Fig. 4: Return rate and resistance combinations of species composition.

a,b, Results are shown for cacao (a) and pasture (b) legacies. Taxa with low resistance and low return rates (green dots) have long recovery times to the undisturbed reference state. Lowest recovery times are achieved when both resistance and return rate are highest (black dots). Blue dots indicate low resistance and high return rate and red dots high resistance and low return rate. Dashed lines mark median values of resistance and return rate across taxa. A characteristic trajectory (red curve) is shown for each scenario (different colours of dots indicate different scenarios and each scenario is framed with the same colour). Dark-grey shading in pictograms indicates perturbation. Dashed lines in pictograms represent the end of perturbation and the onset of recovery. Resistance and return rates for total abundance and species diversity are shown in Extended Data Fig. 5. The y axis is log-transformed. Whiskers represent 95% CIs estimated with a jackknife procedure based on n − 1 iterations with n being the number of independent plots sampled per taxon and legacy (Fig. 2). a,b, Cacao (a) and pasture (b) icons reproduced with permissions from ref. ⁵³, Ecological Society of America, under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. Silhouettes of saproxylic beetle, bee, moth, dung beetle, nocturnal insect, ant, bird and ground bird were created by G. Brehm under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. The following silhouettes were reproduced from PhyloPic (https://www.phylopic.org/): frog and ground mammal, created by M. Michaud under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence; bat, created by Y. Wong under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence; frugivorous bird, created by E. Price under a CC BY 4.0 licence; seedling, created by M. Hofstetter under a CC BY 3.0 licence; tree, created by T. M. Keesey under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence; leaf-litter arthropod, created by B. Lang under a CC BY 3.0 licence; bacteria 10-cm depth and bacteria 50-cm depth, created by L. Simons under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence.