Natural Ecological Processes

  • Abiotic processes
    • Wind (transport of soil, blowing down trees: making open spots in the forest and holes and heaps for varied micro habitats)
    • Water: streams, waves, flooding, ice, snow – including hydrological impact, flood mitigation, water table maintenance
    • Fire
    • Avalanches
    • Geology: minerals and salt impact – including soil and water composition + richness
    • Climate
  • Biotic processes
    • Wildlife
      • Herbivores (large and small)
        • As food for carnivores, carrion eaters/scavengers, dung eaters etc.
        • Seasonal/diurnal migration & population dynamics
        • For natural management
          • Grazing & browsing
          • Tree bark stripping
          • Manuring
          • Dam building, wetland creating (beaver)
          • Burrowing (rabbits), rooting (wild boar)
          • Seeding (squirrel, jay)
          • Cleansing (filtration from sedges, dam oxygenation)
      • Carnivores
        • Prey-predator relationship: equilibrium densities for a balanced ecosystem
        • Managers of healthy prey populations
        • Indirect impact on vegetation and processes (via effect on prey)
      • Scavangers (large and small)
      • Disease – vectors including bark beetle, moth, fungus
      • Genetic selection and evolution, diversity
      • Reproduction, migration internally and repopulation of external areas
      • Adaptation, resilience (eg in response to climate change, alien species impact)
    • Habitats/flora
      • Natural succession to climax vegetation
      • Habitat mosaics determined by natural dynamics
      • Healthy and diverse ecotone functioning
      • Food source provision
      • Shelter, bedding, medicinal use
      • Genetic selection and evolution, diversity
      • Reproduction, spread internally and repopulation of external areas
      • Adaptation, resilience (eg in response to climate change, alien species impact)
      • Large trees needing a long development period to fulfill ecological potential
    • Natural cycles
      • Sequestration, storage, emission of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane
      • Carbon – availability of dead biomass (trees, reeds, grasses) as base for microbiotic activity and invertebrates in the foodchain
      • Nitrogen
      • Other elements

Key principles and indicators for proper functioning of natural processes:

  • Scale – large enough to permit as full a range of processes as possible to function
    • Abiotic: room for the water, fire and wind processes
    • Biotic: especially on the level of meta-populations: “key (steering) species”, facilitating viable gene pools, enabling migration and adaptation
  • Self-contained so far as possible – including water sources, habitat ranges
  • Influence from external influences (pollution, alien species, human impact) minimal
  • Highest species variability and broadest age structure within species that can be permitted by local geography