Rose Thorogood, Ville Mustonen, Alexandre Aleixo, Pedro José Aphalo, Fred O. Asiegbu, Mar Cabeza, Johannes Cairns, Ulrika Candolin, Pedro Cardoso, Jussi T. Eronen

The natural world is under unprecedented and accelerating pressure. Much work on understanding resilience to local and global environmental change has, so far, focussed on ecosystems. However, understanding a system’s behaviour requires knowledge of its component parts and their interactions. Here we present a framework for understanding ‘biological resilience’, or the processes that enable components across biological levels, from genes to communities, to resist or recover from perturbations. Although ecologists and evolutionary biologists have the tool-box to examine form and function, efforts to integrate this knowledge across biological levels and take advantage of big data (e.g. ecological and genomic) are only just beginning. We argue that combining eco-evolutionary knowledge with ecosystem-level concepts of resilience will provide the mechanistic basis necessary to improve management of human, natural and agricultural ecosystems for better resilience.