Human activities or natural events may perturb locally stable equilibrium communities. One can ask how long the community will take to return to its equilibrium and how "far" from the equilibrium it may get in the process. To answer those questions, we can measure the "resilience" and "reactivity" of a system. These concepts thus quantify one particular form of transient dynamics in ecological models. I will briefly review these measures and give some examples and known but still surprising insights. Then I will suggest extensions to periodically forced systems and periodic orbits in autonomous systems and examine some of their properties.