Ecological resilience is the ability of a system to persist in the face of perturbations. Although
resilience has been a highly influential concept, its interpretation has remained largely …

Abrupt ecological changes are, by definition, those that occur over short periods of time
relative to typical rates of change for a given ecosystem. The potential for such changes is …

Ecosystems can show sudden and persistent changes in state despite only incremental
changes in drivers. Such critical transitions are difficult to predict, because the state of the …

Anthropogenic pressures, including climate change, are causing nonlinear changes in
ecosystems globally. The development of reliable early warning indicators (EWI s) to predict …

Theory and observation tell us that many complex systems exhibit tipping points—thresholds
involving an abrupt and irreversible transition to a contrasting dynamical regime. Such …

Directional change in environmental drivers sometimes triggers regime shifts in ecosystems.
Theory and experiments suggest that regime shifts can be detected in advance, and …

Dynamical systems can undergo critical transitions where the system suddenly shifts from
one stable state to another at a critical threshold called the tipping point. The decrease in …

Ecosystem regime shifts are abrupt changes from one dynamical state to another, such as
the shift from a clear‐water state to an algal bloom state in lakes. These transitions are hard …

Research on early warning indicators has generally focused on assessing temporal
transitions with limited application of these methods to detecting spatial regimes. Traditional …

Abstract Early Warning Signals (EWS) have generated much excitement for their potential to
anticipate transitions in various systems, ranging from climate change in ecology to disease …