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In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and subsequently recovering. Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorms, insect population explosions, and human activities such as deforestation, fracking of the ground for oil extraction, pesticide sprayed in soil ...
The diversity of species and genes in ecological communities affects the functioning of these communities. These ecological effects of biodiversity in turn are affected by both climate change through enhanced greenhouse gases, aerosols and loss of land cover [citation needed], and biological diversity, causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and extinctions of species and local populations.
Ecosystem diversity deals with the variations in ecosystems within a geographical location and its overall impact on human existence and the environment. Ecosystem diversity addresses the combined characteristics of biotic properties which are living organisms ( biodiversity ) and abiotic properties such as nonliving things like water or soil ...
The relationship between diversity and stability has been widely studied. [4] [21] Diversity can enhance the stability of ecosystem functions at various ecological scales. [22] For example, genetic diversity can enhance resistance to environmental perturbations. [23] At the community level, the structure of food webs can affect stability.
Ecosystems may transition from one stable state to another, in what is known as a state shift (sometimes termed a phase shift or regime shift), when perturbed. Due to ecological feedbacks, ecosystems display resistance to state shifts and therefore tend to remain in one state unless perturbations are large enough.
Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) is a global program that provides funding and technical assistance to nongovernmental organizations in order to protect the Earth's richest regions of plant and animal diversity, including biodiversity hotspots, high-biodiversity wilderness areas and important marine regions.
This is out of an estimated 8 million animal and plant species, including 5.5 million insect species. The drivers of these extinctions are, in descending order: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species. [6]
At low levels of disturbance, more competitive organisms will push subordinate species to extinction and dominate the ecosystem. [1] At high levels of disturbance, due to frequent forest fires or human impacts like deforestation, all species are at risk of going extinct. According to IDH theory, at intermediate levels of disturbance, diversity ...