# Research efforts and gaps in the assessment of forest system resilience: A scoping review

## TL;DR

This review explores how seven resilience principles are used in assessing forest resilience, finding that some social and governance aspects are rarely studied.

## Contribution

The study identifies a gap in the joint application of all seven resilience principles in forest resilience assessments.

## Key findings

- Diversity was the most commonly used resilience criterion in 50% of studies.
- Social principles like learning, participation, and governance were rarely addressed.
- No study has considered all seven resilience principles together.

## Abstract

This study investigates how the seven core resilience principles are integrated into assessments of forest system resilience to natural or human-induced disturbances across engineering, ecological, and social-ecological resilience concepts. Following PRISMA guidelines, a literature search in the Web of Science database using the keywords “resilience”, “forest” and “ecosystem services” yielded 1828 studies, of which 330 met the selection criteria. The most commonly used criterion was diversity, a sub-criterion of “diversity and redundancy”, appearing in 50% of studies. The results indicate that social and governance-related principles, learning and experimentation (7%), participation (11%), and polycentric governance (9%) have not been frequently addressed. Although numerous studies have employed various principles for assessing forest resilience, none have considered all seven principles jointly. This highlights a significant research gap, emphasising the need to quantify these principles in forest systems. Understanding forest-community dynamics is essential for enhancing the long-term resilience and sustainability of both systems.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-025-02243-4.