Long-Term Ecology Laboratory, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Biodiversity Informatics and Spatial Analysis, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Richmond, UK.
Biol Lett. 2020 Apr;16(4):20200005. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0005. Epub 2020 Apr 1.
Here, we use 30 long-term, high-resolution palaeoecological records from Mexico, Central and South America to address two hypotheses regarding possible drivers of resilience in tropical forests as measured in terms of recovery rates from previous disturbances. First, we hypothesize that faster recovery rates are associated with regions of higher biodiversity, as suggested by the insurance hypothesis. And second, that resilience is due to intrinsic abiotic factors that are location specific, thus regions presently displaying resilience in terms of persistence to current climatic disturbances should also show higher recovery rates in the past. To test these hypotheses, we applied a threshold approach to identify past disturbances to forests within each sequence. We then compared the recovery rates to these events with pollen richness before the event. We also compared recovery rates of each site with a measure of present resilience in the region as demonstrated by measuring global vegetation persistence to climatic perturbations using satellite imagery. Preliminary results indeed show a positive relationship between pre-disturbance taxonomic richness and faster recovery rates. However, there is less evidence to support the concept that resilience is intrinsic to a region; patterns of resilience apparent in ecosystems presently are not necessarily conservative through time.
在这里，我们使用了来自墨西哥、中美洲和南美洲的 30 个长期、高分辨率的古生态记录，以解决关于热带森林弹性的两个假说，这些假说可以通过从以前的干扰中恢复的速度来衡量。首先，我们假设更快的恢复速度与更高生物多样性的地区有关，这与保险假说一致。其次，弹性是由于特定位置的内在非生物因素造成的，因此目前在抵抗当前气候干扰方面表现出弹性的地区在过去也应该显示出更高的恢复速度。为了检验这些假说，我们应用了一个阈值方法来确定每个序列中森林以前的干扰。然后，我们将这些事件的恢复速度与事件发生前的花粉丰富度进行了比较。我们还将每个地点的恢复速度与该地区当前弹性的一个衡量标准进行了比较，该标准通过使用卫星图像来衡量全球植被对气候波动的持久性来测量。初步结果确实表明，在干扰前的分类学丰富度与更快的恢复速度之间存在正相关关系。然而，支持弹性是内在的区域概念的证据较少；目前在生态系统中表现出的弹性模式不一定随着时间的推移而保守。
