Abstract

Understanding how ecological communities and ecosystems respond to perturbations is a pressing research need in ecology. Currently, the focus is largely on assessing resilience, which is often measured as the speed with which a system returns to the initial state after a disturbance or how much disturbance it can withstand without losing its properties. However, many systems do not return to an undisturbed state and experience continued perturbations. Assessing a system's performance under perturbations is thus needed. A concept of antifragility which refers to systems performing better under perturbations than in their absence may be useful for ecology and restoration and could complement the concept of resilience.