There is an urgent need to understand the catastrophic effects that global environmental and climate change can have on the Earth, its components, and ecosystems. One critical concern is the potential for sudden, irreversible tipping of ecosystems. Recent discoveries suggest that tipping points might be avoided or even reversed through the spatial pattern formation of vegetation, thereby creating pathways to resilience. Many, yet undiscovered, resilience pathways may exist in ecosystems that are particularly prone to tipping. Moreover, this resilience could be further enhanced by the unexplored link between spatial pattern formation and community assembly.
The goal of the RESILIENCE project is to fundamentally advance our understanding of tipping points and critical transitions in ecosystems, and to reveal how these transitions can be avoided or even reversed through spatial pattern formation.
RESILIENCE aims to develop a new theoretical framework for emerging resilience through spatial pattern formation and to apply this theory to real-world, tipping-prone biomes that are undergoing rapid global change, with a focus on savannas and tundra ecosystems. A focus of our theoretical approach is developing a novel mathematical connection between the origins of pattern formation and the resilience these patterns confer once they emerge.
Empirically, our approach will involve analyzing existing and new data from in situ observations, as well as drone- and satellite-based remote sensing. This research will identify the conditions and spatial patterns that enable ecosystems to evade or even reverse tipping. By identifying these conditions and patterns, we will also shed light on how human interventions can help prevent or reverse tipping, revealing that ecosystems thought to be highly vulnerable to tipping may actually be more resilient than previously believed.
