Disturbance : In ecological terms, disturbance is a relatively discrete event in time coming from the outside, which disrupts ecosystems, communities, or populations, changes substrates and resource availability, and creates opportunities for new individuals or colonies to become established.

Latitude : The maximum amount the system can be changed before losing its ability to recover; basically the width of the basin of attraction.

Panarchy : The interacting set of hierarchically structured scales (of space, time, and social organization) and the interactive dynamics of a nested set of adaptive cycles.  It is understood also in terms of how the attributes Precariousness, Resistance and Latitude are influenced by the states and dynamics of the (sub)-systems at scales above and below the scale of interest.

Precariousness : The current trajectory of the system, and how close it currently is to a limit or “threshold” which, if breached, makes recovery difficult or impossible.

Regime : It is a particular configuration of states and, more precisely, is understood as the set of system states within a stability landscape.

Resilience : It is the ability of a system to absorb disturbances and still retain its basic function and structure. It can be characterised also as: · General resilience as the resilience of any and all parts of a system to all kinds of shocks, including novel ones; · Specified resilience as the resilience “of what, to what” and, therefore, resilience of some particular part of a system, related to a particular control variable, to one or more identified kinds of shocks; · Engineering resilience is a measure of the rate at which a system approaches steady state following a perturbation, also measured as the inverse of return time.

Resistance : The ease or difficulty of changing the system.

Social-ecological system (SES) : Integrated system of ecosystems and human society with reciprocal feedback and interdependence. The concept emphasizes the humans-in-nature perspective.

Stability domain : A basin of attraction of a system, in which the dimensions are defined by the set of controlling variables that have threshold levels (equivalent to a system regime).

Stability landscape : The extent of the possible states of system space, defined by the set of control variables in which stability domains are embedded.

State space : Defined by the (state) variables that constitute the system. The state of the system at any time is defined by their current values.

Threshold (or critical transition) : A level or amount of a controlling, often slowly changing variable in which a change occurs in a critical feedback causing the system to self-organize along a different trajectory - that is, towards a different attractor.

Transformability : The capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social (including political) conditions make the existing system untenable.  Transformability means defining and creating new stability landscapes by introducing new components and ways of making a living, thereby changing the state variables, and often the scale, that define the system.