S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds. — The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics

121 published claims from this book.

• A biological disturbance can buffer a population against a physical disturbance
• A disturbance is defined by the community change it produces, not by the agent.
• A fine-grained patch mosaic can retain watershed nutrients better than large managed patches
• A fire regime is defined by four interacting parameters
• A hurricane gap can redirect tidal flow and kill corals far from the gap
• A severe dry year drove canopy birds closer to the ground
• A single founding female can repopulate a stream after drought wipes out its fish.
• A single new gap contains abutting, highly contrasting microenvironments.
• A tree’s typical mode of death determines the size of gap it creates.
• Area-restricted foraging both consumes and creates resource patchiness
• Arid ecosystems lack treefall and use distinct disturbance agents
• Arid-land disturbance legacies persist for decades in the landscape
• Autotrophic respiration does not keep rising through stand development
• Biological agents and man-caused change both sit on one disturbance continuum.
• Burn season timing changes nutrient release efficacy
• Community change is classically split into endogenous autogenesis and exogenous allogenesis
• Conservation must protect disturbance regimes, not just taxa, to preserve biodiversity
• Coral growth form determines which species best recolonize small clearings
• Disturbance agents interact synergistically and compound with environmental stress
• Disturbance frameworks must treat all trophic cascades as disturbances
• Disturbance patches in a perennial matrix differ functionally from total removal.
• Disturbance predictions must be mechanistic, incorporating history and context
• Disturbance resource boosts are transient pulses that pioneer traits exploit
• Disturbance severity determines which regeneration strategy dominates recovery.
• Disturbance triggers insect outbreaks once populations cross a regulatory threshold
• Disturbance-resistant residents recolonize bare patches before new recruits arrive.
• Each individual gap is an internal environmental mosaic, not a uniform patch.
• Each regrowth phase has a readable architectural signature in crown and height form
• Each woody plant growth form is efficient only within a narrow disturbance range
• Earlier gap flowering can reduce seed set by confusing pollinator search images
• Ecology must avoid both oversimplified generality and unconnected facts
• Equilibrium succession models give way to a kinetic view accepting site instability
• Extinction-colonization dynamics create linkage disequilibrium in patchily distributed fish.
• Few-element continuous-time landscapes warrant detailed, not aggregate, simulation models.
• Fire intensity results from weather, topography, and fuel properties
• Fire-dependency of germination varies within a species even between nearby populations.
• Forest disturbance regimes differ mainly in timing, spacing, and severity, not rate.
• Fragmented-landscape populations rarely reach equilibrium, defeating deterministic management
• Frequent ‘disasters’ select for traits while rare ‘catastrophes’ mostly just decrease fitness
• Frequent gaps selected long-lived clonal forest herbs for gap-response ability
• Frequent small animal disturbances maintain grassland diversity as a fine-grained mosaic
• Gap closure rate defines a response window that stored-reserve herbs may lag into
• Gap floors can be surface-dry despite high rainfall input.
• Gap formation varies little between years and never synchronizes regionally
• Gap size determines whether lateral branch growth or sapling height growth closes it
• Herb response to gaps fails through five distinct limiting constraints
• Historical grassland disturbance regimes are unrecoverable because native agents were eliminated
• Historical records place 1960-scale earthquakes several times within a Nothofagus life span
• In leafless spring forests light and moisture change little between gap and canopy
• Insect population waves can suppress vegetation across millions of hectares
• Insects make irregular forest disturbance more regular so ruderal species persist
• Intermediate disturbance works by preserving patch structure, not protecting weak competitors
• Interspecific competition restricts species to disturbances where their growth efficiency is highest
• Introduced wild boar can reduce Appalachian herb cover below five percent of expected value
• Landscapes can reach steady state when patch birth and death rates balance
• Large-scale disturbances can prevent landscapes from reaching equilibrium
• Larger disturbances produce fewer surviving coral fragments than smaller ones
• Leaf arrangement in layers sets which light regime favors a tree species
• Liana abundance tracks the supply of trellises that treefall gaps provide
• Lianas suppress host tree growth and mortality unless trees shed or outgrow them
• Local fire return intervals depend on spread from neighbors, not direct ignition
• Localized disturbances turn sessile assemblages into a patch mosaic
• Many shade-tolerant trees reach the canopy through repeated suppression-and-release gap episodes, not one gap
• Mature forests harbor long-lived soil seed banks of pioneer species awaiting disturbance
• Microclimate inside a forest gap depends on gap diameter relative to tree height.
• Migration maintains genetic variation only within an intermediate optimal range
• Mimicking natural mixed gap sizes reproduces primeval composition
• Monoculture management and fire exclusion promote insect-induced vegetation mortality
• Most forest gaps are small but large gaps contribute most total gap area.
• Nutrient availability within a single-tree gap varies between crown and bole zones
• On old nutrient-depleted dunes fire causes net nutrient loss and irreversible biomass decline
• Open patches arise from resident death or from newly created substrata
• Oysters show heterozygosity correlates with growth but selection’s focus stays unclear.
• Patch dynamic theory rests on unverified assumptions about population equivalence
• Patch edge-to-area ratio, not size per se, governs recolonization rate
• Patch environment evolutionary theory cannot yet yield simple general predictions
• Patch size is set by distance between surviving regenerators, tracking mortality
• Patch turnover rate governs mutant fate when extinction outpaces migration
• Perturbation only applies when system parameters and normal state are explicitly defined
• Pioneers dominate large gaps but occupy only debris-free portions of them
• Pooled size or age histograms conceal the structured spatial variance of a patch’s demography.
• Post-fire bamboo thickets can block Nothofagus regeneration and slow eventual succession
• Post-storm predation pressure intensifies on surviving coral fragments
• Postfire recovery speed depends on reproductive mode and stored reserves
• Pre-European aboriginal burning significantly shaped Chilean lowland forest patterns
• Primary species win by persisting under closed canopy rather than growing fast in gaps
• Priority effects mean first colonists hold a lasting competitive advantage on a patch.
• Rainfall is the principal extrinsic driver of vertebrate disturbance in most systems.
• Repeat disturbances near old gaps are common and favor growth-suppression alternating species
• Resilience and stability are distinct ecological concepts describing different recovery properties
• Restricted dispersal alone can generate persistent patchy genetic variation even in large populations
• Rhododendron understories shift gap regeneration toward species that seed onto logs
• Richness is maintained when disturbance recurs faster than competitive exclusion
• Scale insects form separate genetic demes on each individual host tree
• Severe disturbance plus low resource base can reduce species richness
• Shade herbs persist only in small gaps unless sheltered by taller plants
• Shrubland diversity arises from varied disturbance rather than a single optimum
• Shrubland fire recovery is cyclic autosuccession, not a linear successional sequence.
• Small clearings reoccupy faster than large ones when bordered by vegetative colonies.
• Small regime shifts change abundance while catastrophic exotic ones flip whole systems
• Small-edge-rich gap regimes produce repeat disturbance that slows gap closure
• Soil infertility shifts tree death mode away from uprooting and blocks pioneers
• Species abundance is governed by many weak probabilistic forces, not single dominant causes
• Species responses to cutting reveal their historical disturbance regime
• Steady-state shifting mosaics need frequent small disturbances plus feedback on frequency
• Suppressed saplings can capture a mild gap faster than new seedlings can.
• Suppressing disturbance makes ecosystems more vulnerable to catastrophe
• Symmetrical competition makes disturbance-diversity peaks unpredictable
• Synchronous bamboo die-off acts as its own periodic disturbance releasing tree regeneration
• System structure determines which disturbances matter and their impact thresholds
• The 1960 Chilean earthquake triggered mass movements covering 2.8 percent of Valdivia province
• The bamboo Chusquea culeou preempts canopy gaps and blocks Nothofagus regeneration.
• The most spatially heterogeneous systems are often the least resilient
• The neutral-background-matrix assumption fails where the matrix itself holds resources.
• The same patch yields different interaction results at different ages
• Tolerant and intolerant species partition by required gap size
• Topography-driven wind patterns skew treefall frequency and thus species abundance locally
• Treefall damage forms a three-part structure called a chablis, not a clean hole.
• War bombardment weakened trees so rain and wind later felled them onto troops.
• Whether an event is a disturbance depends on the receiving organism
• Within-patch population dynamics partly result from sorting of genotypes over time