A systematic review of terrestrial ecosystem resilience: Trends and adaptations over the past 50 years

Abstract

Resilience plays a crucial role in maintaining desirable ecosystem states and is a key objective of sustainable ecosystem management. This study synthesizes the concepts and measurement approaches of terrestrial ecosystem resilience and expounded on its spatio-temporal changes and influencing factors based on the literature over the past 50 years. Arid regions exhibited the lowest levels of spatial resilience, and the global ecosystem resilience showed a downward trend. In the focal regions, ecological resilience in Amazonian and Southeast Asian rainforest regions declined primarily driven by human activities such as deforestation and cropland expansion. Precipitation and temperature exerted bidirectional influences the resilience of ecosystems, indicating that ecosystem responses to climatic factors were non-monotonic. Evidence concerning anthropogenic factors such as land management and deforestation on ecosystem resilience were predominantly negative. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive synthesis of large scale terrestrial ecosystem resilience assessments, offering valuable insights for ecosystem protection and restoration policy development.

Keywords

Ecological resilience / Engineering resilience / Recovery / Ecosystem management

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Tianjing Wu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Supervision, Software, Resources, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Yanxu Liu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Zhuangzhuang Wang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Conceptualization. Ying Yao: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Methodology. Xueyan Cheng: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Yan Zhao: Writing - review & editing, Supervision.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Yanxu Liu is an Young Editorial Board Member for this journal and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42522105 and 42171088), the 111 Project of China (Grant No. B23027) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China.

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