Natural systems are declining at an unparalleled rate. To prompt conservation of
ecosystems, the IUCN has developed a framework to assess ecosystem threat. By 2025, the
IUCN aims to assess the collapse risk of all the world's ecosystems using this framework.
This increases the pressure to refine tractable methods to predict collapse. However, there
has been no systematic review of whether predicting collapse is possible and practical,
which is impeding consistent and comparable assessments of ecosystem threat. Here, we …