Trophic cascades are powerful interactions that strongly regulate biodiversity a

Question

Trophic cascades are powerful interactions that strongly regulate biodiversity and ecosystem function. Trophic cascades were originally thought to be rare, but now we understand that they occur across diverse terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, and are common features of many green plant communities, including vascular plant assemblages, long thought to be resistant to consumer control. Although we know that trophic cascades can be more powerful under certain conditions, for example climate stress and nutrient enrichment in salt marshes, much research is needed in this area to refine our understanding of when and where trophic cascades will be important.

One of the traditional paradigms of natural resource management is that forcing functions across trophic levels are considered largely bottom-up in nature (Estes & Peterson 2000). Temperate and tropical forests, kelp beds, grasslands, and salt marsh communities, have long been viewed as classic examples of bottom-up regulated systems dominated by relatively unpalatable plants controlled by physical conditions and nutrients. Accordingly, the conservation of these and other plants systems have generally neglected top-down effects in management and conservation efforts for over half of a century. Results from the studies described above call into question the dominance of the bottom-up only paradigm and its wide-scale application to conservation and restoration of plant ecosystems. Managers and ecologists will need to reevaluate their understanding of controls on plant communities and incorporate top-down effects into their conservation plans. Failure to identify and integrate top-down forces may lead to trophic cascades transforming highly diverse and productive plant communities to barren or almost barren flats, with concomitant loss of associated biodiversity and ecosystem function.

From the above snip it please answer the following question

What conservation implications are associated with trophic cascades?

Explanation / Answer

The conservation conclusions we can draw is that following a bottom down method is the best thing in an ecosystem. Plants and herbs are to be given priority and should be cut from this trophic cascade. To prserve and conserve the plant ecology, it is ideal to follow the top down approach. But we have problems with the top down aporoach as well. Because if you see, in a trophic cascade it is always the herbivorous which depends on plants. They come the middle person usually. to follow In forested ecosystems, declining species diversity first becomes apparent in understory vegetation, as less palatable ferns or grasses crowd out more palatable herbaceous dicots and inhibit the establishment of tree seedlings. Suppressed tree recruitment opens gaps in the age structure of palatable shrub/tree species, possibly hindering recovery, even when a natural predation regime is restored. With continued intensive browsing, plant communities shift towards an alternative stable state composed of species resistant or resilient to herbivore pressure  Decreased standing biomass and decreased diversity of native species may, in turn, trigger additional ecosystem effects, such as increased soil and streambank erosion, altered terrestrial and aquatic food webs, and changes in nutrient cycling (see Wardle, this volume). Thus, the removal or significant reduction of large predators sets in motion a chain of events that initiates a downward spiral toward ecosystem simplification. Although partial or complete loss of forest ecosystems is a possible, though still unproven, endpoint (Terborgh and Feeley, this volume), preventing and/or reversing the impacts of large herbivores so that diverse native plant communities and dependent wildlife can thrive represents a daunting but pressing challenge for the scientific community and society as a whole.

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