Conclusions
The preceding exercises have demonstrated how the initiation of disturbance can be affected by landscape position, how disturbances create pattern and dynamics on landscapes, and how spatial and temporal scale influences whether a landscape is equilibrial. You’ve also seen the wide range of vari-ability in natural disturbance regimes and the difficulty in setting reference conditions for a disturbance. Either explicitly or implicitly, each of these ex-amples also illustrates the potential importance of humans in governing dis-turbance dynamics. The first example showed how the use of the landscape for purposes seemingly unrelated to the disturbance in question can influence the pattern of disturbance (e.g., roads influencing the initiation of fires). Di-rect use of the landscape for forest harvest can also substantially alter land-scape patterns. In the last example, the parameters S and T were used to es-timate how human-induced changes in a disturbance regime (e.g., alteration of disturbance size or frequency) might push the landscape into regions of dif-ferent behavior. Humans might alter the size of the disturbance relative to the size of the landscape (S) by either altering the extent of fire or by altering the extent of the landscape itself (through land conversion and fragmentation). Furthermore, humans could alter landscape disturbance by burning or cutting areas larger than might otherwise be disturbed. The recovery time of the dis-turbance relative to the recovery time of the vegetation (T) can also be altered by humans—by initiating disturbance more frequently through altering the frequency of fires or frequency of harvests. Thus, humans can influence the spatial and temporal dynamics of disturbance, creating another layer of com-plexity in addition to the natural variability in disturbance dynamics, which should not be ignored.
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Turner, M.G., Tinker, D.B., Gergel, S.E., Chapin, F.S. (2002). Landscape Disturbance. In: Gergel, S.E., Turner, M.G. (eds) Learning Landscape Ecology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21613-8_11
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