Publisher :
Place of publication :
Publication year : 2009
Thematic : Ecological Economics
Language : English
Note
Connectivity links habitats in space and time. It is a key process that facilitates many
life-history functions of myriad species in a variety of contexts over a wide range of scales. Perhaps
its most obvious application is to the multifaceted linkages among the diverse habitat units comprising
ecosystem complexes like the coastal ecosystem mosaic (CEM)—the tightly interlinked coastal,
estuarine, wetland and freshwater habitats at the interface of land and sea. The ability to utilise this
diversity of connected habitats is integral to the life histories of a broad spectrum of organisms, with
connectivity between habitats being crucial to important functions like nursery utilisation. Although
connectivity is an obvious feature of the CEM, investigation of its implications has largely been
restricted to the migration of organisms. However, connectivity has much broader conceptual relevance.
It is a pervasive and multifaceted process affecting and enabling the lives of organisms over
the full range of conceptual scales, with ecosystem components connected by a diversity of factors,
including physical and biological translocation of nutrients, ontogenetic, life history, spawning and
feeding migrations, food-web dynamics, predator–prey interactions, and many more. All of these
play crucial roles in structuring biological populations, communities and assemblages, and in driving
the biological processes that support them. Moreover, connectivity is a prominent and necessary
component of ecological concepts, ranging from estuarine dependence and metapopulation dynamics
to foraging arena theory. Considering connectivity as a multifaceted process leads to specific
hypotheses about the functioning of the CEM and similar ecosystem complexes.
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Keywords : Regulation services
Encoded by : Pauline Carmel Joy Eje
