Development of Ecosystems

Abstract

We must distinguish between development and evolution in ecosystems. The development of an ecosystem involves the changes due to the first six levels of the hierarchy of regulating mechanisms presented in Table 2.1. The time span of development is dependent on several factors, mainly the components of the ecosystem, including their history, and the imposed changes of forcing functions. The transition from the early stage to the mature stage (see Table 4.5) will usually last from a few months to a few hundreds of years. The evolution of an ecosystem includes the application of level 7 in the hierarchy of regulating mechanisms. Gene changes are a slow process and the evolutionary time span is 100 000 years or more (see also the discussion in Chapter 2 (‘Complexity of ecosystems’)).