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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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15 Aug – 18 Aug 2021, postgraduate workshop
https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1748-9326/page/Focus_on_earth_system_resilience_and_tipping_behavior
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 current context of global change. However, how can we define the stability of anything as complex as an ecological community? And how can we best measure stability? Many…
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Coming week (2-6 December 2019) at the Institute Poincare in Paris, a workshop on “Coupled climate-ecology-economy modeling” will take place. Check here for the detailed workshop programme.