The ghost of disturbance past: long-term effects of pulse disturbances on community biomass and composition

Abstract

Current global change is associated with an increase in disturbance frequency and intensity, with the potential to trigger population collapses and to cause permanent transitions to new ecosystem states. However, our understanding of ecosystem responses to disturbances is still incomplete. Specifically, there is a mismatch between the diversity of disturbance regimes experienced by ecosystems and the one-dimensional description of disturbances used in most studies on ecological stability. To fill this gap, we conducted a full factorial experiment on microbial communities, where we varied the frequency and intensity of disturbances affecting species mortality, resulting in 20 different disturbance regimes. We explored the direct and long-term effects of these disturbance regimes on community biomass. While most communities were able to recover biomass and composition states similar to undisturbed controls after a halt of the disturbances, we identified some disturbance thresholds that had long-lasting legacies on communities. Using a model based on logistic growth, we identified qualitatively the sets of disturbance frequency and intensity that had equivalent long-term negative impacts on experimental communities. Our results show that an increase in disturbance intensity is a bigger threat for biodiversity and biomass recovery than the occurrence of more frequent but less intense disturbances.