Category: latest news

quantifying resilience in ecology and evolution under global environmental change

Species tolerance to global environmental change

A first joint work in my new lab of Jordie Bascompte got published in Nature Communications few weeks ago. By simulating mutualistic communities of 57 empirical plant pollinator and plant seed-disperser networks we identify scenarios where species’ tolerance is extremely sensitive to the direction of change in the strength of mutualistic interaction, as well as…
Read more


September 15, 2013 0

Special issue on early-warning research in journal of Theoretical Ecology

After an invitation by Alan Hastings (editor-in-chief) and a year of preparation, the current issue of Theoretical Ecology is dedicated on Early Warnings and Regime Shifts. The issue contains 11 original research papers from key contributors of the topic ranging from data analysis, to theoretical considerations, lake ecosystems to disease epidemics. We hope it will…
Read more


July 23, 2013 0

Are Warning Signals specific to Catastrophic Transitions?

There is a lot of interest on the limits of resilience indicators and on whether they are uniquely associated with catastrophic transitions. We tried to shed light on that question in a short piece that just appeared in Oikos. There, we show that the same early warnings may signal non catastrophic transitions, but the same transitions…
Read more


April 18, 2013 0

earlywarnings package in R libraries

 Together with Leo Lahti, we fixed bugs and moved the earlywarnings toolbox in R. It is now a library ready to be installed from your preferable CRAN repository. In the process, we also migrated the earlywarnings toolbox to github for shifitng towards open-source, community-based project development. We hope this will facilitate the use of the toolbox both for…
Read more


March 15, 2013 0

Passing slowly tipping points: opportunities and challenges

In a short conceptual paper that appeared this month in TREE, we play around with the idea that depending on the scale and the rate of change of ecological systems, responses to crossing tipping points may differ widely. Ecosystems without tipping points may appear hysteretic, whereas hysteretic systems may offer a window of opportunity for…
Read more


February 25, 2013 0

Flickering before a shift to eutrophication

Together with colleagues from China and the UK we just published work on a paleo limnological record in a big chinese lake that shows a transition to eutrophication during the last 30 years. Interestingly, the data offer the possibility to show that the system exhibits bimodality and that approaching to the permanent shift ‘flickering’ between…
Read more


December 25, 2012 0

Review on anticipating critical transitions in last week´s issue in Science

Our review paper on Anticipating Critical Transitions summarizes the advancement and popularity in estimating early-warning signals for approaching transitions in a variety of disciplines together with some ground-breaking experimental demonstrations that followed the earlier review on early-warnings. In addition, new ideas are mapped out and the challenge of merging network perspectives on stability and collapse…
Read more


October 21, 2012 0

7 principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services

Our long lasting project with the RAYS cohort just got appeared in a review/synthesis paper where we try to summarize basic principles that so far have been widely proposed to be fundamental for supporting the resilience of ecosystem services. Important part of this work is that we try to identify gaps in the existing research on resilience…
Read more


October 18, 2012 0

KNAW colloquium, masterclass and SparcS

Our colloquium and masterclass on ‘Early-warning signals for critical transitions: bridging the gap between theory and practice’ will be hosted by the Dutch Royal Science and Arts Society (KNAW) from 10 to 12 of October 2012 in Amsterdam. This is also going to be the official kick-off of SparcS – the Synergy Program for Analyzing Resilience and Critical transitionS: an initiative…
Read more


September 30, 2012 0

PLoS One paper out!

The methodological paper that we worked on during the Santa Fe Institute workshop last October became available few weeks ago. It presents a suite of most developed methods for identifying early-warnings and provides clear step-by-step examples on how to apply them, in an attempt to offer a protocol to the uninitiated into the field. Most…
Read more


September 19, 2012 0