I have just read a few pages of Pimm's classic [*Food Webs*](http://www.amazon.com/Food-Webs-Stuart-L-Pimm/dp/0226668320/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-9631600-9467103?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176637864&sr=8-1). One of the examples used by Pimm to illustrate the idea of stability made me think about the difference between Pimm's stability and Holling's resilience notions.
From the example of England Song Thrush, it seems that stability is a numerical measure of _species_ characteristics, while resilience is a feature of the system as a whole. While one single species can have changes and come back to its equilibrium, for the system as a whole the equilibrium may be difficult to find or simply do not exist. While stability concerns the fluctuation of a single species or a series of species, it does not indicate whether the structure of the system changes as the species shift from their ``equilibrium''. Resilience, on the contrary, does not question how impact on one species affects this species, but the implications of the impact on the whole system.
My understanding of stability may change as I read more of Pimm's book. But for now I think I grasped some essence in these two concepts.
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