Quantifying resilience of humans and other animals

2018/10/29 by Marten Scheffer, J.E. Bolhuis, J. Elizabeth Bolhuis +17 · 388 citations
Environmental Science · Mathematics · Psychology · #Biology #Business #Climate Change and Health Impacts #Computer science #Data science #Ecosystem dynamics and resilience #Environmental resource management #Environmental science #Flood myth #Forcing (mathematics) #Geography #Mathematics #Natural (archaeology) #Psychological resilience #Psychology #Resilience (materials science) #Risk analysis (engineering)

paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1810630115

published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(47), 11883-11890 (National Academy of Sciences)

openalex publication_date 2018/10/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

All life requires the capacity to recover from challenges that are as inevitable as they are unpredictable. Understanding this resilience is essential for managing the health of humans and their livestock. It has long been difficult to quantify resilience directly, forcing practitioners to rely on indirect static indicators of health. However, measurements from wearable electronics and other sources now allow us to analyze the dynamics of physiology and behavior with unsurpassed resolution. The resulting flood of data coincides with the emergence of novel analytical tools for estimating resilience from the pattern of microrecoveries observed in natural time series. Such dynamic indicators of resilience may be used to monitor the risk of systemic failure across systems ranging from organs to entire organisms. These tools invite a fundamental rethinking of our approach to the adaptive management of health and resilience.

Citations

• The concept of allostasis in biology and biomedicine
• Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system
• Causal Relationship Between Stressful Life Events and the Onset of Major Depression

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