Department of Ecological Dynamics, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW), Alfred-Kowalke-Straße 17, Berlin, Germany.
Institute of Life-Earth-Environment, Namur Institute of Complex Systems, Research Unit in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Université de Namur, Rue de Bruxelles 61, Namur, Belgium.
Ecol Lett. 2019 Apr;22(4):674-684. doi: 10.1111/ele.13226. Epub 2019 Feb 8.
Ecosystems respond in various ways to disturbances. Quantifying ecological stability therefore requires inspecting multiple stability properties, such as resistance, recovery, persistence and invariability. Correlations among these properties can reduce the dimensionality of stability, simplifying the study of environmental effects on ecosystems. A key question is how the kind of disturbance affects these correlations. We here investigated the effect of three disturbance types (random, species-specific, local) applied at four intensity levels, on the dimensionality of stability at the population and community level. We used previously parameterized models that represent five natural communities, varying in species richness and the number of trophic levels. We found that disturbance type but not intensity affected the dimensionality of stability and only at the population level. The dimensionality of stability also varied greatly among species and communities. Therefore, studying stability cannot be simplified to using a single metric and multi-dimensional assessments are still to be recommended.
生态系统以各种方式对干扰做出响应。因此，量化生态稳定性需要检查多种稳定性特性，如抵抗力、恢复力、持久性和不变性。这些特性之间的相关性可以降低稳定性的维度，从而简化对环境对生态系统影响的研究。一个关键问题是干扰的类型如何影响这些相关性。我们在这里研究了三种干扰类型（随机、物种特异性、局部）在四种强度水平下对种群和群落水平稳定性维度的影响。我们使用了以前参数化的模型，代表了五个具有不同物种丰富度和营养级数量的自然群落。我们发现，干扰类型而不是强度影响了稳定性的维度，而且只在种群水平上。稳定性的维度在物种和群落之间也有很大的差异。因此，研究稳定性不能简化为使用单一指标，多维评估仍然是推荐的。
