Associated Ecosystem Engineers
The effects of planned engineers are for the most part evident, as suggested earlier. Contrarily, the effects of associated engineers are largely indirect, subtle, and incompletely understood. To summarize them, it is convenient to think of the overall agroecosystem as having seven compartments into which matter enters and exits, and six processes whereby matter is transferred between compartments, some of which are strictly trophic, others of which are engineering. The seven compartments are...
The Interaction Of Human Engineers With Ecological Engineers The Case Of Pesticides
Although this chapter for the most part ignores the human engineers that play so central a role in this particular ecosystem, it would seem perhaps too parochial not to at least mention some ways in which dramatic engineering feats have interacted with the ecological engineering that is the basis of this chapter. Indeed, some of these interactions have been quite spectacular, in a negative sense. When engineers make bridges whose span characteristics are such that harmonic vibrations cause...
The Drilosphere As A Selforganizing System
Earthworms and other major soil ecosystem engineers create physical domains in soils that have all the characteristics of self-organized systems as defined by Perry (1995) Based on strong and rather specific interactions within physical boundaries, these systems change the constraints of their environment with positive feedbacks on their own living conditions (Lavelle et al. 2006 see Figure 5.1). Soil constraints indeed have pushed soil organisms to develop intense interactions along...
Planned Ecosystem Engineers
In a trivial sense the planned elements of an agroecosystem are all ecological engineers. The farmer, being the ultimate engineer (but not the focus of this chapter) decides to transform the original ecosystem, but the crops he or she chooses inevitably have a major effect on the environment that is constructed. And frequently those effects are not directly trophic, so may be considered as ecological engineering. Perhaps the first acknowledgement of these effects was in the mid-nineteenth...
Historical Perspective On Ecosystem Engineering
Natalie Buchman, Kim Cuddington, and John Lambrinos Ecologists have been aware that animals and plants modify the physical environment for at least 150 years, even though the term ecosystem engineer was not coined until 1994 (Jones et al. 1994). As we have argued elsewhere (Beisner and Cuddington 2005), awareness of the historical development of any ecological topic can lead to deeper understanding and more rapid scientific progress. In this spirit, we outline some of the major areas of...
References
Choosing a place to grow. Importance of within-plant abiotic microenvironment for Yponomeuta mahalabella. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 83 171-180. Anderson, C., and McShea, D.W. (2001). Intermediate-level parts in insect societies Adaptive structures that ants build away from the nest. Insectes Sociaux 48 291-301. Atlegrim, O. (1989). Exclusion of birds from bilberry stands Impact on insect larval density and damage to the bilberry. Oecologia 79 136-139. -. (1992)....
Sphaeroma Quoianum
S. quoianum ( S. quoyanum, S. pentodon) lives intertidally (Riegel 1959, Morris et al. 1980) and burrows into a variety of available soft substrates including peat, mud, and soft rock. It also bores into floating material FIGURE 9.1 Schematic diagrams showing the conversion of a (A) salt marsh, (B) mangrove, and (C) kelp forest to open, unvegetated systems initiated by the burrowing activities of isopods. The burrows of the isopods also create fine-scale habitat for bur-rowing-dwelling...
John T Lill and Robert J Marquis
Plant-feeding insects that construct shelters on their food plants provide ample opportunities for examining the impacts of allogenic ecosystem engineering on nature's most diverse group of organisms, the arthropods. Shelters serve as habitats for a variety of plant-dwelling arthropods that exploit a range of available resources within these constructs. The small size and somewhat ephemeral nature of these constructs at first may suggest their effects on animal community composition and...
Posteradication Flora And Fauna Dynamics
TNC recognized that there were many potential outcomes of the sheep eradication program (Schuyler 1993). The fundamental and most desirable one was that native biodiversity would be maintained or improved, but they were also aware that other outcomes could be undesirable or have unknown consequences. These included an increase in the pig population because of increased food and cover, increased fire frequency and extent resulting from increased vegetation biomass, and an increase in non-native...
