EEB428H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Global Change, Keystone Species, Wildfire Suppression
22 Feb 2016
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Document Summary
Lecture 2: global change and ecosystem, function and complexity. Large-scale systems experience lags and inertia in the response to global change drivers. Direct and indirect effects of global change. Global change involves simultaneous impact of multiple drivers. The growth of global change drivers is exponential, at a faster rate than observed in nature. Species loss can reduce a systems resilience to global change. Migration graph: under business as usual" many organisms will be migrating some might not be able to fast enough. Foot, nutrients, mutualisms, habitat requirements, and check on predatory agents and disease all need to be migrating with the target species as well. Threats to genetic diversity: small population, fragmentation, inbreeding, loss of migration between metapopulation. Species provide ecosystem structure and function (placed into groups) Control agent: an agent that affects the nature of a system, eg. the rate of system processes, the frequency of system components, and the time-constant for turnover events.
