On Some Aspects of Ecological Resilience and the Conservation of Species

The importance of the notion of resilience in determining the static and the intertemporal behavior of jointly determined ecological/economic systems has been recognized by ecologists at least since Holling (1973). This notwithstanding, there are very few formal studies of such systems that explicitly analyze the ecological and the economic aspects of the problem. Consequently, this paper has two objectives. First, a new stationary probability-based method is proposed to characterize the notion of ecological resilience. Next, this characterization is used to study the problem of optimal species conservation