Timing anthropogenic stressors to mitigate their impact on marine ecosystem resilience.

ABSTRACT: Better mitigation of anthropogenic stressors on marine ecosystems is urgently needed to address increasing biodiversity losses worldwide. We explore opportunities for stressor mitigation using whole-of-systems modelling of ecological resilience, accounting for complex interactions between stressors, their timing and duration, background environmental conditions and biological processes. We then search for ecological windows, times when stressors minimally impact ecological resilience, defined here as risk, recovery and resistance. We show for 28 globally distributed seagrass meadows that stressor scheduling that exploits ecological windows for dredging campaigns can achieve up to a fourfold reduction in recovery time and 35% reduction in extinction risk. Although the timing and length of w

SUBMITTER: Wu PP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5665875 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature