Fig. 3: The ‘ball and cup’ analogy of resilience, where greater resilience equates to a deeper cup, shows that building resilience (up the dashed line) in a system makes it less likely to be pushed past a tipping point into an irreversible change in state, deemed a ‘regime shift’.

Perturbations that may push the system towards its tipping point include hurricanes, heatwaves, disease outbreaks and over-exploitation. Resilience-based management focuses on minimising local anthropogenic stressors⁷. In the context of coral reefs, motorboat noise is a local anthropogenic stressor that can be managed. Photo credit: S Simpson.