Environmental Disturbance Promotes Diversity

a landscape with grasses and body of water are covered in fog at sunrise

Biological Strategy

Wet prairie ecosystem

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Image: Kenneth Cole Schneider / Flickr / CC BY - Creative Commons Attribution alone

Maintain Biodiversity

The greater the amount of genetic and species variation in an ecosystem, the more resilient that ecosystem is to disturbances. Variation in ecosystems across the Earth also contributes to the Earth’s resilience to unpredictable changes. This variation is called biodiversity. Because living systems compete with each other for scarce resources, maintaining biodiversity involves creating conditions for a large variety of species to successfully co-occur and reproduce. For example, within a wetland, there are different vegetation types. This diversity results in a complex mosaic of microenvironments as the vegetation types alter air flows, light regimes, and water temperatures and chemistry. Because organisms vary in their ideal environmental conditions, these micro-environments increase the diversity of plants in the wetland. In turn, having a wetland in an otherwise dry area increases biodiversity at an even larger scale.

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Ecosystems

Eco- ("household"), system ("organized whole")

An ecosystem consists of all the biological and nonbiological elements that make up a defined area. That definition might seem vague, but that means it’s flexible: We can apply the word across different scales and times. Ecosystems can be small, like a single tide pool, or large, like coastal wetlands. Ecosystems can include plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, rocks, temperature, light, soil, and climate—all linked through the flow of energy and cycle of nutrients. Each part of an ecosystem interacts with, and is influenced by, other members of the system. These interactions are dynamic, leading to changes to any ecosystem over time.

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Grasses of wet prairies in South Florida thrive by being adapted to fire during the growing season.

“We measured the effects of prescribed fire during January (dormant season) and May (growing season) on flowering of three perennial grasses, muhly (Muhlenbergia capillaris), gulfdune paspalum (Paspalum monostachyum), and south Florida bluestem (Schizachyrium rhizomatum), which are dominant grasses in wet prairies of south Florida, USA. Flowering was promoted by growing season fire but not by dormant season fire. Flowering was significantly greater for all species following prescribed fire conducted during May compared with areas burned during January of the same calendar year. The strong positive effect of growing season fire on flowering of all three species decreased after the first growing season. We rejected the hypothesis that season of fire did not influence flowering. Our results indicated that flowering by these dominant, wet prairie grasses is promoted by early growing season fire, which corresponds to historical patterns of lightning-ignited fire in south Florida.” (Main and Barry 2002:430)

Last Updated August 18, 2016

References

Journal article

Influence of season of fire on flowering of wet prairie grasses in South Florida, USA

Main MB; Barry MJ

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