CoachA disturbance is an event — fire, storm, flood, drought, grazing, felling, an epidemic — that removes biomass and opens space. An ecosystem’s resistance is its capacity to remain unchanged through a disturbance; its resilience is the speed with which it returns to its former state afterward. A forest is resistant to a dry summer and slow to recover from a fire; a grassland is the reverse. Communities are shaped by their disturbance regime: its frequency, intensity and extent. Many communities are mosaics of patches at different stages of succession since their last disturbance, and their diversity is the sum over the mosaic.
