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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.

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