Resilience

Definition

The capacity of a biological system—such as a population, community, or ecosystem—to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks. In arthropod ecology, resilience describes how insect or arachnid populations persist through environmental shocks (drought, pesticide exposure, habitat fragmentation) by leveraging life-history plasticity, dispersal, or dormant stages rather than returning to a fixed equilibrium.

Etymology

From Latin resilire, to spring back or rebound.

Example

Colonies of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) demonstrate resilience to Varroa mite infestation when genetic diversity for hygienic behavior is maintained; colonies collapse when that functional diversity is lost, even if population numbers temporarily recover.

Synonyms

• ecological resilience
• engineering resilience (contrast)

Related Terms

• resistance
• recovery
• stability
• plasticity
• Bet-hedging
• source-sink dynamics
• metapopulation

Usage Notes

Distinguish resilience (persistence through change) from resistance (minimal change during disturbance) and recovery (return time to pre-disturbance state). Resilience can be measured as the magnitude of disturbance a system can absorb before shifting to an alternative stable state. In insect conservation, resilience is increasingly favored as a management goal over static preservation of population size, acknowledging that arthropod communities are inherently dynamic. Some literature uses 'engineering resilience' narrowly for return time to equilibrium, versus 'ecological resilience' for the broader persistence capacity described here.