Resilience trinity: safeguarding ecosystem functioning and services across three different time horizons and decision contexts
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Auge, Harald
Baessler, Cornelia
Bärlund, Ilona
Bennett, Elene M.
Berger, Uta
Bohn, Friedrich
Bonn, Aletta
Borchardt, Dietrich
Brand, Fridolin
Chatzinotas, Antonis
Corstanje, Ronald
Laender, Frederik De
Dietrich, Peter
Dunker, Susanne
Durka, Walter
Fazey, Ioan
Groeneveld, Jürgen
Guilbaud, Camille S. E.
Harms, Hauke
Harpole, Stanley
Harris, Jim A.
Jax, Kurt
Jeltsch, Florian
Johst, Karin
Joshi, Jasmin
Klotz, Stefan
Kühn, Ingolf
Kuhlicke, Christian
Müller, Birgit
Radchuk, Viktoriia
Reuter, Hauke
Rinke, Karsten
Schmitt‐Jansen, Mechthild
Seppelt, Ralf
Singer, Alexander
Standish, Rachel J.
Thulke, Hans‐H.
Tietjen, Britta
Weitere, Markus
Wirth, Christian
Wolf, Christine
Grimm, Volker
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Abstract
Ensuring ecosystem resilience is an intuitive approach to safeguard the functioning of ecosystems and hence the future provisioning of ecosystem services (ES). However, resilience is a multi-faceted concept that is difficult to operationalize. Focusing on resilience mechanisms, such as diversity, network architectures or adaptive capacity, has recently been suggested as means to operationalize resilience. Still, the focus on mechanisms is not specific enough. We suggest a conceptual framework, resilience trinity, to facilitate management based on resilience mechanisms in three distinctive decision contexts and time-horizons: i) reactive, when there is an imminent threat to ES resilience and a high pressure to act, ii) adjustive, when the threat is known in general but there is still time to adapt management, and iii) provident, when time horizons are very long and the nature of the threats is uncertain, leading to a low willingness to act. Resilience has different interpretations and implications at these different time horizons, which also prevail in different disciplines. Social ecology, ecology, and engineering are often implicitly focussing on provident, adjustive, or reactive resilience, respectively, but these different notions and of resilience and their corresponding social, ecological, and economic trade-offs need to be reconciled. Otherwise, we keep risking unintended consequences of reactive actions, or shying away from provident action because of uncertainties that cannot be reduced. The suggested trinity of time horizons and their decision contexts could help ensuring that longer-term management actions are not missed while urgent threats to ES are given priority.