Our work led by the PhD student Mathieu Pelissie just got published in Science Advances. In a nutshell we found: – More than 25% of the marine fish populations studied experienced abrupt changes in productivity since 1950. – Rapid productivity declines were substantially more common in marine regions experiencing the highest warming rates – Fishery…
Read more
We offer a master project that will investigate how different aspects of future climate change, namely changes in temperature, precipitation, variability, and extreme events, may expose terrestrial and freshwater species beyond their historical climate limits. The work will combine ecological and climate data with statistical analyses, primarily in R, to identify the regions and species…
Read more
We are participating in the EU Horizon funded ClimTip project that kicked-off earlier in March 2023. The project aims to quantify the impacts of climate tipping points on Earth systems resilience. Our participation will focus on the repercussions of climate tipping events on the on ecosystems and biodiversity.
The Global Tipping Points Report is the most comprehensive assessment of negative and positive tipping points ever conducted. It says humanity is currently on a disastrous trajectory. The speed of fossil fuel phase out and growth of zero-carbon solutions will now determine the future of billions of people. Current global governance is inadequate for the…
Read more
Biodiversity is exposed to increasing pressure by climate and land use changes. But how are species responding to these pressures and which pressure is more dominant remain controversial questions. In a collaborative study recently published in PNAS including 28 European countries we assessed, for the first time, how 170 bird species have responded to major…
Read more
There is growing concern on the survival of Mediterranean forests under the projected near-future droughts as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Based on palynological reconstruction of the past 500 kyrs we find that global atmospheric carbon dioxide may affect Mediterranean vegetation through forcing on moisture availability. If a CO2-driven moisture decrease persists in the near future,…
Read more
Drylands are home to 2.1 billion people, and harbor some of the world’s rarest biodiversity. Globally, they are also highly sensitive to ecological changes under global change. New research shows that 50% of the changes in dryland ecosystem dynamics are abrupt shifts, which are characteristic of tipping point responses in ecological states. The prevalence of…
Read more
With colleagues from Switzerland, we recently analyzed productivity dynamics of 1,015 lakes worldwide to get an impression of how lake stability changes over time and whether it is marked by the occurrence of regime shifts. Such analysis highlights how remotely-sensed datasets have began to facilitate the quantification of ecosystem resilience at large scales. Read more…
Read more
The master thesis of Alice Ardichvili on How to evolve an alternative stable state got a positive recommendation from the PCI Ecology. It was a first and really pleasant experience receiving two transparent and helpful reviews.
We invite prospective candidates for a three-year fully funded PhD studentship to explore theoretical questions on the eco-evolutionary dynamics in ecological systems with tipping points. Global environmental change has made clear that ecosystems are at risk to unexpected and persistent shifts to undesirable states, popularly referred to as tipping points. But, although the ecological dynamics…
Read more