The rate of environmental change as an important driver across scales in ecology

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.09616. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Alexis Synodinos, Rajat Karnatak, Carlos A Aguilar-Trigueros, Pierre Gras, Tina Heger, Danny Ionescu, Stefanie Maaß, Camille Musseau, Gabriela Onandia, Aimara Planillo

Abstract

Global change has been predominantly studied from the prism of ‘how much’ rather than ‘how fast’ change occurs. The paradigm underlying the former assumes that a smooth change in an environmental driver can force a regime shift between alternative states (Bifurcation-tipping). This presupposes that environmental conditions change at a rate which allows the ecological entity to track them and thus reach equilibrium. However, current rates of environmental change are often too fast for this paradigm to apply, necessitating a shift in approach to improve predictions on the impacts of rapid environmental change. The theory of rate-induced tipping (Rate-tipping) demonstrates how rates of environmental change can cause tipping phenomena even in the absence of alternative states. We illustrate how Rate-tipping can apply to a range of ecological scenarios and explore the literature for properties which increase the sensitivity to rates of change. Further, we discuss how targeted empirical studies can investigate the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms through which rate-induced phenomena can propagate across levels of organisation. Finally, we argue for the inclusion of Rate-tipping in the study of global change as the first step towards the theoretical synthesis necessary to account for multiple stressors impacting ecological entities simultaneously.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/ajeyz

Subjects

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Keywords

buffering mechanisms, climate change, ecological communities, ecosystem response, global change, r-tipping, temporal ecology

Dates

Published: 2021-10-13 11:48

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License

CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Data and Code Availability Statement:
A quantitative analysis based on the literature review was conducted. The list of studies used in this analysis, as well as details of the analysis, are available in the supplmentary material.