What is weird is that I can find plenty of books describing the stress in ecosystems and consequences at different levels of organisation but none with a good definition of stress. Your help would be welcome if you have an idea ! Thanks
Rapport et al. (1985) defined stress as 'external force or factor, or
stimulus that causes changes in the ecosystem, or causes the ecosystem to respond, or entrains ecosystemic dysfunctions ...'. This may be an anwser...
from
Kolasa, J., & Pickett, S. T. (1992). Ecosystem stress and health: an expansion of the conceptual basis. Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress and Recovery (Formerly Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Health), 1(1), 7-13.
Other suggestions are welcome. What I'd like ideally is a scheme gathering stress, pressure, impacts etc....
This might have to do with "stress" relating rather to individual entities, such as defined bodies, than to a system. Stress is defined in physics, e.g. shear stress, or in terms of physiology, see Amir Ghazilou's reply (edited). In ecology, i.e. for ecosystems, it is rather a disturbance of one or several of the system components, than the physiological stress of one component, what you refer to, and might more often be called disturbance, e.g. in Lake (2004): Disturbance, patchiness, and diversity in streams. J. N. Am. Benthol. Soc., 2000, 19(4):573–592, which includes a section on defining disturbance .. and perturbation .. Lake divides disturbance into Pulse, Press, Ramp. In contrast, stressor seems to be a rather more scientific term, e.g. in Article Urbanisation of floodplain ecosystems: Weight-of-evidence an...
A.Disturbance:
-disturbance is a pulsed perturbation from an equilibrium state (White and Pickett 1985) [for terrestrial ecologists] .
-disturbance is a physical process that removes living biomass from an ecosystem (Sousa 1984b) [more suitable for marine ecologists] .
B.Stress
-a physical process that reduces physiological performance without immediately causing death, although it may do so when combined with other factors such as food limitation over longer time frames (e.g., Wootton 1998) . In some cases, disturbance and stress may have the same general effects on ecosystems, particularly when stress operates in a density-independent manner on organisms (e.g., by changing metabolic rates).
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