habitat-mediated facilitation and counteracting ecosystem engineering interactively influence ecosystem responses to disturbancehabitat-mediated便利化和抵消生态系统工程交互影响生态系统对干扰的反应.pdfVIP

Habitat-Mediated Facilitation and Counteracting Ecosystem Engineering Interactively Influence Ecosystem Responses to Disturbance ¨ 1 ¤a¤b 2 1 3,4 5 Johan S. Eklof * , Tjisse van der Heide , Serena Donadi , Els M. van der Zee , Robert O’Hara , Britas Klemens Eriksson1 1 Department of Marine Benthic Ecology and Evolution, Center for Ecology Evolutionary Studies, Groningen University, Groningen, The Netherlands, 2 Community and Conservation Ecology Group, Center for Ecology Evolutionary Studies, Groningen University, Groningen, The Netherlands, 3 Animal Ecology Group, Center for Ecology Evolutionary Studies, Groningen University, Groningen, The Netherlands, 4 Department of Marine Ecology, NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Den Burg, Texel, The Netherlands, 5 Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, Frankfurt, Germany Abstract Recovery of an ecosystem following disturbance can be severely hampered or even shift altogether when a point disturbance exceeds a certain spatial threshold. Such scale-dependent dynamics may be caused by preemptive competition, but may also result from diminished self-facilitation due to weakened ecosystem engineering. Moreover, disturbance can facilitate colonization by engineering species that alter abiotic conditions in ways that exacerbate stress on the original species. Consequently, establishment of such counteracting engineers might reduce the spatial threshold for the disturbance, by effectively slowing recovery and increasing the risk for ecosystem shifts to alternative states. We tested these predictions in an intertidal mudflat characterized by a t