A new index of resilience applicable to external pulse-disturbances that considers the recovery of communities in the short term

Abstract

Resilience is a key concept in the study of the recovery of ecosystems affected by disturbances. Currently, there are numerous indices to measure resilience, but many of them do not show the accuracy of the resilience value or the behaviour of ecological parameters in the face of disturbances. New approaches and technologies enable large amounts of information to be obtained, facilitating the proposal of new resilience indices that work consistently and intuitively for a wide variety of ecological response variables under different scenarios after pulse-disturbances. In this study, we propose and verify a new resilience index, comparing its performance with others previously published. We validated the performance of the new index using real data based on field measurements of changes in soil bacterial OTUs diversity and abundance after a wildfire. The new resilience index provided an automatic and robust functional classification of the behaviour of ecosystems after disturbances, supported by a bootstrap analysis. We identified 5 scenarios of ecosystem resilience performance according to their behaviour after a pulse-disturbance: resilient, non-resilient, recovering, rebound, and continuing.

Keywords

• Resilience index
• Disturbance
• Diversity
• Abundance
• Recovery
• Stability