal variations in ecosystem properties. The special feature presented here includes nine new papers from members and associates of the PAGES EcoRe3 community. The papers build on previous work in palaeoecology to investigate, identify and compare components of ecosystem resilience on centennial to millennial timescales. There are four key messages that can be summarized from the findings of papers within the special feature: (i) multi-proxy studies reveal insights into the presence and mechanisms of alternative states; (ii) transitions between alternative states may not necessarily be abrupt; (iii) components of ecological resilience can be identified in long-term ecological data and (iv) the palaeoecological record can also provide insights into factors influencing the resilience of ecosystem functioning. Overall, these papers demonstrate the importance of using long-term ecological records for addressing questions related to the theoretical framework provided by ecological resilience.

Risk and resilience of vulnerable families in Hong Kong under the impact of COVID-19: an ecological resilience perspective.

PURPOSE: Hong Kong has experienced four waves of COVID-19 since the first case was confirmed in January 2020. Several studies have highlighted the psychological impacts of the outbreak in Hong Kong but have largely ignored the protective factors that contribute to resilience among vulnerable families. This study adopted an ecological resilience framework to explore the impact of this epidemic on members of families with youth with a delinquent tendency/mental health concerns and the ecological protective factors for these vulnerable families. METHODS: Random sampling based on a sampling frame provided by one of the largest local social service organizations in Hong Kong led to the recruitment of 407 respondents who were interviewed using a battery of standardized questionnaires. RESULTS: The results showed that 30.6% and 11.5% of respondents reported a moderate and a severe level of psychological distress, respectively, almost double the percentages reported in a previous study conducted in Hong Kong before the COVID-19 outbreak. Around 36.6% of respondents indicated they had encountered financial problems and almost 40% indicated aggravated financial circumstances since the outbreak. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that financial stress was the strongest predictor of psychological distress. Structural equation modeling indicated that family support, indoor leisure activities and community resources significantly mediated the negative influence of COVID-19-related stressors on psychological distress of family members. CONCLUSION: Family leisure activities, family support, community spirit and mutual help within the context of social-distancing restrictions may need to be promoted to benefit vulnerable families in Hong Kong under the COVID-19 epidemic.

Coping and Adaptation in Response to Environmental and Climatic Stressors in Caribbean Coastal Communities.

Cumulative and synergistic impacts from environmental pressures, particularly in low-lying tropical coastal regions, present challenges for the governance of ecosystems, which provide natural resource-based livelihoods for communities. Here, we seek to understand the relationship between responses to the impacts of El Niño and La Niña events and the vulnerability of mangrove-dependent communities in the Caribbean region of Colombia. Using two case study sites, we show how communities are impacted by, and undertake reactive short-term responses to, El Niño and La Niña events, and how such responses can affect their adaptive capacity to progressive environmental deterioration. We show that certain coping measures to climate variability currently deliver maladaptive outcomes, resulting in circumstances that could contribute to system 'lock-in' and engender undesirable ecological states, exacerbating future livelihood vulnerabilities. We highlight the significant role of social barriers on vulnerabilities within the region, including perceptions of state abandonment, mistrust and conflicts with authorities. Opportunities to reduce vulnerability include enhancing the communities' capacity to adopt more positive and preventative responses based on demonstrable experiential learning capacity. However, these will require close cooperation between formal and informal organisations at different levels, and the development of shared coherent adaptation strategies to manage the complexity of multiple interacting environmental and climatic pressures.