Linking traits across ecological scales determines functional resilience

Highlights

• With globally accelerating extinction rates, ecologists and society are focussed on protecting ecosystem function.
• Resilience of ecosystem function occurs at multiple scales of ecological organisation: individual, population, and community.
• Attributes at the individual species scale increase resistance, while attributes at the landscape scale (population and community) influence recovery.
• We explore how different combinations of scale-dependent resilience attributes are linked to resilience as disturbance regimes vary in their intensity, spatial extent, and frequency.
• Considering multiple scales of resilience attributes allows exploration of how, when, and why different aspects of biodiversity enable the persistence of function under future scenarios of multiple, cumulative, and intensified disturbance regimes.

Keywords

functional redundancy, functional group, functional traits, recovery, resistance, stressor