Ecological Thresholds: The Key to Successful Environmental Management or an Important Concept with No Practical Application?

By Peter M. Groffman, J. Baron, T. Blett, A. Gold, I. Goodman, L. Gunderson, B. Levinson, M. Palmer, Hans W. Paerl, Garry D. Peterson and 6 more. Ecosystems, 2006

1,216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An ecological threshold is the point at which there is an abrupt change in an ecosystem quality, property or phenomenon, or where small changes in an environmental driver produce large responses in the ecosystem. Analysis of thresholds is complicated by nonlinear dynamics and by multiple factor controls that operate at diverse spatial and temporal scales. These complexities have challenged the use and utility of threshold concepts in environmental management despite great concern about preventing dramatic state changes in valued ecosystems, the need for determining critical pollutant loads and the ubiquity of other threshold-based environmental problems. In this paper we define the scope of the thresholds concept in ecological science and discuss methods for identifying and investigating thresholds using a variety of examples from terrestrial and aquatic environments, at ecosystem, landscape and regional scales. We end with a discussion of key research needs in this area.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72c00952904ed0dfced9e22b55bfe96d4bc08242

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Citations in the corpus

Thresholds in macroinvertebrate biodiversity and stoichiometry across water-quality gradients in Central Plains (USA) streams (2009, background): “Thresholds have been found at multiple scales in biology and ecology, and environmental managers are increasingly using them in ecosystem management (Groffman et al. 2006) in terrestrial (e.g., With and King 1999, Hobbs and Harris 2001, Briske et al. 2006) and in aquatic ecosystems (e.g., Dodds…”
Safe and just operating spaces for regional social-ecological systems (2014, background): “An ability to identify and stay within ecological boundaries over longer timescales would help to ensure intergenerational sustainable resource use.”
Defining the limit to resistance in a drought‐tolerant grassland: long‐term severe drought significantly reduces the dominant species and increases ruderals (2011, background): “Many studies have been observational and therefore not ideally suited to investigate responses to future events outside an ecosystem’s historical range of variability (Groffman et al. 2006; Smith, Knapp& Collins 2009).”
Landscape patterns from mathematical morphology on maps with contagion (2009, background): “Knowledge of the associated thresholds for landscape patterns on neutral maps with contagion may help to predict critical thresholds in many ecological phenomena in real landscapes (With and King 1997) which is a central problem in ecology (Burkett et al. 2005; Groffman et al. 2006).”
Mapping vegetation morphology types in a dry savanna ecosystem: integrating hierarchical object-based image analysis with Random Forest (2014, background): “In southern African savanna systems, at the spatial/spectral resolution of Landsat imagery, vegetation physiognomic-structural aspects are the most important determinants of pixel reflectance (Groffman et al. 2005).”
Impacts of invasive Australian acacias: implications for management and restoration (2011, neutral): “3; Groffman et al., 2006; Hobbs et al., 2009).”
The Use of Reference Values in Indicator-Based Methods for the Environmental Assessment of Agricultural Systems (2011, background): “Reference values can help to improve environmental management over time [45] and guide systems towards sustainability.”
Patterns and thresholds of grazing‐induced changes in community structure and ecosystem functioning: species‐level responses and the critical role of species traits (2017, background): “Ecological thresholds, which are defined as points or zones of an abrupt shift in ecological response (Huggett 2005; Groffman et al. 2006), have drawn increasing attention across a range of ecosystems from aquatic to terrestrial, especially to grasslands (Brenden, Wang & Su 2008; Hoover, Knapp &…”
Towards ecosystem-based management: identifying operational food-web indicators for marine ecosystems (2017, background): “Establishing decision criteria that trigger management actions for EBM requires an understanding of how pressure variables influence indicators, as well as the level of a particular pressure at which significant changes in ecosystem structure or function appear (Link, 2002a; Groffman et al., 2006; B”
Australia's Biodiversity and Climate Change (2010, background): “• Not all trajectories are characterised by critical breakpoints (Groffman et al. 2006; Parker and MacNally 2002).”