Pinpointing Fragility: Integrating Resilience Indicators into Risk Evaluation

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Ecosystems globally are increasingly threatened by climate change and human pressures, yet current ecosystem risk assessments predominantly emphasize exposure to stressors while overlooking intrinsic ecosystem resilience—the capacity to absorb and recover from disturbances. Here, we advocate for an integrated framework that explicitly incorporates resilience into ecosystem risk assessments and demonstrate its value in the context of dryland desertification. Through bibliographic analyses of the desertification literature, we reveal a persistent disconnect between resilience research and desertification risk assessments. We then propose pathways for integration and illustrate this approach using a global dataset of dryland sites to show how accounting for resilience reshapes our understanding of desertification risk. By bridging theoretical resilience science and applied risk assessment, our framework offers a conceptual and practical foundation for pinpointing dryland areas most at risk, thereby supporting proactive management in a warming, drying world. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2TH54 Life Sciences Resilience, Risk, Vulnerability, Drylands, Desertification, Degradation Published: 2026-05-06 13:55 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: All data and code are available through Github (https://github.com/bpichon0/Risk_resilience_desertification). Language: English