Ecosystem transilience: a conceptual framework for adaptive forest management under climate change

Abstract

This note proposes the notion of ecosystem transilience as an interpretive framework for forest management under climate change. The term is first traced to its origins in innovation studies, where it described the capacity of major innovations to reshape resources, competencies, and market relations, and is then connected to ecological concepts such as resilience, transformability, and post-disturbance reorganization. Building on this background, the note argues that ecosystem transilience offers a complementary lens for describing the process through which a forest ecosystem moves across a state transition while reorganizing its structures, processes, and functions under changing environmental constraints. Rather than replacing resilience or transformability, it focuses more explicitly on the transition itself and on the possibilities for its active management. A simple conceptual representation is proposed to distinguish resilience, understood as persistence within a domain of ecologically viable configurations, from transilience, understood as the quality of a transition toward new viable configurations while seeking to maintain or reconstitute priority ecosystem functions under uncertainty. Italian forests are presented as a particularly relevant testing ground for this perspective. Their marked biogeographical diversity, the widespread occurrence of structurally simplified stands, and the growing pressure of drought, fire, and climate-driven disturbance make it increasingly difficult to assume that maintaining current forest configurations is always realistic or desirable. Within this context, Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 on nature restoration is interpreted as a policy framework consistent with a transilience perspective. The note identifies four practical implications: defining environmental operating limits; establishing context-specific portfolios of ecosystem functions; accompanying transitions through silvicultural interventions; and developing adaptive indicators capable of monitoring ecosystem change and the quality of functions delivered during transition. Taken together, these elements position ecosystem transilience as a concept that can help bridge ecological theory, adaptive forest management, and restoration policy at a time of accelerating environmental change.