Critical Zone Science in the Anthropocene: Opportunities for biogeographic and ecological theory and praxis to drive earth science integration

Abstract

Critical Zone Science (CZS) represents a powerful confluence of research agendas, tools, and techniques for examining the complex interactions between biotic and abiotic factors located at the interface of the Earth’s surface and shallow subsurface. Earth’s Critical Zone houses and sustains terrestrial life, and its interacting subsystems drive macroecological patterns and processes at a variety of spatial scales. Despite the analytical power of CZS to understand and characterize complicated rate-dependent processes, CZS has done less to capture the effects of disturbance and anthropogenic influences on Critical Zone processes, although some Critical Zone Observatories focus on disturbance and regeneration. Methodological approaches from biogeography and ecology show promise for providing Critical Zone researchers with tools for incorporating the effects of ecological and anthropogenic disturbance into fine-grained studies of important Earth processes. Similarly, mechanistic insights from CZS can inform biogeographical and ecological interpretations of pattern and process that operate over extensive spatial and temporal scales. In this paper, we illustrate the potential for productive nexus opportunities between CZS, biogeography, and ecology through use of an integrated model of energy and mass flow through various subsystems of the Earth’s Critical Zone. As human-induced effects on biotic and abiotic components of global ecosystems accelerate in the Anthropocene, we argue that the long temporal and broad spatial scales traditionally studied in biogeography can be constructively combined with the quantifiable processes of energy and mass transfer through the Critical Zone to answer pressing questions about future trajectories of land cover change, post-disturbance recovery, climate change impacts, and urban hydrology and ecology.

The Case for a Critical Zone Science Approach to Research on Estuarine and Coastal Wetlands in the Anthropocene

“…CZS is uniquely situated to analyse the complexity of processes that operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales in coastal and estuarine systems. As Minor et al (2020) note, integrating the range of processes at the intersection of the atmosphere, hydrosphere/cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere with anthropogenic disturbance '…provides new opportunities to interpolate CZS across larger scales' (p. x) but also, to investigate individual ecosystem types, such as those at the coast, with a more holistic approach.…”

“…the effective energy mass transfer, EEMT, model of Rasmussen et al 2011Rasmussen et al , 2015, then these additional components need to be incorporated into the model. Interestingly, human impact was not explicitly considered in the original CZ concept, although there are expanding efforts to include anthropogenic processes in CZ research (Minor et al 2020). Figure 2 illustrates the additional complexity of estuarine environments from a CZS perspective as it is necessary to take into account a wide range of catchment processes as well as those more proximal to the systems themselves, including those associated with human activity.…”

“…Note that the typical two-dimensional illustration of the CZ (c) has to be extended into the broader coastal ecosystem (b) and the catchment as a whole (a). The inclusion of human activities within the concept, as suggested by Minor et al (2020), is also illustrated realization of simultaneous long-term observation and systematic analysis of coupled physical, chemical and biological processes across multi-interface and multi-temporal scales in order to reveal the underlying mechanisms controlling the evolution of coastal wetlands. Considering these processes across the entire range of spatial scales, from the molecular to catchment, is essential but poorly understood, and the range of timescales over which these interconnections operate has not yet been examined (Ward et al 2020).…”

Ambiente, Antropoceno E Enfermidades: (Re)abrindo a Caixa De Pandora

“…As duas propostas, ao mesclarem forças naturais e sociais, acabam se constituindo como interpretações de um mundo híbrido, uma vez que designam a dominância de processos que não são totalmente naturais ou humanos (DEARING et al, 2015;MINOR et al, 2019), estabelecendo sistemas e dinâmicas que expressam essa realidade.…”

Impact of agriculture intensification on forest degradation and tree carbon stock; promoting multi‐criteria optimization for restoration in Central India

“…To understand the long-term implications of the ongoing land degradation due to combined direct and indirect drivers, multidisciplinary long-term monitoring is being carried out in the Vidarbha region (Mishra et al, 2021;Pujari et al, 2020). This long-term monitoring by multidisciplinary research strengths can help understand the impact of drivers on long term flow of ecosystem services and diverse biogeochemical mechanisms (carbon fluxes between the atmosphere and biomass), ecohydrology, and soil carbon distribution etc., (Dawson et al, 2020;Minor et al, 2020). Keeping in the background the rampant loss of forests in the region along with the depletion of valuable carbon stocks, our present study assessed the impact of different anthropogenic drivers of forest degradation and carbon stocks of forests in the semiarid zone of the Vidarbha region in Central India (Pujari et al, 2020).…”