Toward a Generalizable Framework of Disturbance Ecology Through Crowdsourced Science

Abstract

Disturbances fundamentally alter ecosystem functions, yet predicting their impacts remains a key scientific challenge. While the study of disturbances is ubiquitous across many ecological disciplines, there is no agreed-upon, cross-disciplinary foundation for discussing or quantifying the complexity of disturbances, and no consistent terminology or methodologies exist. This inconsistency presents an increasingly urgent challenge due to accelerating global change and the threat of interacting disturbances that can destabilize ecosystem responses. By harvesting the expertise of an interdisciplinary cohort of contributors spanning 42 institutions across 15 countries, we identified an essential limitation in disturbance ecology: the word ‘disturbance’ is used interchangeably to refer to both the events that cause, and the consequences of, ecological change, despite fundamental distinctions between the two meanings. In response, we developed a generalizable framework of ecosystem disturbances, providing a well-defined lexicon for understanding disturbances across perspectives and scales. The framework results from ideas that resonate across multiple scientific disciplines and provides a baseline standard to compare disturbances across fields. This framework can be supplemented by discipline-specific variables to provide maximum benefit to both inter- and intra-disciplinary research. To support future syntheses and meta-analyses of disturbance research, we also encourage researchers to be explicit in how they define disturbance drivers and impacts, and we recommend minimum reporting standards that are applicable regardless of scale. Finally, we discuss the primary factors we considered when developing a baseline framework and propose four future directions to advance our interdisciplinary understanding of disturbances and their social-ecological impacts: integrating across ecological scales, understanding disturbance interactions, establishing baselines and trajectories, and developing process-based models and ecological forecasting initiatives. Our experience through this process motivates us to encourage the wider scientific community to continue to explore new approaches for leveraging Open Science principles in generating creative and multidisciplinary ideas.

Contrasting Community Assembly Forces Drive Microbial Structural and Potential Functional Responses to Precipitation in an Incipient Soil System

“…This assumption has not been empirically tested to date and decoupling often observed between taxonomy and function ( Burke et al, 2011 ; Louca et al, 2016a , b , 2018 ). Understanding functional assembly forces in landscapes is important, particularly in response to abiotic forcings such as dry-wet cycling and for predicting recovery of systems following major disturbances that “reset” the system ( IPCC, 2014 ; Graham et al, 2021 ). Therefore, systematic studies at landscape scale are needed to understand how hydrological perturbations in the primary stages of landscape evolution impact the mechanisms of soil microbial community structure, function, and assembly.…”

Microbiome assembly predictably shapes diversity across a range of disturbance frequencies

“…Nonetheless, most relevant bacteria in activated sludge have generation times of less than 24 h. Hence, the 42-day length of this study represented around tens to hundredths of generations of many different taxa, allowing the detection of significant patterns in assembly and structure. Further research in a variety of ecosystems is needed to validate the broad applicability of the ISH, particularly considering that disturbance can vary in type, frequency, intensity, driver and impact 31,53 . Studies at different scales are also necessary since ecological patterns can vary across spatial, temporal and phylogenetic scales 3 , while the effect of dispersal processes could also be evaluated within open systems.…”

Crowdsourcing Global Perspectives in Ecology Using Social Media

“…Finally, once the manuscript took shape, a final round of editing was performed by the leadership team, and the document was released one final time for comments. At this stage (approximately one week prior to submission), authorship was assigned as "named author" meaning that the contributor's name would be listed on the published article or "consortium authorship" meaning that a consortium author would be listed as an author on the publication with details on consortium contributors listed at the end of the manuscript (Graham et al, 2021). Contributors were notified of proposed assignments via e-mail.…”