The increasing incidence of extreme events (e.g. fires, insect outbreaks) in combination with ongoing pressures such as climate and land-use changes are seriously threatening the persistence of forest services on which human wellbeing depend. In this context, forest resilience to disturbances has become a paradigm for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Whereas many indicators have been proposed in different empirical studies, most of them are based on a static view of ecosystem states and overlook that ecosystem states, in fact, represent dynamic regimes. In contrast, many advanced theoretical approaches remain largely unexplored in forest systems. In this sense, incorporating theoretical resilience concepts into empirical studies poses a key challenge to developing realistic management of ecosystems in general, and forests in particular.
The MSCA-IF project RESET aimed to contribute to the conservation of forests and prevent their degradation and loss by improving our capability to identify resilient communities, assessing the mechanisms underlying post-disturbance forest dynamics, and supporting forest management and policy through useful information and ground-breaking analytical tools. In particular, RESET consisted of three general objectives:
(1) To develop a methodological framework to identify, characterize, and compare ecological dynamic regimes from empirical data.
(2) To assess the ecological resilience of forests to pulse, ramp, and press disturbances accounting for forest dynamic regimes.
(3) To support forest management and policy by providing novel analytical tools and pragmatic information to help decision-makers anticipate global change impacts.
