Recovery rates reflect distance to a tipping point in a living system

Veraart, Annelies J.; Faassen, Elisabeth J.; Dakos, Vasilis; Nes, Egbert H. van; Lürling, Miquel; Scheffer, Marten

doi:10.1038/nature10723

Cited by 386 publications

(360 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Resilient systems are sustainable in the face of major climate, sanitary and economic driving forces. There are several unresolved challenges involved in understanding whether resilience is a manageable property of APS (I26): (i) to assess the relative weights of biological and decisional processes involved in resilience; (ii) to identify diagnosis indicators and indicators for adaptive management, including the potential to share information and technology for more precise decision making (Robertson et al, 2010); (iii) to explore the operational character of early-warning indicators for anticipating critical thresholds (so-called tipping points; Scheffer et al, 2009;Veraart et al, 2012); and (iv) to understand how farmers respond (i.e. which management strategies do they use) to overcome climatic events and biotic or abiotic stresses (Vanwindekens et al, 2013).…”

Section: Managing For Resilience: Adapting Aps To Risk and Uncertaintmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forty research issues for the redesign of animal production systems in the 21st century

Dumont

García

Thomas

et al. 2014

Animal

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Agroecology offers a scientific and operational framework for redesigning animal production systems (APS) so that they better cope with the coming challenges. Grounded in the stimulation and valorization of natural processes to reduce inputs and pollutions in agroecosystems, it opens a challenging research agenda for the animal science community. In this paper, we identify key research issues that define this agenda. We first stress the need to assess animal robustness by measurable traits, to analyze trade-offs between production and adaptation traits at within-breed and between-breed level, and to better understand how group selection, epigenetics and animal learning shape performance. Second, we propose research on the nutritive value of alternative feed resources, including the environmental impacts of producing these resources and their associated non-provisioning services. Third, we look at how the design of APS based on agroecological principles valorizes interactions between system components and promotes biological diversity at multiple scales to increase system resilience. Addressing such challenges requires a collection of theories and models (concept-knowledge theory, viability theory, companion modeling, etc.). Acknowledging the ecology of contexts and analyzing the rationales behind traditional small-scale systems will increase our understanding of mechanisms contributing to the success or failure of agroecological practices and systems. Fourth, the large-scale development of agroecological products will require analysis of resistance to change among farmers and other actors in the food chain. Certifications and market-based incentives could be an important lever for the expansion of agroecological alternatives in APS. Finally, we question the suitability of current agriculture extension services and public funding mechanisms for scaling-up agroecological practices and systems.

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Section: Managing For Resilience: Adapting Aps To Risk and Uncertaintmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forty research issues for the redesign of animal production systems in the 21st century

Dumont

García

Thomas

et al. 2014

Animal

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“…the focus of extensive research in diverse ecosystems for many decades. Furthermore, metabolism is closely tied to primary producer biomass and life form, which have been used to detect changing resilience in both terrestrial (18,19,24) and aquatic systems (13,17,25). So far, however, it is unknown whether metabolism can be used to detect changes in ecosystem resilience.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, statistics related to variance or autocorrelation could be indicators of declining resilience or approaching thresholds (10,11). Experimental tests of declining resilience in living systems are rare (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17), especially in large-scale field settings. In terrestrial ecosystems, such as forests and grasslands, changing resilience has been measured by analyzing the spatial patterns of vegetation maps obtained by satellite remote sensing (18,19).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in ecosystem resilience detected in automated measures of ecosystem metabolism during a whole-lake manipulation

Batt

Carpenter

Cole

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Environmental sensor networks are developing rapidly to assess changes in ecosystems and their services. Some ecosystem changes involve thresholds, and theory suggests that statistical indicators of changing resilience can be detected near thresholds. We examined the capacity of environmental sensors to assess resilience during an experimentally induced transition in a wholelake manipulation. A trophic cascade was induced in a planktivoredominated lake by slowly adding piscivorous bass, whereas a nearby bass-dominated lake remained unmanipulated and served as a reference ecosystem during the 4-y experiment. In both the manipulated and reference lakes, automated sensors were used to measure variables related to ecosystem metabolism (dissolved oxygen, pH, and chlorophyll-a concentration) and to estimate gross primary production, respiration, and net ecosystem production. Thresholds were detected in some automated measurements more than a year before the completion of the transition to piscivore dominance. Directly measured variables (dissolved oxygen, pH, and chlorophyll-a concentration) related to ecosystem metabolism were better indicators of the approaching threshold than were the estimates of rates (gross primary production, respiration, and net ecosystem production); this difference was likely a result of the larger uncertainties in the derived rate estimates. Thus, relatively simple characteristics of ecosystems that were observed directly by the sensors were superior indicators of changing resilience. Models linked to thresholds in variables that are directly observed by sensor networks may provide unique opportunities for evaluating resilience in complex ecosystems.regime shift | alternative stable states | early warning signals | sonde | high-frequency time series

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“…One method of detecting an approaching bifurcation is to perform repeatable experiments on the system itself and study its responses. [4][5][6] This is very hard or impossible to do with large, complex systems, such as the climate, so one may instead build models of varying complexity and perform experiments on these models instead. 7,8 A third approach is to look at the statistics of some measurable variable of the system, usually a time series of this variable, as these may reveal something about the future behaviour without the need for a detailed model of the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection of bifurcations in noisy coupled systems from multiple time series

Williamson

Lenton

2015

Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science

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Bifurcations in nonstationarity noise dynamic systems: The basins of attraction and the problems of predictability of final states AIP Conf. Proc. 502, 655 (2000) We generalize a method of detecting an approaching bifurcation in a time series of a noisy system from the special case of one dynamical variable to multiple dynamical variables. For a system described by a stochastic differential equation consisting of an autonomous deterministic part with one dynamical variable and an additive white noise term, small perturbations away from the system's fixed point will decay slower the closer the system is to a bifurcation. This phenomenon is known as critical slowing down and all such systems exhibit this decay-type behaviour. However, when the deterministic part has multiple coupled dynamical variables, the possible dynamics can be much richer, exhibiting oscillatory and chaotic behaviour. In our generalization to the multi-variable case, we find additional indicators to decay rate, such as frequency of oscillation. In the case of approaching a homoclinic bifurcation, there is no change in decay rate but there is a decrease in frequency of oscillations. The expanded method therefore adds extra tools to help detect and classify approaching bifurcations given multiple time series, where the underlying dynamics are not fully known. Our generalisation also allows bifurcation detection to be applied spatially if one treats each spatial location as a new dynamical variable. One may then determine the unstable spatial mode(s). This is also something that has not been possible with the single variable method. The method is applicable to any set of time series regardless of its origin, but may be particularly useful when anticipating abrupt changes in the multi-dimensional climate system. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. Abrupt changes in complex systems such as the human body, ecosystems, or the climate system can have unwelcome and expensive consequences. Ideally, given one or more time series of some measurable variables, one would like an early warning method to indicate whether an abrupt change is imminent. Abrupt changes can result from crossing a bifurcation in the underlying dynamical system. Recently, there has been a burgeoning body of work on the detection of approaching bifurcation in noisy systems whose deterministic dynamics are assumed to be approximated by a first order ordinary differential equation (ODE) of one dynamical variable. These methods work by looking for the system's recovery from noisy perturbations becoming more sluggish, a phenomenon known as critical slowing down. This is a generic feature of approaching bifurcations in systems modelled by autonomous first order differential equations of one dynamical variable with additive white noise, where the behaviour is decay toward a fixed point. However, it is not always possible to approximate parts of a complex system in such reduced manner. For example, the climate system can display coupled, oscillatory, or chaotic behaviour. Here, we make a direct g...

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Recovery rates reflect distance to a tipping point in a living system

Cited by 386 publications

References 17 publications

Forty research issues for the redesign of animal production systems in the 21st century

Forty research issues for the redesign of animal production systems in the 21st century

Changes in ecosystem resilience detected in automated measures of ecosystem metabolism during a whole-lake manipulation

Detection of bifurcations in noisy coupled systems from multiple time series

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