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RESILIENCE OF ECOSYSTEMS TO DISTURBANCES
Citation:
Pawlowski**, C. W. AND A Mayer**. RESILIENCE OF ECOSYSTEMS TO DISTURBANCES. Presented at 17th Annual Mtg. for Society of Conservation Biology, Duluth, MN, June 28 - July 02, 2003.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public
Description:
Resilience, in an ecological context, is one of several terms that characterize the response of an ecosystem to disturbance. Other such terms include persistence, resistance and stability. Two definitions of resilience have become prominent in the literature, both of which derive from the dynamic systems theory concept of stability, and both of which concern important aspects of ecosystem management. One refers to the speed of return of a system to its prior, undisturbed steady state. The other refers to the amount of disturbance an ecosystem can absorb before it falls into the basin of attraction of a fundamentally different steady state. We argue that current conceptualizations of resilience do not admit the direct study of disturbance effects on ecosystems because they use state displacement as a proxy for disturbance. Here we suggest a theoretical measure of resilience that uses the concept of invariance to determine, in terms of disturbance size directly, how much disturbance an ecosystem can tolerate. Presentation of these resilience concepts is made in the context of a simple model of lake eutrophication.