The Impact of Environmental Factors on the Development of Antibiotic Resistance in Environmental Systems

Abstract

The pressure of climate change and human actions on the ecosystems are unprecedented, so our analysis should be conducted in parallel regarding their independent and combined consequences on the ecosystem stability. The climate dynamics are highly controlling in that they have direct effect on species, population, community and biogeochemical processes within various systems including terrestrial ecosystems, freshwater ecosystems, marine ecosystems and coastal ecosystems. Manmade activities, both in land-use change, pollution and greenhouse-gas emission, equally encroach on many climate and environmental drivers, impacting organisms and processes in all ecosystems. In the present climate- change era, the anthropogenic perturbations affect the resilience and stability by changing the ecosystem responses and vary the interaction between climate and environmental drivers. Little formal modelling of the interactions between human activities and climate change has been done. Nonetheless, the recent data on cases of such interactions in diverse ecological settings depicts the interactions as well as their ecological impacts on the stability of ecosystems. A single study of a dryland stream showed that an increase in temperature and reduction in precipitation interact to cause macroinvertebrate communities to become more unstable and sensitive; as warming and drought become more severe, the cascading processes destroy former stabilizing processes and interacting climatic and anthropogenic drivers. Likewise, the shift of tropical waters to a turbid condition of underwarming and nutrient enrichment is an example of a tipping point and alterations in fire, great storms and pest outbreaks are evidence of changes in disturbance regime