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Open AccessTransformation starts at the periphery of networks where pushback is less
Complex systems ranging from societies to ecological communities and power grids may be viewed as networks of connected elements. Such systems can go through critical transitions driven by an avalanche of cont...
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Open AccessNorthern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests
Climate change is expected to shift the boreal biome northward through expansion at the northern and contraction at the southern boundary respectively. However, biome-scale evidence of such a shift is rare. He...
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Open AccessSome species flourish when many do not: a pattern in data on ecological communities
Patterns in species × sample tables of communities depend above all on the organisms of the data sets and the conditions involved. Patterns that surpass individual sets are of special interest. Our question, l...
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Open AccessA potential feedback loop underlying glacial-interglacial cycles
The sawtooth-patterned glacial-interglacial cycles in the Earth’s atmospheric temperature are a well-known, though poorly understood phenomenon. Pinpointing the relevant mechanisms behind these cycles will not...
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Open AccessEvaluating the performance of multivariate indicators of resilience loss
Various complex systems, such as the climate, ecosystems, and physical and mental health can show large shifts in response to small changes in their environment. These ‘tip** points’ are notoriously hard to ...
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Open AccessHysteresis of tropical forests in the 21st century
Tropical forests modify the conditions they depend on through feedbacks at different spatial scales. These feedbacks shape the hysteresis (history-dependence) of tropical forests, thus controlling their resili...
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Open AccessInferring causation from time series in Earth system sciences
The heart of the scientific enterprise is a rational effort to understand the causes behind the phenomena we observe. In large-scale complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system, real experiments are rar...
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Forest-rainfall cascades buffer against drought across the Amazon
Tree transpiration in the Amazon may enhance rainfall for downwind forests. Until now it has been unclear how this cascading effect plays out across the basin. Here, we calculate local forest transpiration and...
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Climate reddening increases the chance of critical transitions
Climate change research often focuses on trends in the mean and variance. However, analyses of palaeoclimatic and contemporary dynamics reveal that climate memory — as measured for instance by temporal autocor...
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Open AccessSlow Recovery from Local Disturbances as an Indicator for Loss of Ecosystem Resilience
A range of indicators have been proposed for identifying the elevated risk of critical transitions in ecosystems. Most indicators are based on the idea that critical slowing down can be inferred from changes i...
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Open AccessRare, Intense, Big fires dominate the global tropics under drier conditions
Wildfires burn large parts of the tropics every year, sha** ecosystem structure and functioning. Yet the complex interplay between climate, vegetation and human factors that drives fire dynamics is still poo...
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Coral reefs in the Anthropocene
Coral reefs support immense biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services to many millions of people. Yet reefs are degrading rapidly in response to numerous anthropogenic drivers. In the coming centur...
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Remotely sensed resilience of tropical forests
Remote sensing of tropical forest activity indicates that temporal autocorrelation—an indicator of slow recovery from stress—rises steeply as precipitation falls sufficiently. This offers some support for a ti...
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Erratum to: Multiple feedbacks and the prevalence of alternate stable states on coral reefs
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Multiple feedbacks and the prevalence of alternate stable states on coral reefs
The prevalence of alternate stable states on coral reefs has been disputed, although there is universal agreement that many reefs have experienced substantial losses of coral cover. Alternate stable states req...
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Open AccessBistability, Spatial Interaction, and the Distribution of Tropical Forests and Savannas
Recent work has indicated that tropical forest and savanna can be alternative stable states under a range of climatic conditions. However, dynamical systems theory suggests that in case of strong spatial inter...
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Causal feedbacks in climate change
Although the correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature is well documented, it is difficult to show causality from the data. This study uses insight from dynamical systems theory to show that interna...
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Flickering as an early warning signal
Most work on generic early warning signals for critical transitions focuses on indicators of the phenomenon of critical slowing down that precedes a range of catastrophic bifurcation points. However, in highly...
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Effects of interannual climate variability on tropical tree cover
Climatic warming is intensifying the global water cycle, and is projected to increase rainfall variability. Higher interannual variability in rainfall is shown to reduce tree cover in the wet tropics, but may ...
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Lower biodiversity of native fish but only marginally altered plankton biomass in tropical lakes hosting introduced piscivorous Cichla cf. ocellaris
We compared the species richness and abundance of fish, zooplankton and phytoplankton in nine mesotrophic coastal shallow lakes (Northeastern Brazil) with and without the exotic predator cichlid tucunaré or ‘p...
