This dissertation moves among several connected ideas that form the backbone of ecological resilience—the discontinuity hypothesis, cross-scale resilience model, regime shift theory, and panarchy. It both expands conceptual arguments and tests some of the hypotheses generated.

Analyses discussed include applying the discontinuity hypothesis to the global economic system, testing candidate socio-political processes to see if they were correlated to the identified scale domains, comparing the cross-scale resilience of coral reef fish communities from the Hawaiian archipelago, and testing a novel information-theory method to detect spatial regimes in zooplankton and avian communities across large spatial scales.

Conceptual arguments include detailing why the discontinuity hypothesis can and should be used to objectively detect scale domains of pattern and process in non-ecological complex systems, why the cross-scale resilience model would benefit from the consideration of abundance, and why adaptive cycles are more than just a metaphor for dynamics of change over time, but are driven by endogenous features inherent to complex adaptive systems.