10.5061/DRYAD.CZ8W9GJ09
Hillebrand, Helmut
0000-0001-7449-1613
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
Kunze, Charlotte
Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University
of Oldenburg [HIFMB]
Meta-analysis on pulse disturbances reveals differences in functional and
compositional recovery across ecosystems
Dryad
dataset
2019
disturbance experiments
recovery
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
https://ror.org/018mejw64
DFG HI 848/26-1
Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony
ZN3285
2020-12-19T00:00:00Z
2020-03-23T00:00:00Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13457
255123 bytes
3
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Most ecosystems are affected by anthropogenic or natural pulse
disturbances, which alter the community composition and functioning for a
limited period of time. Whether and how quickly communities recover from
such pulses is central to our understanding of biodiversity dynamics and
ecosystem organization, but also to nature conservation and management.
Here, we present a meta-analysis of 508 (semi-)natural field experiments
globally distributed across marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.
We found recovery to be significant yet incomplete. At the end of the
experiments, disturbed treatments resembled controls again when
considering abundance (94%), biomass (82%), and univariate diversity
measures (88%). Most disturbed treatments did not further depart from
control after the pulse, indicating that few studies showed novel
trajectories induced by the pulse. Only multivariate community composition
on average showed little recovery: disturbed species composition remained
dissimilar to the control throughout the experiment. Still, when
experiments showed a higher compositional stability, they tended to also
show higher functional stability. Recovery was more complete when systems
had high resistance, whereas resilience and resistance were negatively
correlated. The overall results were highly consistent across studies, but
significant differences between ecosystems and organism groups appeared.
Future research on disturbances should aim to understand these
differences, but also fill obvious gaps in the empirical assessments for
regions (especially the tropics), ecosystems and organisms. In summary, we
provide general evidence that (semi-)natural communities can recover from
pulse disturbances, but compositional aspects are more vulnerable to
long-lasting effects of pulse disturbance than the emergent functions
associated to them.
This data set contains all effect sizes between a control and a disturbed
treatment for 508 experiments used to analyze recovery across ecosystems
and organisms. A full description of the methods is in the paper
associated to this manuscript. The data contains 6 columns. case.ID is a
unique identifier for each of the 508 experiments. Appendix S1 at the
paper contains full documentation for each of the experiments. resp.cat
categorizes the response variable as either biomass, abundance, an index
of diversity or composition. The manuscript details the rationale behind
these categries, and the detailed variables measures are given in Appendix
S1. Day of the experiment, with 0 being the pre-distrubance day. RD:
Relative duration within the experiment, i.e., normalizing the day of the
experiment to the duration of the experiment, such that 1 is the final
sampling date. LRR is the effect size of the disturbance, in most cases a
log-response ratio, only for composition mostly a dissimilarity metric.
Again, for detauls see the paper's method section var.lrr is the
sampling variance of the effect sizes, if blank it could not be derived
from the primary literature.