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Resilience is a concept that is intuitively understood by most rangeland managers. Indeed it is a characteristic required of those who live in the rangelands. In essence it refers to the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance and persist in its pre-disturbance state, rather than moving to a new degraded state. Therefore managing for resilience in the variable and highly unpredictable rangelands is a desirable goal.

Managing for resilience should prevent a desirable rangelands agro-ecosystem from changing to an undesirable state in the face of a disturbance, by maintaining the underlying ecological, economic and management components of the system that allow it to recover from disturbance. A significant body of scientific theory about resilience exists. However, making the step from scientific theory to managing for resilience is hampered by the fact that resilience in complex agro- ecosystems has not been adequately quantified nor have the key elements that confer resilience been identified.

This paper reports on a developing research program to operationalise and test resilience theory in Australian agro- ecosystems using dynamic systems models that capture the feedbacks within and between the social, economic and ecological components.