ABSTRACT
Are ecosystems generally stable? What makes them unstable? ese two questions are among the core problems of system ecology, but we can easily lengthen the list of relevant questions: Can ecosystems persist in the course of a su¥ciently long time in spite of perturbations, changing forcing functions, constraints, or impacts? What will happen when the perturbations stop? Or the forcing functions return to normal values valid before the major impacts or disturbances started? We will try to answer these questions
in this chapter, but before starting the discussion of the questions, it is necessary to clarify what we mean by stability and give de‰nitions of the most important stability concepts. ough the stability concepts have been widely discussed in the ecological literature, it is di¥cult to provide a precise and unambiguous de‰nition. For those seeking a mathematical angle to the stability concept, refer to Chapter 6 in Jørgensen and Svirezhev (2004).
