Environmental Dynamics in Salinas Grandes, Catamarca, Argentina

A proposal of new conditions and criteria for the evaluation of woodlands

“…This means that a woodland, by accomplishing this condition, is able to recover from a disturbance by the ordination of the structure, in this case soil, plants, animals and (micro) atmosphere, as shown in Karlin et al (2011Karlin et al ( , 2013, both within a primary or secondary ecological succession. Related to resilience and stability, Lyapunov coefficients are proposed for the measurement of this condition (Jørgensen and Svirezhev 2004;Karlin et al 2011Karlin et al , 2013.…”

“…For woodlands, to move towards a steady state and gain stability, it means to reduce disorder gained as exergy, and the ability to reach a steady state is what we call resilience. Identifying a steady state (defined as a state more stable than others in terms of ecological functioning) enables researchers to measure the current condition of a studied woodland compared to the steady state in terms of Euclidean distance (Karlin et al 2011. According to this, while the Euclidean distance tends to zero, stability is increased.…”

“…However, the facts show that this does not always occur. A clear example is what happens after forest fires (Karlin et al 2011), where the system experiences invasion of opportunist species (r-species), temporarily increasing its biodiversity. Such species are later replaced by species with higher interspecific competition capacity (K-species).…”

Exergetic Model of Secondary Successions for Plant Communities in Arid Chaco (Argentina)

“…Ecosystems are open systems that exchange energy with the surrounding environment, modifying among other components the plant frequencies. Based on these changes it is possible to define vectors that show the tendencies of the succession to reach mature or quasistationary states and their modifications by natural or anthropic disturbances [1]. Concepts of succession are based on the observation and the analysis of the system's states over space and time.…”

“…If an energy gradient is considered, given by the differences in abundance and frequency among each state, higher energy differences (Δ ) mean higher differences among states. Lesser differences in energy mean that the successional states are similar (at least from the thermodynamics point of view) [1].…”