Identifying fingerprints of fragility in complex ecosystems

Ecosystems are deteriorating at unprecedented rate.

Climate change is threatening their functioning and the vital services they provide to human societies, imposing an urgent need to understand how they are coping with and reacting to global change. The complexity of ecosystems, however, makes predicting their fragility a difficult endeavor.

FRAGILEPRINTS: Identifying fingerprints of fragility in complex ecosystems focuses on a critical scenario in ecosystem degradation: large and abrupt transitions following gradual environmental changes, observed across ecosystems worldwide.

Despite important progresses, key knowledge gaps remain in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these transitions, making them notoriously difficult to predict.

Current research relates them to the presence of Multiple Stable States (MSS), with small perturbations able to induce large shifts from healthy, species-rich communities towards deteriorated ecosystem states.

Understanding of MSS, however, is based on simple models that largely ignore the role of species diversity and interaction complexity, highlighting an extremely relevant gap in our capacity to uncover potential abrupt transitions in species-rich ecosystems.

To address this gap, FRAGILEPRINTS will investigate the emergence of MSS in complex ecosystems by combining a novel bottom-up and top-down interdisciplinary approach: increasing complexity in few-species MSS models and adding structure to random high-dimensional complex networks.

The combination of the two, each applying mathematical models and numerical simulations confronted with experiments and whole-ecosystem data, will allow the identification of fingerprints of ecosystem fragility: conditions, common across ecosystems, related to the presence of MSS and potential abrupt transitions.

These results will be applied to generate a predictive tool with utility in prioritizing areas for conservation, mapping ecosystem fragility or restoring degraded ecosystems.