Cascading regime shifts within and across scales

By J. Rocha, Garry D. Peterson, Ö. Bodin, Simon A. Levin. Science, 2018

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cascading effects of regime shifts The potential for regime shifts and critical transitions in ecological and Earth systems, particularly in a changing climate, has received considerable attention. However, the possibility of interactions between such shifts is poorly understood. Rocha et al. used network analysis to explore whether critical transitions in ecosystems can be coupled with each other, even when far apart (see the Perspective by Scheffer and van Nes). They report different types of potential cascading effects, including domino effects and hidden feedbacks, that can be prevalent in different systems. Such cascading effects can couple the dynamics of regime shifts in distant places, which suggests that the interactions between transitions should be borne in mind in future forecasts. Science, this issue p. 1379; see also p. 1357 Abrupt changes in ecosystems affect other ecosystems in time and space. Regime shifts are large, abrupt, and persistent critical transitions in the function and structure of ecosystems. Yet, it is unknown how these transitions will interact, whether the occurrence of one will increase the likelihood of another or simply correlate at distant places. We explored two types of cascading effects: Domino effects create one-way dependencies, whereas hidden feedbacks produce two-way interactions. We compare them with the control case of driver sharing, which can induce correlations. Using 30 regime shifts described as networks, we show that 45% of regime shift pairwise combinations present at least one plausible structural interdependence. The likelihood of cascading effects depends on cross-scale interactions but differs for each type. Management of regime shifts should account for potential connections.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a59a5f7dca0eae73dd04cc40aa5c5d26e69cb722

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Citations in the corpus

Network resilience (2020, background): “As humans increase their pressure on the planet, regime shifts are likely to occur more often, and more severely, and more broadly [182, 183, 184, 185].”
Global ecosystem thresholds driven by aridity (2020, background): “Along with recent studies dealing with multiscale regime shifts (12), our study provides a well-defined framework for sequential shifts that can inspire a new generation of multiscale models to explore ecosystem responses to climate change.”