SPECIAL FEATURE FOREST RESILIENCE, TIPPING POINTS AND GLOBAL CHANGE PROCESSES Long-term disturbance dynamics and resilience of tropical peat swamp forests

predominantly into oil palm plantations. This wetland ecosystem is assumed to have experienced insignificant disturbance in the past, persisting under a single ecologically-stable regime. However, there is limited knowledge of the past disturbance regime, long-term functioning and fundamentally the resilience of this ecosystem to changing natural and anthropogenic perturbations through time. 2. In this study, long-term ecological data sets from three degraded peatlands in Sarawak were col-lected to shed light on peat swamp forest dynamics. Fossil pollen and charcoal were counted in each sedimentary sequence to reconstruct vegetation and investigate responses to past environmental disturbance, both natural and anthropogenic. 3. Results demonstrate that peat swamp forest taxa have dominated these vegetation profiles through-out the last c. 2000-year period despite the presence of various drivers of disturbance. Evidence for epi-sodes of climatic variability, predominantly linked to ENSO events, and wildfires is present throughout. However, in the last c. 500 years, burning and indicators of human disturbance have ele-vated beyond past levels at these sites, concurrent with a reduction in peat swamp forest pollen. 4. Two key insights have been gained through this palaeoecological analysis: (i) peat swamp forest vegetation has demonstrated resilience to disturbance caused by burning and climatic variability i