Many studies on ecosystem resilience often lack sufficiently long time scales to determine potential cycles of landscape response. In this paper we review some examples on how palaeoecology has provided an important aid to modern ecology in understanding ecosystem resilience. We focus some of these ideas on two Holocene sites from Southern Spain (Zonar and Gador) where current plant diversity is very high. Both sites presented resilient pattern at centennial and millennial time scales with several stable phases.
