Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, 3010, Australia.
School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, 2 George Street, Brisbane, QLD, 4001, Australia.
Nat Commun. 2017 Nov 2;8(1):1263. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01306-9.
Better mitigation of anthropogenic stressors on marine ecosystems is urgently needed to address increasing biodiversity losses worldwide. We explore opportunities for stressor mitigation using whole-of-systems modelling of ecological resilience, accounting for complex interactions between stressors, their timing and duration, background environmental conditions and biological processes. We then search for ecological windows, times when stressors minimally impact ecological resilience, defined here as risk, recovery and resistance. We show for 28 globally distributed seagrass meadows that stressor scheduling that exploits ecological windows for dredging campaigns can achieve up to a fourfold reduction in recovery time and 35% reduction in extinction risk. Although the timing and length of windows vary among sites to some degree, global trends indicate favourable windows in autumn and winter. Our results demonstrate that resilience is dynamic with respect to space, time and stressors, varying most strongly with: (i) the life history of the seagrass genus and (ii) the duration and timing of the impacting stress.
为了解决全球生物多样性丧失的问题，迫切需要更好地减轻人为因素对海洋生态系统的压力。我们利用生态弹性的全系统建模来探索减轻压力的机会，考虑到压力源之间的复杂相互作用、它们的时间和持续时间、背景环境条件和生物过程。然后，我们寻找生态窗口，即压力源对生态弹性影响最小的时间，这里将风险、恢复力和抵抗力定义为生态窗口。我们对全球分布的 28 个海草草甸进行了研究，结果表明，利用生态窗口安排疏浚活动可以将恢复时间缩短四倍，并将灭绝风险降低 35%。尽管窗口的时间和长度在一定程度上因地点而异，但全球趋势表明秋季和冬季是有利的窗口。我们的研究结果表明，弹性在空间、时间和压力源方面是动态的，与海草属的生活史和（ii）影响压力的持续时间和时间最为相关。
