Max Rietkerk (Utrecht
University), Arjen Doelman (Leiden
University), Ehud Meron (pictured below) (Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev) and Isla Myers-Smith
(University of Edinburgh) have received an ERC Synergy grant of 10 million euros
with their project RESILIENCE. The researchers will investigate whether and how
tipping points in ecosystems can be prevented or evaded by spatial processes
and the formation of spatial patterns.
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Tipping points occur when the damage to ecosystems crosses a threshold so that
dramatic and irreversible change occurs. This damage is often a consequence of
human impacts on the planet such as climate change. These tipping points are
known to be a great concern in the fight against climate change. On a large
scale, tipping points can cause savannahs to flip over to deserts and tundra
can change to forests, resulting in even more climate change.
Earlier research
published in Science last year showed that the largely overlooked tendency of
stressed ecosystems to form spatial patterns, such as vegetation patterns, can
significantly increase the capability of ecosystems to resist tipping and
recover from damage. Rietkerk: “We will take the concept of tipping back to the
drawing table and investigate the conditions for which this concept breaks down
and needs to be replaced by the theory of spatial pattern formation.”
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Above: Vegetation bands (Photo Credit: Stephan Getzin)
The theory proposed by the RESILIENCE team now suggests that tipping points may
be prevented and circumvented by spatial patterning and its feedback with other
ecological processes and that ecosystems are much more resilient than
previously thought. Meyer-Smith: "Tundra ecosystems are full of spatial
patterns. Stripes, circles and hexagons can be found across all different types
of tundra landscapes. Whether these patterns confer resilience to climate
change or not is an open question and one we aim to test in the RESILIENCE
project."
The multidisciplinary team, with researchers from Utrecht, Leiden, Be’er Sheva,
and Edinburgh, will study pathways of resilience and ways of human intervention
to evade these ‘points of no return’. Doelman: “With this project, we aim for
discovering and constructing fundamental mechanisms that may give complex
ecosystems the flexibility to respond to climate change without collapsing in a
catastrophic way.”
The researchers will address this challenge by combining disciplines like
ecology, physics, mathematics, computing and data science. Meron: “The high
complexity of spatially extended ecosystems, reflected in part by their
hierarchy of organizational levels, has hampered attempts to disentangle
ecosystem response to climate change. The synergy of different expertise in our
team will allow us to take advantage of that complexity and identify novel
directions to evade tipping.”
The research will start in the spring of 2023 and will last for six years.
Media Coverage:
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