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

Abstract 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.