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 the oligotrophic and eutrophic state may be observed. We compared these results to model simulations and we conclude that flickering may be more possible to detect in the most common ecological records at hand.