Sustainability Science RobustnessEvolvability BIO AC Meeting 19 April 2007 How do biological systems create, test and maintain adaptive capacity? Critical thresholds State changes Cross-scale feedbacks Lags and inertia biology J. Cancalosi

Sustainability Science Discontinuity Nonlinearity Abrupt change Forecasting + humans How do slowly changing variables interact with boundary conditions and variables that change on faster time scales? Mississippi River and Missouri River from Space - NASA American Chestnut

Sustainability Science How do latitude, resistance and precariousness of a system affect resilience? supanet.com how close the current state of the system is to a limit or threshold the ease or difficulty of changing the system the maximum amount a system can be changed before losing its ability to recover complex systems Keeling CO2 curve Latitude Precariousness Resistance

AdaptationTransformation How do the actors in a system influence resilience and robustness? What governs buffering capacity --- the ability to absorb stress and shock without fundamental change? How is novelty admitted to a system? What governs evolvability --- the ability of a system to move in a fundamentally different trajectory? Sustainability Science