Managing for a Resilient Ocean

Ocean policies around the world increasingly emphasize the importance of maintaining resilient ocean ecosystems, communities, and economies. To maintain and restore the resilience of healthy marine ecosystems in practice, specific management objectives with metrics and a policy framework for how to apply them will be needed. Here we present a concept for doing this, based on evidence that marine ecosystems transition from desirable to less desirable states in response to a number of physical, chemical, and biological drivers.