Title: Review on alternative stable states in ecosystems
Abstract: This paper presents the concept of alternative stable states (ASS) and its significance in ecology. We summarize the different underlying mechanisms of ASS and the recent evidence of their existence and their relation with regime shifts in ecosystems. The prospects of the theory and application are discussed. Alternative stable states mean that there are different stable states which have different structures and functions under the same conditions. Importantly, these different states can each provide different ecosystem services. The two states are not necessarily stable points, but may also include, cycle attractors or chaos attractors. Alternative stable states have been shown in different ecosystems such as marine ecosystem, wetland ecosystem and arid ecosystem. The basic mechanism is that there should be a strong positive feedbacks leading to alternative stable states. The positive feedbacks in ecosystem include facilitation, over-exploitation and ice-albedo. Many theoretical studies have predicited that ASS is a general phenomenon in ecosystems, but there are little experimental proofs. Different states have different basins of attraction, and there will be threshold among these states. When the strength of a disturbance is bigger than the resilience, there will be regime shifts in the system (i.e. a shift to the alternative state). Recently it is suggested that there can be early warning signals of regime shifts include rising variance, slow recovery and changing skewness. The future research on ASS focus on (1) underlying mechanisms of ASS in different systems (2) showing the existence of ASS in ecosystem (3) assessment of the ecosystem resilience and early warning signals and (4) application of ASS in ecological restoration.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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