the fundamental question - can the Earth ever recover from the comet like impact of humans and be as great as it once was?
----- Original Message ----- From: Lee Frelich To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, October 25, 2009 11:49 AM Subject: [ENTS] Re: Autopoietic Forests and Forest Patch Management Gary, Ed: As Ed points the autopoietic concept and preservation concept have problems in terms of defining what indirect effects of people are allowed for a system to still be considered autopoietic. The indirect effects that are allowed or not allowed then lead to all sorts of logic problems with temporal and spatial scale as it relates to preservation. For example, if autopoiesis includes watching how collective DNA of the species within the preserved area responds to loss of species due to introduced diseases and pests, then small areas could be autopoietic, but if it does not include those indirect effects, then no area is big enough to be autopoietic (or to be preserved), since no size ensures the absence of invasive tree diseases and pests. The temporal scale problem is equally large. Given many thousands or millions of years, all systems will respond and adapt to non native species, climate change and loss of the species that initially were native. The introduction of invasive species, tree pests and diseases, and global warming become a small blip in time, and all systems would be autopoietic. If defined on a time scale of a few centuries, however, all systems would lose autopoeisis, regardless of size, given the onslaught of invasive species and global warming. Its always the temporal and spatial scale issues that are so difficult with any new concept in ecology. It took me 2 years to work through those issues for the neighborhood effect hypothesis of forest dynamics before I was happy enough with the concept to publish it. If people are interested in preserving the last natural systems as they are right now, then there is no spatial or temporal scale at which autopoesis or preservation will work without a lot of management outside of the 'preserved' areas to keep out all invasive species and stop global warming. Lee --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
