Synthesis, part of a Special Feature on Pathways to Resilient Salmon Ecosystems Evolutionary History, Habitat Disturbance Regimes, and Anthropogenic Changes: What Do These Mean for Resilience of…
By Robin S. Waples, T. Beechie, G. Pess. 2009
118 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Because resilience of a biological system is a product of its evolutionary history, the historical template that describes the relationships between species and their dynamic habitats is an important point of reference. Habitats used by Pacific salmon have been quite variable throughout their evolutionary history, and these habitats can be characterized by four key attributes of disturbance regimes: frequency, magnitude, duration, and predictability. Over the past two centuries, major anthropogenic changes to salmon ecosystems have dramatically altered disturbance regimes that the species experience. To the extent that these disturbance regimes assume characteristics outside the range of the historical template, resilience of salmon populations might be compromised. We discuss anthropogenic changes that are particularly likely to compromise resilience of Pacific salmon and management actions that could help bring the current patterns of disturbance regimes more in line with the historical template. In this paper, we consider how the evolutionary history of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) and the dynamic ecosystems they inhabit have conferred considerable resilience on this important natural resource. We include in the term "Pacific salmon" not only the five species traditionally recognized from North America (pink salmon, O. gorbuscha; chum salmon, O. keta; coho salmon, O. kisutch; sockeye salmon, O. nerka; Chinook salmon, O. tshawytscha) but also steelhead, the anadromous form of rainbow trout, O. mykiss. Pacific salmon have evolved in an environment that is both
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e56257ca69152b744729149e5e86994ae2be7f11
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In Ecology
In Global and Planetary Change
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Citations in the corpus
- Research, part of a Special Feature on Pathways to Resilient Salmon Ecosystems The Fate of Coho Salmon Nomads: The Story of an Estuarine-Rearing Strategy Promoting Resilience (2009, background): “Thus, diking, draining and filling of estuarine habitats represent essentially a permanent disruption of connectivity between habitats leading to reduced life history diversity and perhaps less resilience through rapid evolution and an altered nomad strategy (Waples et al. 2009).”
- Quantifying the contribution of juvenile migratory phenotypes in a population of Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (2010, background): “Theoretically, the presence of diverse juvenile migratory contingents provides resilience for a population that confronts varying environmental conditions (Thorpe et al. 1998, Secor 1999, Waples et al. 2009).”