Kayla C. Mathes

1 INTRODUCTION Disturbances affect every scale and level of biological organization. However, disturbance studies are generally guided by discipline-specific theories, terminology, and literature, limiting coherence across fields of ecology. In ecosystem ecology, prominent historical and enduring theoretical frameworks emphasize disturbance effects on systems-level biomass, and energy pools and fluxes over time and space (Bormann & Likens, 1979; Odum, 1969; Whittaker et al., 1974).