8.3 Ecosystem resilience and recovery

Ecosystem resilience and recovery are crucial concepts in understanding how environments respond to disturbances. Factors like adaptive capacity, resistance, and recovery time play key roles in determining an ecosystem's ability to bounce back from stress.

Assessing and promoting resilience involves maintaining biodiversity and reducing human impacts. Ecological succession and alternative stable states are important processes in ecosystem recovery, while restoration ecology and bioremediation offer tools to actively assist damaged environments.

Ecosystem Resilience

Factors Influencing Resilience

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• Adaptive capacity enables ecosystems to maintain functionality and structure in the face of disturbances by adjusting and reorganizing components
• Resistance refers to an ecosystem's ability to withstand disturbances without significant changes in structure or function
• Recovery time is the duration required for an ecosystem to return to its pre-disturbance state after a perturbation
• Threshold effects occur when an ecosystem reaches a critical point beyond which it shifts to a new stable state, often due to the accumulation of gradual changes or a sudden, severe disturbance

Assessing and Promoting Resilience

• Ecosystem resilience can be assessed by examining factors such as biodiversity, functional redundancy, and the presence of keystone species
• Promoting ecosystem resilience involves maintaining genetic and species diversity, preserving key habitats and ecological processes, and reducing anthropogenic stressors (pollution, habitat fragmentation)
• Monitoring ecosystem health indicators (water quality, species abundance) helps detect early signs of stress and enables timely management interventions to enhance resilience
• Incorporating ecosystem-based management approaches fosters resilience by considering the complex interactions and feedbacks within ecosystems and their responses to disturbances

Ecosystem Recovery

Ecological Succession and Alternative Stable States

• Ecological succession describes the sequential changes in species composition and ecosystem structure following a disturbance, often progressing from pioneer species to a climax community
• Primary succession occurs on newly exposed or formed substrates (volcanic islands, glacial moraines) where soil development and colonization by pioneer species initiate the recovery process
• Secondary succession takes place in areas where an existing ecosystem has been disturbed (abandoned agricultural fields, clear-cut forests) and recovery begins with the remnants of the previous community
• Alternative stable states refer to the potential for an ecosystem to exist in multiple stable configurations, each with distinct species compositions, structures, and functions
  • Shifts between alternative stable states can be triggered by disturbances, changes in environmental conditions, or the crossing of ecological thresholds
  • Examples of alternative stable states include clear-water and turbid-water states in shallow lakes, grasslands and shrublands in semi-arid regions, and coral-dominated and algae-dominated states in coral reefs

Restoration Ecology and Bioremediation

• Restoration ecology aims to assist the recovery of degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems by actively intervening to re-establish native species, ecological processes, and ecosystem services
  • Restoration projects may involve planting native vegetation, reintroducing key species, removing invasive species, and restoring hydrological processes (wetland restoration)
  • Successful restoration requires understanding the ecosystem's historical state, setting clear goals, engaging stakeholders, and long-term monitoring and adaptive management
• Bioremediation utilizes living organisms (microbes, plants) to degrade, detoxify, or remove contaminants from the environment, aiding in the recovery of polluted ecosystems
  • Microbial bioremediation relies on the metabolic capabilities of bacteria and fungi to break down organic pollutants (hydrocarbons, pesticides) and transform inorganic contaminants (heavy metals)
  • Phytoremediation employs plants to absorb, accumulate, or degrade contaminants from soil and water (using hyperaccumulator plants to extract heavy metals from contaminated soils)