When Does Stress Build Strength? Linking Stress Physiology to Resilience in the Age of Rapid Environmental Change

The rapid, unprecedented rate of worldwide pressures organisms are currently exposed to, from climate instability to pollution, urges to expand research focus toward stress resilience. Here, our main goal is to call for an integrative effort to understand conserved processes underlying whole-organism stress resilience with a specific focus on the following questions: (i) How can stress resilience be defined? (ii) What are its main underlying metrics at the whole-organism level (focus on glucocorticoid hormones, oxidative stress, neural and behavioral metrics)? (iii) What is the role of stress inoculation- and hormetic-like effects to build resilience throughout an organism´s lifespan? By building up on emerging knowledge spanning from behavioral biology and ecophysiology to biomedicine, we explore conserved mechanisms of stress resilience that are relevant for both environmental and human health. Finally, we encourage for more research on wildlife study systems, which experience natural and cumulative stressors across ecologically relevant settings, and can thus help uncover functional mechanisms of stress resilience across vertebrates, including humans.