Spatial early warning signals for impending regime shifts: A practical framework for application in real-world landscapes.

ABSTRACT: Prediction of ecosystem response to global environmental change is a pressing scientific challenge of major societal relevance. Many ecosystems display nonlinear responses to environmental change, and may even undergo practically irreversible 'regime shifts' that initiate ecosystem collapse. Recently, early warning signals based on spatiotemporal metrics have been proposed for the identification of impending regime shifts. The rapidly increasing availability of remotely sensed data provides excellent opportunities to apply such model-based spatial early warning signals in the real world, to assess ecosystem resilience and identify impending regime shifts induced by global change. Such information would allow land-managers and policy makers to interfere and avoid catastrophic shifts, but al

SUBMITTER: Nijp JJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6849843 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature