External shocks, agent interactions, and endogenous feedbacks — Investigating system resilience with a stylized land use model

•We proposed a framework of resilience in the context of coupled Social-Ecological Systems (SES).•A stylized agent-based model of a land use system was implemented as an example of SES to investigate system resilience.•Internal mechanisms increased the ability of the system to recover from external shocks.•Feedbacks resulted in different regimes of crop cultivation, each with a distinctive set of functions.•Resilience is not a generic system property, but strongly depends on what system function is considered.