The Resilience of Coral Reefs Across a Hierarchy of Spatial and Temporal scales

Resilience is a dynamical property of ecosystems that integrates processes of recovery, disturbance and internal dynamics, including reinforcing feedbacks. As such, resilience is a useful framework to consider how ecosystems respond to multiple drivers occurring over multiple scales. Many insights have emerged recently including the way in which stressors can combine synergistically to deplete resilience. However, while recent advances have mapped resilience across seascapes, most studies have not captured emergent spatial dependencies and dynamics across the seascape (e.g., independent box models are run across the seascape in isolation). Here, we explore the dynamics that emerge when the seascape is ‘wired up’ using data on larval dispersal, thereby giving a fully spatially-realistic model. We then consider how dynamics change across even larger, biogeographic scales, posing the question, ‘are there robust and global “rules of thumb” for the resilience of a single ecosystem?’. Answers to this question will help managers tailor their interventions and research needs for their own jurisdiction.