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. 2023 Aug 28;2:16. doi: 10.1038/s44185-023-00022-6

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — Biological resilience (mechanisms and processes across biological levels that enable systems to resist disturbance and/or recover over time back to a steady state after perturbations) is mediated by connections within and among levels of organisation (simplified to genes and genomes, cells and organelles, organisms and populations, communities and ecosystems; depicted by multi-coloured shading and lines), and recognises that the present state (expanded in centre of figure) is shaped by ecological and evolutionary responses to past biotic (multi-coloured) and abiotic (grey) disturbance and selection (note that time is represented by a log-scale). Resistance (change) and recovery (time, state and rate) can be measured using properties of different biological levels (inset) to provide a ‘common currency’ for integration, and then enhance the translation horizon (vertical dashed line, close in time) by providing more readily measurable indicators and improving accuracy of forecast outcomes (grey arrows and question marks within circles). Note that the resistance and recovery trajectories of biological levels to a disturbance event may differ in both amplitude and temporal scale (inset), and that ‘recovery’ is also sometimes referred to in the literature as a measure of resilience (e.g. refs. ^11,27).