ECOLOGICAL COMMENTS ON TERRITORIAL SYSTEMS OF ECOLOGICAL STABILITY

This article attempts to identify principal theoretical inconsistencie s, uncertainties and unresolved questions within the framework of terr itorial systems of ecological stability (TSES) which has been widely a dopted as one of the main environmental management and conservation to ols in Slovakia. It is argued that questions of sufficiency and consis tency of the TSES paradigm, maturity of TSES theoretical constructs, r elevance of ecological stability as a unifying interpretation and eval uation concept, sufficient generality of TSES contexts, conceptual cla rity, systematicity, optimality, deterministic vs stochastic and equil ibrium vs nonequilibrium approaches and organization of ecological com munities are of greatest theoretical relevance in this respect. In the case of regional and higher-order biocorridors, the importance of rec ognizing the evolutionary and the ecological spatio-temporal scales is emphasized. As a consequence, it is hypothesized that ecotones (lands cape boundaries) which are sufficiently large (at least of regional di mension) and sufficiently old (at least of centuries), particularly la rger stream ecosystems and larger formation/biome interfaces, are the structures exerting significant as well as sufficiently scale-independ ent (i.e., translatable directly from ecological to evolutionary spati o-temporal scale) effects on both the movements of biota, and matter, energy, and information fluxes across terrestrial landscapes.