Climate change, vanishing habitats, invasive species, overfishing: none of these pressures are letting up, and ecosystems everywhere are absorbing the hits.

A new synthesis paper asks the question sitting underneath all of that damage.

What actually lets an ecosystem take a punch and keep functioning – still producing the fish, the clean water, the food webs that people and wildlife depend on – instead of quietly unraveling?

The answer, according to researchers at the Center for Ecosystem Management, comes down to something almost counterintuitive: mess. Specifically, the kind of ecological mess that comes from genuine variety.