What makes the Chaco ecosystem resilient?

LIPOMA MARIA LUCRECIA; CABROL, DIEGO A; CUCHIETTI, ANÍBAL; ENRICO, LUCAS; GORNÉ LUCAS D.; DÍAZ SANDRA

Liverpool

Congreso; BES and SFE² Annual Meeting: Ecology Across Borders; 2021

British Ecological Society and SFE2

Terrestrial ecosystem resilience is expected to depend on different ?sources of resilience? like functional diversity of plant communities and the presence of biological legacies like seed and seedling banks. We measured the resilience of the forest at the Gran Chaco southern extreme (central Argentina) in the face of land-use change, and asked which sources of resilience contribute the most to its recovery. After 5 years of experimental exclusion and despite the unusual high rainfalls, only grass cover showed positive resilience (recovery towards the reference forest). All other indicators showed either no significant change (null resilience) or even transitioned away from the reference forest (?negative resilience?). Only those sources of resilience related to functional diversity influenced the resilience of vegetation. Although still confined to the early post-disturbance stages, our findings suggest that recovery of this system may be slower and more complicated than predicted on the basis of space-for-time substitution studies.