Just back from holidays I’m sad to find out that one of the most influential thinkers on resilience passed away. I feel lucky I had the chance to meet Buzz and hear his passionate and truly inspiring words. The Resilience Center put together a short obituary where I also found a memoir that I was not aware of.
Does evolution matter for tipping point responses?
In a recent perspective in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we explored the question of how trait variation and trait evolution can have important consequences for resilience at the ecosystem level ultimately affecting threshold where tipping points might have otherwise occurred. These ideas form a framework for adding an eco-evolutionary perspective to ecosystem tipping point research that we have already started working on both theoretically and experimentally. More to come soon! And some general reading here.
Ecological Transitions: Regime Shifts, Thresholds and Tipping Points
A bibliographic entry on the topic of Ecological Transitions contains some key literature on the history and definitions along with few research concepts and examples. It can help to get a brief overview of the field in a kind of Wikipedia style.
satellite session in CCS2018
There is still time to submit your abstract in our satellite session on Robustness, Adaptability and Critical Transitions in Living Systems during the upcoming conference of the Complex Systems Society in Thessaloniki, Greece from the 23-28 of September 2018.
Deadline for abstract submission is the 27th of June 2018.
Increasing climate variability will hit world’s poorest countries
It has been difficult to predict how weather extremes such as heat waves and cold snaps might change in a future climate. In this paper, we continue our long-term studies on climate variability, by looking at climate model predictions on future temperatures. We find that rich countries that contribute most to climate change will see less temperature fluctuation, whereas in poor countries the fluctuations will become stronger.
Plasticity affects population tipping point responses
Just back from the British Ecological Society 2017 Conference in Ghent, Belgium. First expedition with my new colleagues from the BioDICee team in Montpellier. I was happy to see great talks, meet old and new friends, and present new work on how adaptation matters for understanding tipping points.
Trends in variability and autocorrelation in observed global temperature records
Back in 2012, we started exploring how patterns in the magnitude and persistence of fluctuations in instrumental records of temperature and their major global sea and land indices might have changed during the last century. Our objective was to identify regions where climate variability and autocorrelation might have markedly increased potentially due to anthropogenic forcing. We just published the results of this work in a paper titled Observed trends in the magnitude and persistence of monthly temperature variability. The main findings are summarised here.
Evaluating early-warning indicators of critical transitions in natural aquatic ecosystems
We just published a study on signatures of instability in empirical time series from five freshwater ecosystems with documented sudden, persistent transitions hypothesized to represent critical transitions. We detected strong variation in early warning indicators, and a low agreement between the four indicators we tested. We conclude that the applicability of these tools was strongly limited by the requirement for ecosystem-specific knowledge of transition-generating mechanisms and their drivers to choose relevant state variables for analysis, especially in monitored systems that are not explicitly designed for estimating this type of indicators.
PAGES Issue on Climate Tipping Points
In the just published PAGES issue of Past Global Changes there is a science highlight on Tipping points or “Lessons from the Past for the Future” as the editorial suggests. In ten short 2-page contributions the most up-to-date ideas about past climatic transitions are highlighted together with examples from ecological and socio-ecological abrupt shifts. We have contributed in this issue a short piece on how the shift of the Sahara has been shaping our thinking about abrupt change.
Monitoring economic variables to infer ecosystem resilience
Strongly coupled socio-ecological systems propagate their effects and disturbances one to the other. This has been demonstrated in most studies of human management of common resources. In recent work, we show that indicators of decreasing resilience can also propagate from one system to the other. For example, an increasingly harvested fish stock might reflect its eroding resilience in the profits of its harvesters. This generally implies that monitoring socio-economic variables that are linked to natural resources can indicate the resilience of the socio-ecological coupled system as a whole.