Operationalizing resilience in Australian and New Zealand agroecosystems

We present techniques that we have developed to operationalize the concept of resilience, as promoted by The Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org). We also outline a new program of research applying these techniques across a diverse range of Australian and New Zealand systems to begin operationalizing resilience management wherever humans interact with the natural environment. Resilience is an emergent system-wide property that describes the capacity of a system to absorb perturbations and persist in a variable environment. In human-modified natural systems, such as agro-ecosystems and landscape mosaics containing both farmland and remnant native vegetation, we claim: a) that long-term system dynamics is determined by interactions and feedbacks between social, economic and ecological sub-systems, rather than instantaneous stocks and flows of material throughout a system; and b) that instantaneous system behaviour is often dominated by stochasticity, variability and uncertainty. We propose a new mathematical technique, based on dynamical systems theory and systems science, which embraces uncertainty using the concept of resilience. We hope that this approach will provide a useful complement to “precise” simulation models of agricultural systems. We examine these techniques in the context of a new research program studying resilience in Australian and New Zealand agro-ecosystems. This research program is allowing us to apply these techniques to a wide range of case studies, producing quantitative results that operationalize the concept of resilience at a scale not previously achieved