The concept of ecological resilience describes how a system maintains its function and structure in a period of rapidly increasing environmental change. Since the theory of resilience was explicitly defined by Holling in 1973, numerous scholars from different intellectual disciplines have attempted to measure, estimate, or quantify resilience. However, there is growing concern that lack of clarity on the operationalization of the concept will limit its application. Thus, we have reviewed and synthesized the theory and quantitative approaches from two leading areas of resilience research---ecological resilience from environmental science and community resilience from the social sciences. We discuss research development and quantitative approaches within these scientific disciplines and the challenges for consolidating these approaches into a more integrated science for managing and assessing coupled human-natural systems. This research will be co-presented by researchers from the fields of social and ecological sciences.
Results/Conclusions
We identified two fundamental differences in the quantitative approaches between ecological and community resilience. First, ecological components are rarely considered in the assessment of human community resilience, and vice versa. However, the interaction between ecological and social factors is a key to understanding the resilience of coupled systems of humans and nature. The second difference is how each domain treats scale. Community resilience literature primarily relies on the analysis of one level in the system (community level); however, without considering cross-scale effects and interactions, analyses could be oversimplified and inaccurate, and adverse management outcomes could result. Both domains face the challenge of acquiring longitudinal data and consistent measures for key variables. To overcome these shortcomings, we proposed quantifiable metrics (e. g., landscape connectivity associated with human development) and quantitative methods such as discontinuity analysis that could bridge the gap between the two domains. For instance, discontinuity analysis uses proxies to identify scales in relevant systems, and provides an objective method to identify scales in social-ecological systems and account for cross-scale interactions. Through illuminating the limits of present resilience studies in disparate disciplines, and presenting opportunities for future research, we point out a critical step in moving resilience theory and application forward.