Mentges Andrea, Clark Adam Thomas, Blowes Shane A, Kunze Charlotte, Hillebrand Helmut, Chase Jonathan M
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig Leipzig Germany.
Department of Computer Sciences Martin Luther University Halle Germany.
Ecol Evol. 2024 Oct 17;14(10):e11637. doi: 10.1002/ece3.11637. eCollection 2024 Oct.
Ecological stability is a vital component of natural ecosystems that can inform effective conservation and ecosystem management. Furthermore, there is increasing interest in making comparisons of stability values across sites, systems and taxonomic groups, often using comparative synthetic approaches, such as meta-analysis. However, these synthetic approaches often compare/contrast systems where measures of stability mean very different things to the taxa involved. Here, we present results from theoretical models and empirical data to illustrate how differences in growth rates among taxa influence four widely used metrics of ecological stability of species abundances responding to pulse perturbations: resilience, recovery, resistance and temporal stability. We refer to these classic growth-rate-dependent metrics as 'realised' stability. We show that realised resilience and realised temporal stability vary as a function of organisms' growth rates; realised recovery depends on the relation between growth rate and sampling duration; and realised resistance depends on the relation between growth rate and sampling interval. To account for these influences, we introduce metrics intended to be more independent of growth rates, which we refer to as 'intrinsic' stability. Intrinsic stability can be used to summarise the overall effects of a disturbance, separately from internal recovery processes - thereby allowing more general comparisons of disturbances across organisms and contexts. We argue that joint consideration of both realised and intrinsic stability is important for future comparative studies.
生态稳定性是自然生态系统的一个重要组成部分，可为有效的保护和生态系统管理提供依据。此外，人们越来越有兴趣比较不同地点、系统和分类群的稳定性值，通常采用比较综合的方法，如荟萃分析。然而，这些综合方法往往比较/对比的系统中，稳定性的衡量标准对所涉及的分类群来说含义截然不同。在此，我们展示理论模型和实证数据的结果，以说明不同分类群之间生长速率的差异如何影响物种丰度对脉冲扰动响应的四个广泛使用的生态稳定性指标：恢复力、恢复、抵抗力和时间稳定性。我们将这些经典的依赖生长速率的指标称为“实现的”稳定性。我们表明，实现的恢复力和实现的时间稳定性随生物体生长速率而变化；实现的恢复取决于生长速率与采样持续时间之间的关系；实现的抵抗力取决于生长速率与采样间隔之间的关系。为了考虑这些影响，我们引入了旨在更独立于生长速率的指标，我们将其称为“内在”稳定性。内在稳定性可用于总结干扰的总体影响，与内部恢复过程分开——从而允许在不同生物体和环境中对干扰进行更普遍的比较。我们认为，联合考虑实现的稳定性和内在稳定性对未来的比较研究很重要。
