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An example of ecological stability . In ecology, an ecosystem is said to possess ecological stability (or equilibrium) if it is capable of returning to its equilibrium state after a perturbation (a capacity known as resilience) or does not experience unexpected large changes in its characteristics across time. [1]
A diagram of the typical drivers of ecosystem collapse. [1]While collapse events can occur naturally with disturbances to an ecosystem—through fires, landslides, flooding, severe weather events, disease, or species invasion—there has been a noticeable increase in human-caused disturbances over the past fifty years.
In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and subsequently recovering. Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorms, insect population explosions, and human activities such as deforestation, fracking of the ground for oil extraction, pesticide sprayed in soil ...
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.
Resistance is one of the major aspects of ecological stability.Volker Grimm and Christian Wissel identified 70 terms and 163 distinct definitions of the various aspects of ecological stability, but found that they could be reduced to three fundamental properties: "staying essentially unchanged", "returning to the reference state...after a temporary disturbance" and "persistence through time of ...
The community context considers a relatively constant environment in which multiple stable states are accessible to populations or communities. This definition is an extension of stability analysis of populations (e.g., Lewontin 1969; Sutherland 1973) and communities (e.g., Drake 1991; Law and Morton 1993).
Based on the contradictory characteristics of both of these examples, areas of occasional disturbance allow both r and K species to benefit by residing in the same area. The ecological effect on species relationships is therefore supported by the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. Disturbed vegetation due to milpa farming. Cayo District, Belize.
"ecological regime shifts can be defined as abrupt changes on several trophic levels leading to rapid ecosystem reconfiguration between alternative states" Cumming & Norberg, 2008 [ 21 ] "the ability of a system to internally switch between different self reinforcing processes that dominate how the system functions"