Author: vdakos

quantifying resilience in ecology and evolution under global environmental change

EWS package gets into WICI Data challenge finalists!

Our submission of an interactive visualization version of the earlywarnings R package for critical transitions in the Data Challenge competition organised by the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation got into the 4 finalists. Although we didn’t get the first place, the judges were very flattering and Leo Lahti and myself are really proud to have…
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September 30, 2013 0

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…
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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…
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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…
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April 18, 2013 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…
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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…
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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…
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September 19, 2012 0

Model-based leading indicators for critical transitions

In a recent work with Tony Ives, we showed how modified linear models with time-varying parameters can be used to extract an indicator of instability for a time series that may be drifting towards a regime shift. The paper is available online in Ecosphere. The idea is simply that instead of fitting an autoregressive model…
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August 19, 2012 0

Using Economic Information to Anticipate Collapses in Social-Ecological Systems

Andries is going to present our work in progress in the upcoming Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society in Minneapolis later this month. The talk is part of an interesting session on Climate and Fisheries: Responses of a Socio-Ecological System to Global Change.


August 3, 2012 0

Early Detection of Ecosystem Regime Shifts: A Multiple Method Evaluation for Management Application

The paper we were working on within the EUR-Oceans group for the Baltic Sea just appeared in PLoS One. We show for the first time how different methods for identifying regime shifts can be applied in the marine environment and how they can be interpreted. Hopefully this study will pave the way for same sort of…
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July 11, 2012 0