Biodiversity, resilience and the control of ecological-economic systems: The case of fire-driven rangelands

Abstract

The loss of resilience in systems characterised by multiple equilibria is indicated by a discontinuous change in the state of the system, or the transition from one locally stable state corresponding to a particular mix of species to another state corresponding to a different mix of species. The resilience of the system (the state of the range in this example) may be influenced by the management regime through its impact on the response to disturbances. The paper shows that optimal management of an event-driven system should be sensitive to the opportunities created by such events.