What is the relationship between ecosystem complexity and resilience and difference between resistance and resilience biodiversity?
The structure and functions of ecological components populations, communities and ecosystems. The capacity to weather a disturbance without loss is defined as resistance, whereas resilience is the capacity to recover from a disturbance after incurring losses, which may be considerable. Ecosystems that are more complex are more resilient, or better able to tolerate and recover from disturbances, than ecosystems that are less complex.
Biologically diverse communities are also more likely to contain species that confer resilience to that ecosystem because as a community accumulates species, there is a higher chance of any one of them having traits that enable them to adapt to a changing environment. Resilience is not affected by changes to ecosystem complexity. Resilience is the capacity to recover and resistance is the ability to remain largely unchanged. Some factors that increase resilience include the species richness of the ecosystem, ecological redundancy of species within the ecosystem, and higher humidity levels. The source, persistence, and intensity of the stressors can also impact resilience. Both resistance and resilience cause an ecosystem to remain relatively unchanged when confronted to a disturbance, but in the case of resistance alone no internal re-organization and succession change is involved. This can lead to collapse of the system when a disturbance threshold is exceeded. Evidence from biodiversity–ecosystem function research points toward an increase in ecological benefits with higher levels of biodiversity and this relationship has also been hypothesized for the link between biodiversity and economic value. Resilient ecosystems can also provide protection against disturbances that would reduce income or quality of life, such as storm surge protection and flood control. However, a community may be resilient despite being linked to resilient ecosystems.
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