The processes that govern the responses to disturbances are very complex and many traditional research methods are not adapted to disentangling the processes and ecosystem characteristics that make our environment resilient. We use a group of statistical tools that can find patterns in a lot of noise and deal with this complexity (aptly called “complex systems tools"). Our project is called the "Big Data Cluster” because we use these tools on “Big Data”, i.e. existing and newly collected data that have either high volume (a lot of data), high velocity (almost real-time data), variety (very different data types), veracity (data of varying quality) and/or value (data ready for use).