Early warning signals of regime shifts in coupled human–environment systems

Early warning signals of regime shifts in coupled human-environment systems.

In complex systems, a critical transition is a shift in a system's dynamical regime from its current state to a strongly contrasting state as external conditions move beyond a tipping point. These transitions are often preceded by characteristic early warning signals such as increased system variability. However, early warning signals in complex, coupled human-environment systems (HESs) remain ...

Changing skewness: an early warning signal of regime shifts in ecosystems.

Empirical evidence for large-scale abrupt changes in ecosystems such as lakes and vegetation of semi-arid regions is growing. Such changes, called regime shifts, can lead to degradation of ecological services. We study simple ecological models that show a catastrophic transition as a control parameter is varied and propose a novel early warning signal that exploits two ubiquitous features of ec...

An early warning on early warning systems!

Early warning signals in plant disease outbreaks

Correspondence Sirio Orozco-Fuentes Email: [email protected] Summary 1. Infectious disease outbreaks in plants threaten ecosystems, agricultural crops and food trade. Currently, several fungal diseases are affecting forests worldwide, posing a major risk to tree species, habitats and consequently ecosystem decay. Prediction and control of disease spread are difficult, mainly ...

Early warning signals of stochastic switching.

The development of statistical signals for anticipating changes of state ('regime shifts') is an active area of research in ecology [1,2], earth and atmospheric science [3], and biology [4,5]. Causes of regime shifts include noise-induced transitions [6], discontinuities in the underlying dynamics [7], stochastic fluctuations dominated by low frequencies [8], stochastic switching between basins...