Leopold sought a harmonious integration of humans as ecosystem component and human activity as ecological process. Inappropriate behaviors degrade them. Trail equestrians must address fundamentally how their activities affect these basic ecosystem characteristics. In attempting to do so, the first thing do is to understand these terms. The sizes of these arrays are refereed to as natural diversity.
Some systems naturally have low diversity and are always fragile.
That is they will not tolerate a great deal of human activity before they undergo drastic change. To the extent that equestrian use of trails adversely affects sensitive species, erodes soils, and lowers water quality, the ecosystem integrity is being degraded. Every set of circumstances of intensity of trail use and ecosystem capacity to withstand that level of use will require novel management approaches. Writing in the 1940s, Leopold accepted the ideas of the early ecologists about stability. The thinking was that in the absence of human influence, ecosystems tended to move to a general steady state condition.