This table teaches us more about ecosystem attributes than any ecology class I took in undergrad. This table allows us to compare attributes between developed and undeveloped, intact and compromised, functional and dysfunctional ecosystems. An interim professor from Dartmouth handed this table out to us Ecology 101 students and said, “Put this on your kitchen […]
MEDIA ON BWCAW WILDLAND FIRE
I cannot believe how the media sees wildland fire as “scarring and devastating” and not renewing and regenerative. So many earth ecosystems are dependent upon fire to flush out excess nutrients, disease, pestilence, and mutation. Without fire, these systems become eutrophic, lifeless, devolve, and significantly decrease in resilience. Symptoms of fire suppression are everywhere within […]
Landscape Successional Sere Ratios in Boreal Ecosystems
By energy laws, keystone processes (disburbance renewal regenerative cycles) emerged to maximize ecosystem energy intake and transformation into biology, ecosystem services, and system resilience. Adaptive, pulsing renewal cycles maintained multiple successional seres in predictable spatial temporal landscape patterns. Historically, when pulsing cyclic renewal processes were intact, all successional seres occurred across a landscape, which maximized […]
Too Many Deer (TMD) and Colonial Ecology
The people who cared for this land for the past 50,000 generations, used fire to enhance edible vegetation, for the people and the animals they loved. The “Too Many Deer” (TMD) myth has destroyed (afforestation = eutrophication) millions of acres of land we “man”-age” for nature. As the great polymath-ecologist said, the two principle drivers […]
Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis (IDH)
Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis (IDH) provides restoration ecology a framework for restoring processes that maintain / renew ecological function, biological diversity, and capacity for ecosystem services. In summary, IDH illuminates natural disturbances, such as herbivory and fire, that occurred in predictable cycles, pulses, and patterns, preventing widespread system decent into late succession, as characterized by declines […]