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Ecological Resiliency

Ecological Resiliency. Presentation to Multi-hazard Roundtable Jan. 16, 2008 Susan Bolton, Ph.D., P.E. University of Washington sbolton@u.washington.edu. Ecological Resiliency.

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Ecological Resiliency

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  1. Ecological Resiliency Presentation to Multi-hazard Roundtable Jan. 16, 2008 Susan Bolton, Ph.D., P.E. University of Washington sbolton@u.washington.edu

  2. Ecological Resiliency • Emerges from ecosystem features which follow the ‘rules’ of thermodynamics, conservation of mass and energy, natural selection and evolution

  3. Overarching ecological principles • Thermodynamics and conservation of mass and energy • Energy flows, solar based • Materials are reused and recycled • Natural selection and evolution • Self-organization • Disturbance and thresholds

  4. Ecosystem • a self-organizing system with no blueprint or design • would need a large amount of information to predict final outcome • redundancy of function but not necessarily of structure • based on solar energy • reuse of materials • many possible outcomes and pathways • current state reflects past history (disturbances) • has a tipping point or threshold where a new state is categorically different from previous and cannot return • everything is connected

  5. Definitions • Engineering resilience • Rate at which a system returns to a single steady state or cyclic state following a disturbance • Ecological resilience • Amount of change (disturbance) a system can withstand before it changes to a new set of reinforcing processes and structures

  6. Traditional vs. ecological engineering

  7. Additional information • Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. 4:2-23 • Gunderson, L.H. 2000. Ecological Resilience – in Theory and Application. Annual Review of Ecological Syst. 31:425-439. • Bergen, S.D., S.M. Bolton, and J.L. Fridley 2001. Design principles for ecological engineering. Ecological Engineering 18:201-210. • Huggett, A.J. 2005. The concept and utility of ‘ecological thresholds’ in biodiversity conservation. Biological Conservation 124:310-310.

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