News

New study – Ocean warming associated with rapid declines in productivity and elevated risk of fish stock collapses

Our work led by the PhD student Mathieu Pelissie just got published in Science Advances. In a nutshell we found:

MASTER THESIS (M2): MODELLING BIODIVERSITY EXPOSURE TO FUTURE CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS

We offer a master project that will investigate how different aspects of future climate change, namely changes in temperature, precipitation, variability, and extreme…

Launch of EU project ClimTip

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…

The Global Tipping Points Report launched at COP28

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…

Farmland practices are driving bird populations decline across Europe

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…

Atmospheric CO2 forcing on Mediterranean biomes during the past 500 kyrs

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…

Prevalence and drivers of abrupt vegetation shifts in global drylands

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…

Ecological stability of lakes declining globally over time

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…

First submission to Peer Community in Ecology

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…

Funded Phd opportunity in eco-evolutionary ecosystem dynamics

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…

Interacting Tipping Elements in the Natural and Social Components of the Earth System

15 Aug – 18 Aug 2021, postgraduate workshop

Special issue on Earth System resilience now open for submissions

https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1748-9326/page/Focus_on_earth_system_resilience_and_tipping_behavior

Unveiling dimensions of stability in complex ecological networks

Understanding what determines the stability of ecological communities is one of the oldest questions asked in ecology, an issue that has become even more pressing in the…

The Mathematics of Climate and the Environment – Workshop – Paris

Coming week (2-6 December 2019) at the Institute Poincare in Paris, a workshop on “Coupled climate-ecology-economy modeling” will take place.

Buz Holling past away

Just back from holidays I’m sad to find out that one of the most influential thinkers on resilience passed away. I feel lucky I had the chance to meet Buzz and hear his…

Master Thesis / Stage M2 Feb-June 2020

There is an opportunity to do a master thesis (5 months) at the Institute of iEES in Paris on the interface of tipping points and evolution: on “Ecological consequences of…

Does evolution matter for tipping point responses?

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…

Ecological Transitions: Regime Shifts, Thresholds and Tipping Points

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…

satellite session in CCS2018

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…

Increasing climate variability will hit world’s poorest countries

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…

Plasticity affects population tipping point responses

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…

Trends in variability and autocorrelation in observed global temperature records

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…

Evaluating early-warning indicators of critical transitions in natural aquatic ecosystems

We just published a study on signatures of instability in empirical time series from five freshwater ecosystems with documented sudden, persistent transitions hypothesized…

PAGES Issue on Climate Tipping Points

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.…

Monitoring economic variables to infer ecosystem resilience

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…

new job position

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…

Hysteresis and Heteroskedasticity (early view papers)

Only a handful of studies demonstrate the existence of hysteresis in bistable systems. In a follow-up from our earlier work, we study the recovery trajectory of a…

Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems

We tried to bring together evidence of how the widely discussed notion of resilience can be beneficial in sustaining the equally discoursed ecosystem services in the context…

Detecting tipping points in ecological networks

In this just published paper we develop a framework of detecting tipping points in the context of mutualistic networks. Under a scenario of global environmental change that…

The use and misuse of resilience indicators as early warnings for regime shifts

Regime shifts have been a long sought theme of research in marine ecosystems. Controversies, new methods and alternative hypotheses on how to study and understand such…

ASLO organized session: Regime shifts in lakes, rivers, and oceans

Together with David Seekel and Jessica Gephart, we are organizing a session on regime shifts in the upcoming American Society for Limnology & Oceanography conference in…

Learning about complex systems

A new experience attending a conference of another community for the first time. European Conference on Complex Systems in Lucca Italy. A mix of physicists, mathematicians…

Applying Resilience Thinking – conference preps

Just a week before the resilience conference 2014 in Montpellier a short brochure of our forthcoming book on “Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem…

Spatial methods of early warnings for tipping points

Recently our paper on spatial indicators for critical transitions was published in PloS One. In this paper we summarize methods and create a flowchart for looking for…

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…

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…

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.
T…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Does predator interference cause alternative stable states in multispecies communities?

Our paper with Jiangfeng Feng and Egbert van Nes in Theoretical Population Biology just appeared online http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tpb.2012.06.003 . We show that predator…

Dutch graduate research school SENSE PhD award

My PhD thesis “Expecting the Unexpected: indicators of resilience as early-warning signals for critical transitions” received the SENSE PhD Award for 2012.

KNAW colloquium on Early Warnings in October 2012

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…

ASLO meeting Japan: Session on Ecosystem change and predictability

Together with Elisa Benincà from the University of Amsterdam and Chih-hao Hsieh from the National Taiwan University, we are putting together a special session on

new postdoc position

I just moved to Sevilla in Spain for a postdoc in the lab of Jordi Bascompte http://bascompte.net/