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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]
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 ...
Resilience has been defined in two ways in ecological literature: as the time required for an ecosystem to return to an equilibrium or steady-state following a perturbation (which is also defined as stability by some authors). This definition of resilience is used in other fields such as physics and engineering, and hence has been termed ...
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). The ecosystem context focuses on the effect of exogenic "drivers" on communities or ecosystems (e.g., May 1977; Scheffer et al. 2001; Dent et al. 2002).
The relationship between ecosystem complexity and stability is a major topic of interest in ecology.Use of ecological networks makes it possible to analyze the effects of the network properties described above on the stability of an ecosystem.
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.
An ecosystem, short for ecological system, is defined as a collection of interacting organisms within a biophysical environment. [2]: 458 Ecosystems are never static, and are continually subject to both stabilizing and destabilizing processes. [3]
There are different ecological dimensions that can be mapped to create more complicated food webs, including: species composition (type of species), richness (number of species), biomass (the dry weight of plants and animals), productivity (rates of conversion of energy and nutrients into growth), and stability (food webs over time). A food web ...