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, and robustness, which is measured by 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. Antifragility, a concept that refers to systems performing better under sustained perturbations than in their absence is one such tool and could be a useful complement to resilience and robustness for ecology and restoration.