FIGURE 3. External conditions affect the resilience of multi-stable ecosystems to perturbation.

The bottom plane shows the equilibrium curve as in Fig. 2. The stability landscapes depict the equilibria and their basins of attraction at five different conditions. Stable equilibria correspond to valleys; the unstable middle section of the folded equilibrium curve corresponds to a hill. If the size of the attraction basin is small, resilience is small and even a moderate perturbation may bring the system into the alternative basin of attraction.