Early warning of critical transitions in biodiversity from compositional disorder.

ABSTRACT: Global environmental change presents a clear need for improved leading indicators of critical transitions, especially those that can be generated from compositional data and that work in empirical cases. Ecological theory of community dynamics under environmental forcing predicts an early replacement of slowly replicating and weakly competitive "canary" species by slowly replicating but strongly competitive "keystone" species. Further forcing leads to the eventual collapse of the keystone species as they are replaced by weakly competitive but fast-replicating "weedy" species in a critical transition to a significantly different state. We identify a diagnostic signal of these changes in the coefficients of a correlation between compositional disorder and biodiversity. Compositional disorder

SUBMITTER: Doncaster CP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6849621 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature