Resilience In Ecosystem

Abstract

When it becomes inadvertently impossible for an ecosystem to recover from a disturbance or damage, whether it may be due to natural events like, foods hurricanes, fire, eruption from a volcano or due to the influences of human interferences like pollution, over fishing etc. endangers the benefits of that ecosystem (e.g., food, clean water). Resilience refers to ecosystem's stability and capability of tolerating disturbance and restoring itself. If the disturbance is of sufficient magnitude or duration, a threshold may be reached where the ecosystem undergoes a regime shift, possibly permanently. Human activities that adversely affect ecological resilience such as reduction of biodiversity, exploitation of natural resources, pollution, land use, and anthropogenic climate change are increasingly causing regime shifts in ecosystems, often to less desirable and degraded conditions. According to David Tilman(1999) the agricultural production has intensified and had doubled since the last 35 years and is associated with a 6.87-fold increase in nitrogen fertilization, a 3.48-fold increase in phosphorus fertilization, a 1.68-fold increase in the amount of irrigated cropland, and a 1.1-fold increase in land in cultivation. In this paper we will discuss the ecosystems resilience.