Increasing drought frequency threatens ecosystem health, necessitating comprehensive resilience assessments to understand ecological responses. However, current frameworks often overlook adaptability (the capacity of systems to learn from disturbances and self-adjust). This omission can lead to overestimating resilience loss and misjudging ecosystem collapse thresholds. To address this, we developed an integrated framework that incorporates adaptability as a third core dimension alongside resistance and recovery, and constructed a comparable composite resilience indicator using the entropy weight method. Applying this framework to the Yellow River Basin (YRB, 1982-2017) yielded several key insights. Resistance and recovery showed opposite trends and a clear trade-off across ecosystems. This reflects the regulatory role of adaptability in dynamically balancing drought tolerance and post-drought regeneration. Among ecosystems, forests exhibited the lowest resistance but the highest recovery, grasslands displayed the opposite pattern, and rain-fed croplands and shrublands were intermediate. Temporally, resistance, adaptability, and overall resilience increased (p < 0.001) across ecosystems, whereas recovery declined (p < 0.001). Analysis of the driving factors revealed that seasonal temperature variability, soil-topography conditions (available water capacity and elevation), and drought characteristics (severity and frequency) were key drivers of ecosystem resilience metrics. Compared with resilience estimates based on the first-order lagged autocorrelation coefficient (AR(1)), the proposed framework produced consistent results and detected early-phase resilience decline. Overall, this study provides a novel, three-dimensional perspective on ecosystem resilience and informs targeted ecosystem management strategies in the YRB and similar dryland regions.