Abstract
To thoroughly understand the extent, the spatial and temporal articulation and the action modalities of a disturbance event on one or more particular environmental components present in a site, knowing its specific regime is a necessary starting point (White and Pickett 1985).
Acts in the ecological theatre are played out
on various scales of space and time.
To understand the drama,
we must view it on appropriate scale
(Wiens 1989)
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Notes
- 1.
Henceforth, to describe a natural disturbance, or an anthropogenic threat, the terms characteristic, attribute or variable will be treated as synonyms.
- 2.
Many other spatio-geographic metrics (such as fragmentation levels, connectivity, contiguity, scatteredness) can also be applied, and are available in many software programs (for example FRAGSTAT).
- 3.
In a Mediterranean wetland, for example, a water stress, considered as a sudden decrease of water level exceptionally occurring in Winter (a period in which such areas are visited by numerous migratory birds), can exert marked effects on the ecosystem. These are extremely different from the effects caused by the same event taking place in Spring or Summer, when many of the sensitive bird species are absent (see Causarano et al. 2009). In fact, in Spring and Summer such ecosystems are frequented by group of water-related species equipped by evolutionary strategies which allow them to perceive the same event as an opportunity.
- 4.
In ecology we can also distinguish between pulse and press processes. The former measure the response of a system following a single treatment/perturbation and its recovery capacity; therefore they constitute an estimate of the system resilience. The latter measure the response following a treatment/perturbation maintained continuously through time (Gotelli and Ellison 2004). For communities this has implications with respect to the attainment of equilibrium conditions.
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Battisti, C., Poeta, G., Fanelli, G. (2016). The Disturbance Regime. In: An Introduction to Disturbance Ecology. Environmental Science and Engineering(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32476-0_4
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