The Journal is published by the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic in cooperation with the Cave Administration of the Czech Republic, the Krkonoše Mts. National Park Administration, the Bohemian Forest Mts. National Park Administration, the Podyjí National Park Administration and the The Bohemian Switzerland National Park Administration. It has been published since 1946.
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Nature Conservation 3/2010 — 22. 6. 2010 — Research, Surveys and Data Management — Print article in pdf
Co přinesly novější poznatky ekosystémové ekologie
New knowledge in ecosystem ecology (in the U.S. called conservation ecology) may change the nature conservation and landscape management conceptual framework.
The equilibrium is one of the oldest and most pervasive ideas in ecology and consequently in conservation biology. Tenets of the equilibrium paradigm consider ecosystems (1) to be essentially closed, (2) to be self-regulating, (3) to posses a stable point or stable cycle equilibria, (4) to have deterministic dynamics, (5) to be virtually free of disturbance, and (6) to be independent of human influences. The early founders of ecology believed in the importance of a biological and geological past, and in nature’s patterns and inherent coherence that persists over time. The centrepiece of the classical paradigm was the theory of climatic succession. This view of community change remained dominant until the early 1970s. A classical ecology view of the world can be easily described by a „hand-in-glove“ relationship between habitat and the species distribution. Within this concept all niches were assumed to be full and all species were thought to be in their proper places: all finger pockets are filled by one finger. Under the non-equilibrium paradigm, ecosystems can be thought to be open, to be regulated by factors internal and external to them, to lack a stable point equilibrium, to be nondeterministic, to incorporate disturbances, and to admit human influence. If equilibrium is to be found in certain ecosystems, it may appear on certain specified time intervals and at certain coarse spatial scales. Meanwhile, conservationists increasingly recognize that individual species are embedded in interactive communities and that disturbance and dynamics are fundamental processes in natural systems. Ideas about metapopulation have taught us that very frequently we might observe empty but perfectly suitable habitats. Furthermore, source-sink dynamics have explained why we may often have species in an unsuitable habitat. In terms of the hand-in-glove analogy, there is a glove that has a few extra finger pockets, where are no fingers, and perhaps two fingers sticking into a single pocket and most pockets are occupied. The new view of nature is also called “flux of nature”. With respect to ecosystem dynamics, resistance means the ability of an ecosystem to continue to function without change when stressed by a disturbance. It can be understood also as the magnitude of state that can be disturbed before an ecosystem changes its structure by changing the variables and processes that control ecosystem “behaviour”. On the other hand, resilience is the ability of an ecosystem to recover after a disturbance. It could be measured also as the rate at which an ecosystem returns to a single steady or cyclic state following a disturbance. Another term of ecological science, raised in relation to the ecosystem concept, ecological integrity, describes the state where in a ecosystem, structure and functional relations maintained are similar to those when natural biodiversity has been present. Due to ecosystem dynamics, ecosystem management should be highly adaptive. Adaptive management is a systematic process for continually improving policies and practices by learning from the outcomes of measures in the field. In other words, contrary to blanket management, it is a structured, iterative process of optimal decision making in the face of uncertainty or a quasi-experiment, flexible “learning by doing”. Governmental and non-governmental nature conservation and landscape protection organisations should include the recent knowledge in ecosystem ecology into their policy and everyday practices.