ResIntegrate: Integrating and predicting resilience of ecological systems to multiple disturbances

Objective

Ecological systems rarely face disturbances one at a time. Instead, droughts, fires, storms, and human pressures often occur together or in rapid succession, interacting in ways that can amplify or dampen their effects. Some ecosystems resist these disturbances or recover quickly, while others collapse or shift into entirely new states. Understanding why these different outcomes occur is one of the central challenges in ecology and is critical for predicting biodiversity change and sustaining the ecosystem services on which societies depend. Yet, most ecological research has examined disturbances in isolation, typically as single, short-lived events, despite the fact that natural systems experience complex disturbance regimes that vary in intensity, duration, frequency, and timing. As a result, we still lack a unified understanding of how ecological resilience emerges and how responses to interacting disturbances propagate from individuals to populations and entire communities. ResIntegrate will develop a new framework to understand and predict resilience under realistic disturbance regimes. By linking the responses of individual organisms to the dynamics of populations and the stability of ecological communities, the project will uncover how combinations of interacting disturbances shape ecological systems. It will combine ecological theory with large global datasets on population dynamics, longterm studies of natural populations exposed to multiple disturbances, and coordinated disturbance experiments in grasslands worldwide. This integrative approach will reveal which species, life-history strategies, and environments are most resilient to interacting disturbances. In doing so, it will provide new tools to forecast ecological change and guide conservation strategies aimed at strengthening the resilience of ecosystems in an increasingly disturbed world.