Conference Agenda

Global change presents wildlife with an unprecedented number and variety of challenges, e.g., climate change, novel diseases, urbanization, and hunting. In this context it is important to assess how resilient populations, species, and ecosystems are to disturbances. Such assessments require strong quantitative skills. Resilience is a central concept in ecological theory, and diverse methods have been developed to quantify it using empirically-collected data. Studies of resilience have been limited mainly to higher levels of organization, such as communities or ecosystems. However, understanding the resilience of populations is at least as important because many management actions target this level of organization, and populations are best suited for common conservation actions such as restocking or translocation and reintroduction. Recently, Capdevilla and colleagues (2020) introduced the term "demographic resilience" to define population resilience and suggested quantifying it using methods developed for transient dynamics analysis that are applied to the matrix population model for the species in question. Over time, the nature and intensity of disturbances may change, affecting demographic rates. Because demographic rates are used to calculate demographic resilience, we expect that demographic resilience also changes over time. However, so far demographic resilience has been assumed to be static. The assumption that resilience is static means that only a single demographic resilience value is calculated, which does not allow pinpointing the points or periods in time when the population was affected by the disturbance and, in turn, impairs our ability to suggest effective mitigation and conservation measures. In this workshop, participants will learn about the theory of demographic resilience and the different metrics that are used to quantify it. We will introduce the commonly used 'bivariate approach' for quantifying resilience, which is based on measuring two resilience components: (i) the ability of a system to withstand disturbance (‘resistance’) and (ii) the ability of the system to recover from a disturbance, i.e., to return to its original state after the disturbance ('recovery'). The core of the workshop will focus on introducing the concept of dynamic demographic resilience (i.e. varying over time). We will present our newly developed R package for quantifying dynamic demographic resilience. We will demonstrate how our package can be used to measure dynamic demographic resilience and to compare it to the static demographic resilience.