What Makes an Ecosystem Resilient
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Ecological resilience refers to how well an ecosystem can absorb disturbance, such as fire, drought or disease, and still recover its essential structure and function afterward, rather than being pushed permanently into a different, often less productive and less diverse state that it struggles to recover from naturally.
Diversity tends to support resilience considerably, since an ecosystem containing many different species performing similar ecological roles is less likely to lose that function entirely if any single species is badly affected by a particular disturbance, compared with a simplified system relying heavily on just one or two key species.
Connectivity between habitat patches also supports resilience, since it allows species to recolonise an area after a disturbance from nearby, less affected populations, which is part of why fragmented, isolated landscapes generally recover far more slowly and considerably less completely from any disturbance than well connected ones with broadly similar habitat quality found nearby.