Revisiting: Ecosystem, Structure, Function and Mineral Cycling

This chapter reviews how marine ecosystems respond to parasites. Evidence from several marine ecosystems shows that parasites can wield control over ecosystem structure, function, and dynamics by regulating host density and phenotype. Like predators, parasites can generate or modify trophic cascades, regulate important foundational species and ecosystem engineers, and mediate species coexistence by affecting competitive outcomes. Sometimes the parasites have clear positive impacts within ecosystems, such as increasing species diversity or maintaining ecosystem stability. Other times, parasites may have destabilizing effects that signal an ecosystem out of balance. But it is now clear that some (but not all) parasites can have strong and, at times, predictable effects, and should thus be incorporated into food web and ecosystem models

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The need for a nationally consistent ecosystem monitoring framework for Australian rangelands.

10.32942/osf.io/f3q42 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ben Sparrow ◽

Greg Guerin ◽

Andrew Lowe

Keyword(s):

Data Collection ◽

Structure Function ◽

Monitoring System ◽

Ecosystem Structure ◽

Ecosystem Monitoring ◽

Essential Information ◽

Design Elements ◽

National Monitoring ◽

Management Interventions ◽

Monitoring Framework

The need for a national ecosystem monitoring system for the Australian rangelands has been regularly identified. Against a background of natural variability, rangeland ecosystems face both short and longer-term impacts. These pressures, including overstocking, climate change, deforestation, altered fire regimes and invasion by feral species, are expected to drive changes to the structure, function and composition of native vegetation, and significantly impact fauna populations and ecosystem fluxes. A national monitoring framework is required to report where and when change is occurring, what is changing and the direction and magnitude of change, all of which underpin understanding the causes and viable management interventions required to mitigate undesirable outcomes. In this paper we articulate criteria for a national monitoring system that provide the essential information to assess environmental change and detail how such a system will enable change to be assessed at local to global scales. The system should incorporate a range of scales of monitoring, detect changes in ecosystem structure, function and diversity and measure key environmental variables. It should encourage the standardisation of data collection, the collection of environmental samples for downstream analysis and the integration of new technologies to improve data collection, analysis and delivery. Our vision includes the provision of free, widely accessible data and the publication of methods, data and rationale in peer reviewed literature. The framework also needs to meet a variety of State, Territory and national legislative and international reporting requirements. Finally, the framework will be built on, and incorporate the best of existing monitoring programs and will be supported long-term as part of the national science infrastructure. Whilst these system design elements appear difficult to achieve, there are many reasons to be optimistic that this vision can become a reality.

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