Resilience metrics are robust across data qualities but sensitive to community size models

Modern biodiversity monitoring is generating increasingly multidimensional representations of wildlife populations and ecosystems. It is therefore appealing for conservation and environmental governance to combine that information into single measure of ecosystem or population health.
The Jacobian matrix is a common characteristic used to identify the sensitivity of simulated/mathematical systems to perturbation (a.k.a. its resilience) and predict its near future dynamics. Jacobians have therefore been suggested as a theoretically grounded measure of ecosystem resilience. Whilst historically it has been challenging to estimate the Jacobian from empirical data, recent work has proposed a suite of metrics capable of reconstructing it for real-world community using multi-species time series data.
Here we assess the robustness of five resilience metrics influenced by varying time series lengths and data qualities based on that seen in real-world wildlife time series. We generate data using ...