LAUSR

Communities are increasingly threatened by extreme weather events. The cumulative effects of such events are typically investigated by assessing community resilience, that is, the extent to which affected communities can achieve pre‐event states. However, a mechanistic understanding of the processes underlying resilience is frequently lacking and requires linking various measures of resilience to demographic responses within natural communities. Using 13 years of data from a shrub community that experienced a severe drought in 2005, we use generalized additive models to investigate temporal changes in three measures of resilience. We assess whether community‐weighted, species‐specific demographic traits such as longevity and reproductive output can predict changes in resilience and how the performance of these traits compares to more commonly used plant functional traits such as leaf area or root dry matter content. We find significant spatiotemporal variation in community dynamics after the drought. Overall, demographic traits are better at predicting absolute and relative resilience in total plant cover, but functional traits outperform demographic traits when resilience in community composition is assessed. All resilience measures show nonlinear and context‐specific responses to demographic and functional traits; and these responses depend strongly on the severity of initial drought impact. Synthesis. Our work demonstrates that a full picture of the mechanisms underlying community responses to drought requires the assessment of numerous species‐specific characteristics (including demographic and functional traits) and how these characteristics differentially affect complementary measures of community changes through time.