A boost for integrative rethinking of resilience in water-driven transitional ecosystems

Establishing operational approaches to assess and forecast resilience is critical for understanding ecosystem responses to global change. Current methods fall short when applied to water-driven transitional ecosystems, which undergo periodic shifts between aquatic and terrestrial phases. These ecosystems are highly sensitive to changes in historical wet-dry regimes, yet existing approaches often neglect the interconnection and compensatory dynamics between phases, yielding unreliable resilience estimates. We propose a holistic approach that integrates the entire wet-dry cycle and treats aquatic and terrestrial phases as interconnected components of a scalable meta-ecosystem. This perspective captures key resilience mechanisms-species turnover and functional redundancy driving compensatory effects-that sustain biodiversity and functioning across phases. By framing resilience as an emergent ecosystem property, our system-wide approach identifies essential elements for reliable assessments and provides a functional pathway to make resilience evaluations more actionable, with broad implications for managing water-driven transitional ecosystems under global change.