| Summary: | Environmental policy instruments often require that natural resource managers safeguard the resilience of ecosystems. However, 'resilience' has been a difficult concept to operationalise. Two forms of resilience are recognised in the ecological literature. 'Ecological resilience' concerns ecosystems that possess alternative equilibrial states (attractors) and has been operationalised in a few systems. 'Engineering resilience' was developed for ecosystems with a single attractor, but its use is confined to systems that gravitate towards a stable equilibrium. We present a general method to quantify engineering resilience that can be applied irrespective of an ecosystem's stability or proclivity to obey multiple attractors. The technique uses a system model to distinguish the effects of globally driven (and essentially unmanageable) stressors, such as climate change and ocean acidification, from regional- and local-scale (manageable) stressors on the ecosystem. We illustrate the technique using a simple coral reef model and find it able to calculate the impacts of managing crown-of-thorns starfish against a background of increasing stress from climate change and ocean acidification. Resilience analyses using our approach help assess the relative importance of local- or regional-scale management interventions under varying degrees of global environmental change, even if they preside over long-term ecosystem decline. Several frameworks of varying complexity are provided to guide the linkage of resilience metrics to environmental decision-making.
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