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Adaptive capacity confers resilience to perturbation, giving ecological and human social systems the ability to reconfigure themselves with minimum loss of function.In ecological systems, this resilience shows as net primary productivity and maintenance of biomass and biodiversity, and the stability of hydrological cycles.
Examples include searching for food, mating, and vocalizations. Physiological adaptations permit the organism to perform special functions such as making venom , secreting slime , and phototropism , but also involve more general functions such as growth and development , temperature regulation , ionic balance and other aspects of homeostasis .
Figure 16.5 Some examples of these are building seawalls or inland flood defenses, providing new insurance schemes, changing crop planting times or varieties, and installing green roofs or green spaces. Adaptation can be reactive (responding to climate impacts as they happen) or proactive (taking steps in anticipation of future climate change).
For example, in coastal regions of Sweden, Spain and UK, Littorina saxatilis posses different shell shape in response to predation by crabs or waves surges. [ 43 ] Predation by crabs, also called crab crushing, gives rise to snails with wary behavior having large and thick shells which can easily retract and avoid predation.
Social-ecological systems are based on the concept that humans are a part of—not separate from—nature. [8] This concept, which holds that the delineation between social systems and natural systems is arbitrary and artificial, was first put forth by Berkes and Folke, [9] and its theory was further developed by Berkes et al. [10] More recent research into social-ecological system theory has ...
Population, community, and physiological ecology provide many of the underlying biological mechanisms influencing ecosystems and the processes they maintain. Flowing of energy and cycling of matter at the ecosystem level are often examined in ecosystem ecology, but, as a whole, this science is defined more by subject matter than by scale.
Seminal examples of local adaptation come from plants that adapted to different elevations [10] or to tolerate heavy metals in soils. [11] Interactions among species (e.g. herbivore-plant interactions) can also drive local adaptation, though do not seem to be as important as abiotic factors, at least for plants in temperate ecosystems. [ 12 ]
The bodies of some animals, such as woodrats, are inversely correlated with the mean annual temperature of their environment. [9] This is an applied example of Bergmann's rule; Drosophila species occur in both tropical climates, where the temperature is warm, and temperate climates, where the temperature is colder. When both groups of species ...