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Abstract Detecting and understanding disturbance is a challenge in ecology that has grown more critical with global environmental change and the emergence of research on social–ecological systems. We identify three areas of research need: developing a flexible framework that incorporates feedback loops between social and ecological systems, anticipating whether a disturbance will change vulnerability to other environmental drivers, and incorporating changes in system sensitivity to disturbance in the face of global changes in environmental drivers. In the present article, we review how discoveries from the US Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network have influenced theoretical paradigms in disturbance ecology, and we refine a framework for describing social–ecological disturbance that addresses these three challenges. By operationalizing this framework for seven LTER sites spanning distinct biomes, we show how disturbance can maintain or alter ecosystem state, drive spatial patterns at landscape scales, influence social–ecological interactions, and cause divergent outcomes depending on other environmental changes.
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Melt/Rise: Climate change and the global interconnectedness of water
From the vantage point of the social sciences, the article provides an overview of the author's concept, "hydrological globalization," as interconnective quality --both physical and social -- that is created through anthropogenic climate change and the transformation of the global cryosphere. The proposition forwarded in the article is that we can "follow the water" from sites of melt (such as The Arctic) to sites where melted ice has, and will, become sea level rise (largely in global coastal cities in the mid-latitudes) in order to compare and contrast strategies and commitments of response and adaptation to environmental change. Through the connectivity of the World Ocean, the essay proposes that novel, unlikely and distant relations are created through the deformation and reformation of the hydrosphere.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2030474
- PAR ID:
- 10391357
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Berlin journal
- Volume:
- 36
- ISSN:
- 1610-6490
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 34-37
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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