Zurlini et al. (2014) formulated interesting thoughts on our recent publication dealing with the assessment of ecosystem stability using remote sensing time series (De Keersmaecker et al., 2014). Their main concerns can be summarised as follows: (i) the normalized spectral entropy (HSn; Zaccarelli et al., 2013) that was used to quantify resilience, should be interpreted as a metric for structural irregularity, rather than regularity, and (ii) our focus was on local stability and the ability to return to a stable point or trajectory only (i.e. engineering resilience), whereas stability metrics are commonly used to assess the adaptive capacity to remain within the same stability domain (i.e. ecological resilience) (Dakos et al., 2012; Holling, 1996; Pimm, 1984).This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.