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Landscape modification and nutrient-driven instability at a distance.

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Summary
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Nutrient enrichment destabilizes ecosystems, causing species loss and reduced function. Human activities amplify these effects across landscapes, highlighting the need to manage nutrient pathways for ecosystem stability.

Keywords:
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Area of Science:

  • Ecology
  • Environmental Science
  • Theoretical Ecology

Background:

  • Nutrient addition can destabilize food webs (paradox of enrichment).
  • Increased nutrient loading can cause competitive exclusion and reduce food web diversity.
  • A framework to predict nutrient impacts on landscape-level food web stability is lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop a coherent framework predicting nutrient impacts on food web stability across landscapes.
  • To investigate how anthropogenic resource and organism displacement affects ecological stability.
  • To synthesize contemporary food web and meta-ecosystem theory with empirical data.

Main Methods:

  • Combined contemporary food web and meta-ecosystem theory.
  • Developed models to predict nutrient impacts on stability and function.
  • Integrated theoretical synthesis with empirical data on ecosystem imbalances.

Main Results:

  • Nutrient additions are expected to decrease stability and function in human-impacted regions.
  • Destabilization is likely driven by competitive exclusion of edible plant species.
  • Spatial nutrient transport amplifies instabilities over vast distances in modified landscapes.

Conclusions:

  • Human modification connects ecosystems, causing widespread, costly nutrient-driven instabilities.
  • Slowing spatial nutrient pathways is a potent strategy for stabilizing degraded ecosystems.
  • Empirical evidence shows growing frequency of distant, propagating ecosystem imbalances.