Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://dspace.utpl.edu.ec/jspui/handle/123456789/19144
Title: Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) as a model system in community, landscape and ecosystem ecology
Authors: Castillo Monroy, A.
Keywords: biodiversity
biological soil crusts
ecosystem function
global change
landscape heterogeneity
micro
landscape
model system
species interactions
metadata.dc.date.available: 2017-06-16T22:03:01Z
Publisher: Biodiversity and Conservation
Abstract: Model systems have had a profound influence on the development of ecological theory and general principles. Compared to alternatives, the most effective models share some combination of the following characteristics: simpler, smaller, faster, general, idiosyncratic or manipulable. We argue that biological soil crusts (biocrusts) have unique combinations of these features that should be more widely exploited in community, landscape and ecosystem ecology. In community ecology, biocrusts are elucidating the importance of biodiversity and spatial pattern for maintaining ecosystem multifunctionality due to their manipulability in experiments. Due to idiosyncrasies in their modes of facilitation and competition, biocrusts have led to new models on the interplay between environmental stress and biotic interactions and on the maintenance of biodiversity by competitive processes. Biocrusts are perhaps one of the best examples of micro-landscapes-real landscapes that are small in size. Although they exhibit varying patch heterogeneity, aggregation, connectivity and fragmentation, like macro-landscapes, they are also compatible with well-replicated experiments (unlike macro-landscapes). In ecosystem ecology, a number of studies are imposing small-scale, low cost manipulations of global change or state factors in biocrust micro-landscapes. The versatility of biocrusts to inform such disparate lines of inquiry suggests that they are an especially useful model system that can enable researchers to see ecological principles more clearly and quickly
metadata.dc.identifier.other: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10531-014-0658-x
URI: http://dspace.utpl.edu.ec/handle/123456789/19144
ISBN: 9603115
Other Identifiers: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10531-014-0658-x
Other Identifiers: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10531-014-0658-x
metadata.dc.language: Inglés
metadata.dc.type: Article
Appears in Collections:Artículos de revistas Científicas



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