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Ecosystem antifragility: beyond integrity and resilience.

Miguel Equihua1, Mariana Espinosa Aldama2, Carlos Gershenson3,4,5

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Ecosystem antifragility, a new concept, suggests ecosystems can benefit from environmental variability, going beyond traditional resilience. This approach offers a mathematically formal and practically applicable method for evaluating ecosystem health and response to change.

Keywords:
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Area of Science:

  • Ecology
  • Information Theory
  • Systems Biology

Background:

  • Ecosystem resilience and integrity are critical concepts in ecological studies.
  • Existing literature often focuses on properties enabling resilience, responses to perturbations, and complexity.
  • A gap exists in understanding how ecosystems can actively benefit from environmental variability.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To review and synthesize the literature on ecosystem resilience and integrity.
  • To introduce and develop the concept of ecosystem antifragility.
  • To provide a mathematically formal and heuristically applicable framework for evaluating ecosystem antifragility.

Main Methods:

  • Literature review and synthesis of existing research on ecosystem resilience.
  • Theoretical development of the concept of ecosystem antifragility.
  • Quantitative modeling and application examples to demonstrate antifragility.

Main Results:

  • Identified three main narratives in ecosystem resilience literature: inherent properties, response to perturbations, and complexity.
  • Proposed ecosystem antifragility as a novel concept where systems benefit from variability.
  • Demonstrated that antifragility surpasses traditional resilience/robustness by enabling systems to gain from stress.

Conclusions:

  • Ecosystem antifragility offers a new paradigm for understanding ecosystem dynamics and health.
  • This concept provides a mathematically sound and practically evaluable approach to ecological assessment.
  • Antifragile ecosystems are not merely resistant but actively improve with environmental fluctuations.