A Synthesis is Emerging between Biodiversity–Ecosystem Function and Ecological Resilience Research: Reply to Mori.

A recent paper by Mori [1] states the need for a unification of studies of ‘engineering’ and ‘ecological’ frameworks of resilience. Engineering resilience focuses on the capacity of a system to recover to equilibrium following some kind of perturbation, while ecological resilience (ER) explicitly recognizes multiple stable states and the capacity for systems to resist ‘regime shifts’ between alternative states. We find Mori's argument somewhat surprising given the number of recent biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (B-EF) studies that incorporate aspects of both resistance and recovery (e.g., see references in [2, 3]). We would argue that a synthesis is well underway and that apparent discrepancies are more due to differences in the spatial, temporal, and systems scale of focus and ambiguities in defining this study context rather than any fundamental incompatibilities in conceptual frameworks.