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…
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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.
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.
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…
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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.
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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After 3 beautiful years in Spain, I am getting quite excited starting up a new postdoc position in Switzerland at ETH in Zurich. I will be part of a multidisciplinary program bringing together geneticists, ecologists, and biologists studying empirically and theoretically adaptation to a changing environment.