Understanding how disturbance affects biodiversity is important for both fundamental and applied reasons. Here, I investigate how disturbances with different ecological effects change biodiversity metrics. I define three main types of disturbance effects: D disturbance (shifts in mortality rate), B disturbance (shifts in reproductive rates) and K disturbance (shifts in carrying capacity). Numer...

Given the increasingly global stresses on forests, many ecologists argue that managers must maintain ecological resilience: the capacity of ecosystems to absorb disturbances without undergoing fundamental change. In this review we ask: Can the emerging paradigm of natural-disturbance-based management (NDBM) maintain ecological resilience in managed forests? Applying resilience theory requires c...

Shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice in most tropical regions of the world and has the potential to provide for human livelihoods while hosting substantial biodiversity. Little is known about the resilience of shifting cultivation to increasing agricultural demands on the landscape or to unexpected disturbances. To investigate these issues, we develop a simple social-ecol...

In the search for the best ecological and economic indicators of ecosystem change, a unifying solution for joining data from disparate fields appears as a general rule: Organize data into space/time/topic hierarchies that permit convergence of data resulting from shared and appropriate scaling. The scale of the data selects for compatible methodologies, leading to data integration and the disco...

Ecological resilience, adaptive cycles, and panarchy are all concepts that have been developed to explain abrupt and often surprising changes in complex socio-ecological systems that are prone to disturbances. These types of changes involve qualitative and quantitative alterations in systems’ structures and processes. This paper uses the concepts of ecological resilience, adaptive cycles, and p...

This article presents a social-ecological resilience assessment and attempts to explicitly examine the impacts of urbanization on resilience, with a view to explore how to strengthen social-ecological governance of the resilience of urban ecosystems. We use a combined Grey-Fuzzy evaluation model to discuss a case study of the Su-Xi-Chang city cluster, a metropolitan area in East China, in which...

Ecological disturbances of forests by insects have a complex array of associated human dimensions presenting complications for natural resource decision making and relationships between stakeholders and managers. This article discusses the human context of forest disturbances by insects by reviewing four cases of bark beetle forest disturbance from British Columbia in Canada, Bavarian Forest Na...