Biotic Regulation: Main Page

 
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Welcome to
Biotic Regulation of the Environment
web site!

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Since February 14, 2008 it is no longer updated.
Welcome to www.bioticregulation.ru!

Open letter
to citizens of Russia:
Forests mean safety

(in Russian)

Scientific concept of the
biotic regulation of the environment
can be formulated with the following major propositions:
  • Natural ecological communities that are undisturbed by humans create and control their environment. They maintain it in a state optimal for the whole community and, up to a certain threshold, compensate for all deviations from that optimum. Such biotic regulation occurs on both local and global scales.
  • Biotic regulation is performed by the complex co-ordinated functioning of all species in the natural ecological community. The information needed to ensure such functioning is contained in the genomes of species. Stabilising natural selection protects this information from spontaneous decay. Evolution proceeds in the direction of enhancing the regulatory potential of the community.
  • Information fluxes that are processed by the natural biota while performing environmental control exceed the information fluxes that modern civilisation would ever be able to process by orders of magnitude. This means that the biotic mechanism of environmental stabilisation is unique and cannot be replaced by a technological one.
  • Anthropogenic transformation of natural ecosystems completely destroys the regulatory potential of the ecological communities on a local scale and continually weakens the global power of biotic regulation. Anthropogenically disturbed and artificially created biological systems are not only merely deprived of regulatory abilities but themselves act as powerful destabilisers of the environment.
  • Environmental parameters that are favourable for life on Earth are physically unstable. In particular, the liquid state of terrestrial hydrosphere, a major prerequisite for functioning of the contemporary living systems, is unstable with respect to spontaneous transition to the states of complete glaciation of the planetary surface or complete evaporation of the oceans. Without the stabilising impact of natural biota the environment and climate of Earth would rapidly degrade to a state prohibiting human existence.
  • The major challenge for modern natural science is therefore to quantify the necessary and sufficient global area that needs to be exempted from anthropogenic activities and given back to natural ecosystems in order to offset the global environmental collapse and regain the long-term stability of environmental parameters favourable for human life. In short,

NO NATURAL FORESTS - NO HUMAN LIFE ON EARTH

Topical publications
on biotic regulation

Supplementary data
for published papers

Books
on biotic regulation

Empirical evidence
for biotic regulation

Biotic regulation versus
genetic adaptation
and nutrient limitation

Demography:
Survivorship essentials



  Last updated 17 January 2008.
About this web site
© V.G. Gorshkov, A.M. Makarieva, 2001-2008