This transdisciplinary session will explore ecosystem instabilities and their response to a range of environmental perturbations through a resilience lens. Globally, environments are facing a diverse range of disturbances, both individually and in compound form, that threaten to induce catastrophic shifts and potentially form exceptional ‘antropocene’ states, leading to a irreversible loss of vital ecosystem services. The resilience of ecosystems to environmental change is controlled by negative feedback mechanisms that stabilise and regulate environments, instabilities that propagate and amplify initial pressures, and the intensity, spatial extent and longevity of the original disturbance.

This session will debate (1) how we can simulate such threshold dynamics with simple models without oversimplifying or incorrectly representing the real world, (2) how we define whether transitions to new stable states have been achieved in field and laboratory research, (3) the mechanisms that dampen and amplify disturbance pressures and (4) how we can identify, validate and predicted impending catastrophic shifts. Further it will consider the management implications of a resilience approach, exploring how vulnerable systems on the cusp of transitions are identified, how regime shift concepts can be efficiently implemented to shift or stabilize ecosystem states, and the mechanisms used to justify stabilisations as opposed to reclamation. At its core, this session recognises the interdisciplinary nature of ecosystem interactions that drive the environmental responses to disturbance and the need for a multi-faceted approach to address such questions of local and global concern. The session welcomes abstracts transcending spatio-temporal scales, from laboratory investigations of microbiological communities through to the biomes explored at a global scale. It will combine field-based assessments of ecosystem transitions, feedback responses determined over years to decades with paleo analysis, and modelling studies that can examine state shifts over millennia.