ArticleNature communications2023
Early warning signals have limited applicability to empirical lake data.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Soil-Plant Coupling Principle (SPCP): A Conceptual Framework for Diagnosing Hidden Ecosystem Vulnerability.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Early warning signals for loss of control in complex systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Early Warning Signals in Ecological Time-Series.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Detecting and forecasting tipping points from sample variance alone.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Navigating tipping points: A complex systems framework for anticipating lake ecosystem collapse.Fundamental research · 2026Review
- Generalized Mechanism Model for Ecosystem Hysteresis.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- The Endocannabinoid-Microbiota-Neuroimmune Super-System: A Unifying Feedback Architecture for Systems Resilience, Collapse Trajectories, and Precision Feedback Medicine.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Multivariate signals of population collapse in a high-throughput ecological experiment.Ecology · 2025Article
- Early warnings are too late when parameters change rapidly.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- 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 warning of regime switching in a complex financial system from a spillover network dynamic perspective.iScience · 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
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
Research aimed at identifying indicators of persistent abrupt shifts in ecological communities, a.k.a regime shifts, has led to the development of a suite of early warning signals (EWSs). As these often perform inaccurately when applied to real-world observational data, it remains unclear whether critical transitions are the dominant mechanism of regime shifts and, if so, which EWS methods can predict them. Here, using multi-trophic planktonic data on multiple lakes from around the world, we classify both lake dynamics and the reliability of classic and second generation EWSs methods to predict whole-ecosystem change. We find few instances of critical transitions, with different trophic levels often expressing different forms of abrupt change. The ability to predict this change is highly processing dependant, with most indicators not performing better than chance, multivariate EWSs being weakly superior to univariate, and a recent machine learning model performing poorly. Our results suggest that predictive ecology should start to move away from the concept of critical transitions, developing methods suitable for predicting resilience loss not limited to the strict bounds of bifurcation theory.
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