Resilience in ecology: Abstraction, distraction, or where the action is?

Increasingly, the success of management interventions aimed at biodiversity conservation are viewed as being dependent on the ‘resilience’ of the system. Although the term ‘resilience’ is increasingly used by policy makers and environmental managers, the concept of ‘resilience’ remains vague, varied and difficult to quantify. Here we clarify what this concept means from an ecological perspective, and how it can be measured and applied to...