Early Warnings of Regime Shifts: A Whole-Ecosystem Experiment

By Stephen R. Carpenter, J. Cole, Michael M. Pace, R. Batt, William A. Brock, Timothy J. Cline, J. Coloso, J. Hodgson, J. Kitchell, D. Seekell and 2 more. Science, 2011

888 citations recorded by the source corpus.

High-frequency monitoring of manipulated and reference lakes enabled early detection of subsequent catastrophic regime shift. Catastrophic ecological regime shifts may be announced in advance by statistical early warning signals such as slowing return rates from perturbation and rising variance. The theoretical background for these indicators is rich, but real-world tests are rare, especially for whole ecosystems. We tested the hypothesis that these statistics would be early warning signals for an experimentally induced regime shift in an aquatic food web. We gradually added top predators to a lake over 3 years to destabilize its food web. An adjacent lake was monitored simultaneously as a reference ecosystem. Warning signals of a regime shift were evident in the manipulated lake during reorganization of the food web more than a year before the food web transition was complete, corroborating theory for leading indicators of ecological regime shifts.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3816cebc55f1b1a97f665adb24ed46fea48c87c9

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Citations in the corpus

Methods for Detecting Early Warnings of Critical Transitions in Time Series Illustrated Using Simulated Ecological Data (2012, background): “The return rate has also been expressed as [1-a1], which reflects the proportion of the distance from equilibrium that decays away at each time step [10].”
When can positive interactions cause alternative stable states in ecosystems (2016, background): “…existence unequivocally in an ecosystem requires using experimental approaches, which are often expensive, time consuming and not always possible at meaningful spatial and temporal scales (Schr€oder, Persson & de Roos 2005; Petraitis 2013; but see e.g. Carpenter et al. 2011; Sirota et al. 2013).”
Do early warning indicators consistently predict nonlinear change in long‐term ecological data? (2016, background): “Variance and autocorrelation were selected as candidate EWIs because they have an established theoretical basis, empirical verification from experimental work, and can be calculated readily (Scheffer et al. 2009; Carpenter et al. 2011).”
Cascading extinctions as a hidden driver of insect decline (2020, background): “Such a structural breakdown leaves the community vulnerable and is often associated with regime shifts and erosion of biodiversity (Hughes et al., 2007; Carpenter et al., 2011).”
Crop–livestock integration beyond the farm level: a review (2016, background): “Developing ecosystem services through agriculture involves working across organization levels on the causal chain: management practices-property (state)-process (intensity)-service (level) (Carpenter et al. 2011; Robinson et al. 2012).”
Resilience in ecology: Abstraction, distraction, or where the action is? (2014, methodology): “Such an experimental approach has been used to identify the threshold in abundances of top predators in a freshwater lake associated with a switch from a food web dominated by planktivorous fishes to one dominated by piscivorous fishes (Carpenter et al., 2011).”