Pyrogeography and Biogeochemical Resilience

Abstract

The response of biogeochemical fluxes to perturbation has been a major focus of ecosystem studies for decades (Bormann and Likens 1979a; Vitousek and Melillo 1979; West et al. 1981). Perturbation is a fundamental component of conceptualizations of system resilience (Holling 1973; Carpenter et al. 2001; Folke et al. 2004), complex adaptive cycles (Norberg and Cumming 2008), self-organization (Rietkerk et al. 2004a), cross-scale interactions (Allen and Holling 2002; Peters et al. 2004; Allen 2007), and abrupt shifts in ecosystem behavior (Groffman et al. 2006; Sonderegger et al. 2009).