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What is an Ecosystem?

What is an Ecosystem?

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Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 23, 2025

Methods of Soil Resampling to Monitor Changes in the Chemical Concentrations of Forest Soils

Methods of Soil Resampling to Monitor Changes in the Chemical Concentrations of Forest Soils

Published on: November 25, 2016

Monitoring Terrestrial Ecosystem Resilience Using Earth Observation Data: Identifying Consensus and Limitations

Katharina Runge^1,2, Marlee Tucker², Thomas W Crowther¹

¹Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich, Switzerland.

Global Change Biology

|March 11, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Ecosystem resilience, measured by Earth observation (EO) data, shows complex patterns. Different metrics reveal four core resilience components, with slower recovery indicating greater drought resistance across biomes.

Keywords:

Earth observation biomes recovery resilience resistance terrestrial vegetation

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Last Updated: May 23, 2025

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Published on: November 25, 2016

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Published on: September 26, 2017

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Published on: October 11, 2016

Area of Science:

Ecology
Remote Sensing
Environmental Science

Background:

Ecosystem resilience, the capacity to withstand and recover from disturbances, is crucial for environmental stability.
Slowing recovery rates serve as an early warning signal for abrupt ecosystem shifts.
Earth observation (EO) vegetation data offers potential for broad-scale resilience assessment, but method proliferation causes uncertainty.

Purpose of the Study:

To review and reconcile diverse methods for evaluating ecosystem resilience using EO data.
To empirically test relationships between widely used resilience metrics.
To explore resilience patterns across global biomes and vegetation types.

Main Methods:

Literature review of resilience metrics derived from EO data.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyze relationships between 10 key resilience metrics.
Empirical testing of metric relationships across global biomes.

Main Results:

Ten resilience metrics were found to aggregate into four fundamental components of ecosystem dynamics.
Ecosystems exhibiting slower recovery rates demonstrated increased resistance to drought.
The interrelationships between resilience metrics varied significantly across different biomes and vegetation types.

Conclusions:

Ecosystem resilience is multidimensional, with distinct metrics capturing different aspects of system dynamics.
Understanding biome-specific metric relationships is essential for accurate broad-scale resilience assessment.
Findings inform global resilience mapping for conservation and policy decisions.