Regime Shifts, Resilience, and Biodiversity in Ecosystem Management

TLDR

The study reviews evidence of regime shifts in terrestrial and aquatic environments, linking resilience and biodiversity, and argues that active adaptive management and governance are needed to sustain desired ecosystem states and transform degraded systems. The authors conduct a review of regime‑shift evidence across ecosystems, focusing on resilience dynamics and the functional roles of biological diversity. Human actions that diminish resilience—by eroding response diversity, removing species or trophic levels, increasing pollution and climate change, and altering disturbance regimes—raise the likelihood of regime shifts, rendering ecosystems more vulnerable and prone to abrupt transitions that reduce ecosystem service provision.

Abstract

▪ Abstract We review the evidence of regime shifts in terrestrial and aquatic environments in relation to resilience of complex adaptive ecosystems and the functional roles of biological diversity in this context. The evidence reveals that the likelihood of regime shifts may increase when humans reduce resilience by such actions as removing response diversity, removing whole functional groups of species, or removing whole trophic levels; impacting on ecosystems via emissions of waste and pollutants and climate change; and altering the magnitude, frequency, and duration of disturbance regimes. The combined and often synergistic effects of those pressures can make ecosystems more vulnerable to changes that previously could be absorbed. As a consequence, ecosystems may suddenly shift from desired to less desired states in their capacity to generate ecosystem services. Active adaptive management and governance of resilience will be required to sustain desired ecosystem states and transform degraded ecosystems into fundamentally new and more desirable configurations.