Interspecific interactions are important structuring forces in ecological communities. Interactions can be disturbed when species are lost from a community. When interactions result in fitness gains for at least one participating organism, that organism may experience reduced fitness as a result of interaction disturbance. However, many species exhibit traits that enable individuals to persist ...

This paper proposes a conceptual and measurement framework to quantitatively assess the disaster resilience of communities. The concept of resilience suggests a much broader framework than simply reducing monetary losses. Resilience can be conceptualized along four interrelated dimensions: technical, organizational, social, and economic. Evaluating community resilience and the degree to which m...

Resilience theory has received increased attention from researchers across a range of disciplines who have developed frameworks and articulated categories of indicators; however, there has been less discussion of how to recognize, and therefore support, social resilience at the community level, especially in urban areas. The value of urban environmental stewardship for supporting social-ecologi...

This paper explains the fundamental concepts of resilience proposing a unified terminology and establishing a common frame of reference for quantitative evaluation of such seismic resilience. The evaluation is based on a non-dimensional analytical function based on loss recovery within a “recovery period”. Distinction is made between direct and indirect losses. The path to recovery is expressed...

269 ON APRIL 23, 2008, THE CENTER for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) convened an invitational meeting to discuss community resilience for catastrophic health events and to help inform implementation planning for Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21 (HSPD-21). Released in October of 2007, HSPD-21 identified community resilience as one of the “four most c...

Liming has been used extensively in Scandinavia and elsewhere since the 1970s to counteract the negative effects of acidification. Communities in limed lakes usually return to acidified conditions once liming is discontinued, suggesting that liming is unlikely to shift acidified lakes to a state equivalent to pre-acidification conditions that requires no further management intervention. While t...

This research assessed whether greater attachment to an Aboriginal community buffers against the negative effects of stigma and promotes positive health outcomes. Aboriginal Australians (n = 203) living with hepatitis C completed a survey assessing community attachment, stigma, resilience, quality of life, treatment intent, hepatitis C knowledge and positive lifestyle changes. A stronger sense ...

the article by potts et al, “the pill is mightier than the sword,” points out that family planning has an important role to play in building peace by increasing women’s empowerment and their agency, ultimately helping peacebuilding efforts. evidence has demonstrated that family planning programs are cost effective, produce quick results, help women and couples meet their desired fertility level...

The emergent property of resilience is the ability of a system to return to an original state after a disturbance. Resilience may be used as an early warning system for significant or irreversible community transition; that is, a community with diminishing or low resilience may be close to catastrophic shift in function or an irreversible collapse. Typically, resilience is quantified using reco...

This paper presents a conceptual framework to define seismic resilience of communities and quantitative measures of resilience that can be useful for a coordinated research effort focusing on enhancing this resilience. This framework relies on the complementary measures of resilience: “Reduced failure probabilities,” “Reduced consequences from failures,” and “Reduced time to recovery.” The fram...