terça-feira, fevereiro 21, 2006

Aprendendo com os furacões

"Making a virtue out of a necessity: Hurricanes and the resilience of community organization" - artigo de Robert D. Holt publicado nos "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" de 6 de Fevereiro de 2006:
«Most of us these days are all too aware of the disruptive impact of hurricanes in human affairs. Yet disturbances ranging from minor local disruptions to massive large-scale catastrophes are part-and-parcel of life in most natural ecosystems.

These disturbances often provide scientific opportunities, because sometimes one learns the most about how a system functions by watching it recover after it has been kicked by a major disturbance. Ecologists increasingly recognize that the structure of natural communities reflects the interplay of processes acting over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales that are well beyond the scope of manipulative experiments.

The article by Schoener and Spiller provides a deft testament to the insights that can sometimes be gleaned from "natural" experiments generated by large-scale disturbances, which permit an examination of system responses that could not be readily examined with manipulative experiments.»

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