Human effects on natural disturbance regimes
Land use practices have a variety of effects on natural
disturbance regimes:
- they can rescale natural disturbances
eg make them smaller (or larger), less frequent (or more), more or less
intense
- they can rescale areas through
biogeographic barriers (roads, canals, park boundaries defined by radical
change in habitat), which reduces the effective size of the system
- they can introduce novel (unprecedented)
disturbances, chronic stresses, unnatural shape complexity
or degrees of connectedness
- they can cause homogenisation
of natural patterns through land use or by suppressing the natural processes
that maintain diversity (eg, natural "old-growth" forests
as compared to managed plantations) (Forman
and Godron, 1986)
Humans can alter the type, frequency and magnitude of
a natural disturbance regime (White
and Harrod, 1995).
Long term effects of human activity can be desertification,
deforestation and erosion (Forman
and Godron, 1986).
Political, economic and social factors influence
landscape structure, function and change.
