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In 1997, Grimm and Wissel made an inventory of 167 definitions used in the literature and found 70 different stability concepts. [5] One of the strategies that these two authors proposed to clarify the subject is to replace ecological stability with more specific terms, such as constancy, resilience and persistence. In order to fully describe ...
Hysteresis is an important concept in alternative stable state theory. In this ecological context, hysteresis refers to the existence of different stable states under the same variables or parameters. Hysteresis can be explained by "path-dependency", in which the equilibrium point for the trajectory of "A → B" is different from for "B → A ...
[2] [3] [4] Second, interspecific competition results in one species driving a competitor to extinction and becoming dominant in the ecosystem. [2] [3] [4] Third, moderate ecological scale disturbances prevent interspecific competition. [2] [3] [4] The hypothesis is ambiguous with its definitions of the terms "intermediate" and "disturbance".
The balance of nature, also known as ecological balance, is a theory that proposes that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium or homeostasis, which is to say that a small change (the size of a particular population, for example) will be corrected by some negative feedback that will bring the parameter back to its original "point of balance" with the rest of the system.
The concept of resilience in ecological systems was first introduced by the Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling [7] in order to describe the persistence of natural systems in the face of changes in ecosystem variables due to natural or anthropogenic causes. Resilience has been defined in two ways in ecological literature:
This ecological concept is based on the broader concept of holism, which describes the functionality of any system as having many individual parts, all of which are extremely important to the system's viability. "A community has been viewed as a super organism with integrity analogous to that of cells in an organism.
Ecosystem ecology is philosophically and historically rooted in terrestrial ecology. The ecosystem concept has evolved rapidly during the last 100 years with important ideas developed by Frederic Clements, a botanist who argued for specific definitions of ecosystems and that physiological processes were responsible for their development and persistence. [2]
In scientific ecology, climax community or climatic climax community is a historic term for a community of plants, animals, and fungi which, through the process of ecological succession in the development of vegetation in an area over time, have reached a steady state. This equilibrium was thought to occur because the climax community is ...