In this just published paper we develop a framework of detecting tipping points in the context of mutualistic networks. Under a scenario of global environmental change that might affect species interactions we show how indicators of resilience could provide early warning in complex communities such as those represented by the network of interactions between plants and their animal mutualists. This work…
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Regime shifts have been a long sought theme of research in marine ecosystems. Controversies, new methods and alternative hypotheses on how to study and understand such marine regime shifts are summarized in the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on Marine regime shifts around the globe: theory, drivers and impacts that just appeared online. Thus,…
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Recently our paper on spatial indicators for critical transitions was published in PloS One. In this paper we summarize methods and create a flowchart for looking for indicators of upcoming transitions in spatial data. It is a natural follow-up paper from our previous work on methods for timeseries. The methods of the paper are now summarized in the spatial indicators section…
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Our submission of an interactive visualization version of the earlywarnings R package for critical transitions in the Data Challenge competition organised by the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation got into the 4 finalists. Although we didn’t get the first place, the judges were very flattering and Leo Lahti and myself are really proud to have…
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There is a lot of interest on the limits of resilience indicators and on whether they are uniquely associated with catastrophic transitions. We tried to shed light on that question in a short piece that just appeared in Oikos. There, we show that the same early warnings may signal non catastrophic transitions, but the same transitions…
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Together with Leo Lahti, we fixed bugs and moved the earlywarnings toolbox in R. It is now a library ready to be installed from your preferable CRAN repository. In the process, we also migrated the earlywarnings toolbox to github for shifitng towards open-source, community-based project development. We hope this will facilitate the use of the toolbox both for…
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Together with colleagues from China and the UK we just published work on a paleo limnological record in a big chinese lake that shows a transition to eutrophication during the last 30 years. Interestingly, the data offer the possibility to show that the system exhibits bimodality and that approaching to the permanent shift ‘flickering’ between…
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Our review paper on Anticipating Critical Transitions summarizes the advancement and popularity in estimating early-warning signals for approaching transitions in a variety of disciplines together with some ground-breaking experimental demonstrations that followed the earlier review on early-warnings. In addition, new ideas are mapped out and the challenge of merging network perspectives on stability and collapse…
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Our colloquium and masterclass on ‘Early-warning signals for critical transitions: bridging the gap between theory and practice’ will be hosted by the Dutch Royal Science and Arts Society (KNAW) from 10 to 12 of October 2012 in Amsterdam. This is also going to be the official kick-off of SparcS – the Synergy Program for Analyzing Resilience and Critical transitionS: an initiative…
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In a recent work with Tony Ives, we showed how modified linear models with time-varying parameters can be used to extract an indicator of instability for a time series that may be drifting towards a regime shift. The paper is available online in Ecosphere. The idea is simply that instead of fitting an autoregressive model…
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