Resilience and tree health: a basis for implementation in sustainable forest management

Abstract

Resilience is rapidly becoming a prominent concept in research, policy and practice. However, it is apparent that there is no consistent meaning of resilience being used by those involved in governing and managing forests and tree health. We aimed to (1) identify how the concept of resilience is defined in a range of decision-making contexts, (2) develop an understanding of resilience, which will be useful in the context of tree health and forestry and (3) suggest how managers could use this understanding more broadly as a framework for decision-making on resilience within the forestry sector. Implementation of resilience for tree health needs to encompass a range of functions and services, management objectives and threats, all present at a variety of scales. We conclude that, due to the complexity of the resilience concept and forest systems, no single definition of resilience can be sufficient and it is more appropriate to explicitly consider four resilience components: resistance, recovery, transformation and adaptation. We propose a set of decision steps which stakeholders can use to develop a Resilience Implementation Framework to guide management for their system of interest.