Universality of noise-induced resilience restoration in spatially-extended ecological systems

Abstract Many systems may switch to an undesired state due internal failures or external perturbations, of which critical transitions toward degraded ecosystem states are prominent examples. Resilience restoration focuses on the ability spatially-extended and required time recover their desired under stochastic environmental conditions. The difficulty is rooted in lack mathematical tools analyze with high dimensionality, nonlinearity, effects. Here we show that nucleation theory can be employed advance resilience spatially-embedded ecological systems. We find exhibit single-cluster multi-cluster phases depending sizes noise strengths. also discover a scaling law governing for arbitrary system strengths two-dimensional This approach not limited ecosystems has applications various dynamical systems, from biology infrastructural