ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Evaluating early-warning indicators of critical transitions in natural aquatic ecosystems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Early Warning Signals in Ecological Time-Series.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Stochastic colonization, transient and boom-bust dynamics shape invasions by native taxa.Ecology · 2026Article
- Navigating tipping points: A complex systems framework for anticipating lake ecosystem collapse.Fundamental research · 2026Review
- Revealing unseen dynamical regimes of ecosystems from population time-series data.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Applicability of spatial early warning signals to complex network dynamics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Early detection of disease outbreaks and non-outbreaks using incidence data: A framework using feature-based time series classification and machine learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Early warning signals do not predict a warming-induced experimental epidemic.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Reduced precipitation can induce ecosystem regime shifts in lakes by increasing internal nutrient recycling.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Anticipating regime shifts by mixing early warning signals from different nodes.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Early warning signals have limited applicability to empirical lake data.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Early warnings for multi-stage transitions in dynamics on networks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Quantifying resilience and the risk of regime shifts under strong correlated noise.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Regime shifts, trends, and variability of lake productivity at a global scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Scaling up our understanding of tipping points.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Structure-based identification of sensor species for anticipating critical transitions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Abrupt shifts in 21st-century plankton communities.Science advances · 2021Article
- Detecting alternative attractors in ecosystem dynamics.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Forecasting resilience profiles of the run-up to regime shifts in nearly-one-dimensional systems.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Resilience of aquatic systems: Review and management implications.Aquatic sciences · 2020Article
- Network dynamics of positive and negative affect in bipolar disorder.Journal of affective disorders · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
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Abstract
Ecosystems can show sudden and persistent changes in state despite only incremental changes in drivers. Such critical transitions are difficult to predict, because the state of the system often shows little change before the transition. Early-warning indicators (EWIs) are hypothesized to signal the loss of system resilience and have been shown to precede critical transitions in theoretical models, paleo-climate time series, and in laboratory as well as whole lake experiments. The generalizability of EWIs for detecting critical transitions in empirical time series of natural aquatic ecosystems remains largely untested, however. Here we assessed four commonly used EWIs on long-term datasets of five freshwater ecosystems that have experienced sudden, persistent transitions and for which the relevant ecological mechanisms and drivers are well understood. These case studies were categorized by three mechanisms that can generate critical transitions between alternative states: competition, trophic cascade, and intraguild predation. Although EWIs could be detected in most of the case studies, agreement among the four indicators was low. In some cases, EWIs were detected considerably ahead of the transition. Nonetheless, our results show that at present, EWIs do not provide reliable and consistent signals of impending critical transitions despite using some of the best routinely monitored freshwater ecosystems. Our analysis strongly suggests that a priori knowledge of the underlying mechanisms driving ecosystem transitions is necessary to identify relevant state variables for successfully monitoring EWIs.
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