Most ecosystems are affected by anthropogenic or natural pulse disturbances, which alter the community composition and functioning for a limited period of time. Whether and how quickly communities recover from such pulses is central to our understanding of biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem organisation, but also to nature conservation and management. Here, we present a meta-analysis of 508 (semi-)natural field experiments globally distributed across marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. We found recovery to be significant yet incomplete. At the end of the experiments, disturbed treatments resembled controls again when considering abundance (94%), biomass (82%), and univariate diversity measures (88%). Most disturbed treatments did not further depart from control after the pulse, indicating that few studies showed novel trajectories induced by the pulse. Only multivariate community composition on average showed little recovery: disturbed species composition remained dissimilar to the control throughout most experiments. Still, when experiments revealed a higher compositional stability, they tended to also show higher functional stability. Recovery was more complete when systems had high resistance, whereas resilience and resistance were negatively correlated. The overall results were highly consistent across studies, but significant differences between ecosystems and organism groups appeared. Future research on disturbances should aim to understand these differences, but also fill obvious gaps in the empirical assessments for regions (especially the tropics), ecosystems and organisms. In summary, we provide general evidence that (semi-)natural communities can recover from pulse disturbances, but compositional aspects are more vulnerable to long-lasting effects of pulse disturbance than the emergent functions associated to them.

中文翻译：

---

对脉冲干扰的荟萃分析揭示了整个生态系统在功能和成分恢复方面的差异。

大多数生态系统都受到人为或自然脉冲干扰的影响，这些干扰会在有限的时间内改变社区的组成和功能。社区是否以及如何从这些脉冲中恢复，这是我们对生物多样性动态和生态系统组织的理解的核心，也是我们自然保护和管理的核心。在这里，我们对全球分布在海洋，陆地和淡水生态系统中的508个（半）自然野外实验进行了荟萃分析。我们发现恢复意义重大但尚未完成。在实验结束时，当考虑丰度（94％），生物量（82％）和单变量多样性测度（88％）时，受干扰的处理再次类似于对照。大多数受干扰的治疗在脉冲后并没有进一步脱离控制，表明很少有研究显示出由脉冲引起的新颖轨迹。平均而言，只有多元社区组成几乎没有恢复：在大多数实验中，受干扰物种组成与对照保持不同。尽管如此，当实验显示更高的组成稳定性时，它们往往也表现出更高的功能稳定性。当系统具有较高的抵抗力时，恢复会更加完整，而弹性和抵抗力则呈负相关。各项研究的总体结果高度一致，但生态系统和生物体组之间出现了显着差异。未来对干扰的研究应旨在理解这些差异，但也应填补对地区（尤其是热带地区），生态系统和生物的经验评估中的明显空白。综上所述，