Regime Shift - Frontiers of Research

Frontiers of Research

Regime shift research is occurring across multiple ecosystems and at multiple scales. New areas of research include early warnings of regime shifts and new forms of modeling.

Significant efforts have been made to identify early-warning signals of regime shifts. System approaching a bifurcation point show a characteristic behaviour called critical slowing down that leaves a distinguishable signal in the increase of spatial and temporal autocorrelation, variance and skewness increase while variance spectra tend to lower frequencies. Researchers have explored early warning signals in lakes, climate dynamics, food webs, dry land transitions and epilepsy attacks. It remains unclear how well such signals work for all regime shifts; and if the early warnings give time enough to take appropriate managerial corrections to avoid the shift. Additionally, early warning signals also depend on intensive good-quality data series that are rare in ecology. However, researchers have used high quality data to predict regime shifts in a lake ecosystem. Changes in spatial pattern as an indicator of regime shifts have also become a topic of research.

Another front of research is the development of new approaches to modeling. Dynamic models, bayesian belief networks, Fisher information, and fuzzy cognitive maps have been used as a tool to explore the phase space where regime shifts are likely to happen and understand the dynamics that govern dynamic thresholds. Models are useful oversimplifications of reality, which limits are given by the current understanding of the real system as well as the assumptions of the modeler. Therefore, a deep understanding of causal relationships and the strength of feedbacks is required to capture possible regime shifts dynamics. Nevertheless, such deep understanding is available only for heavily studied systems such as shallow lakes. Methods development is required to tackle the problem of limited time series data and limited understanding of system dynamics, in such a way that allow identification of the main drivers of regime shifts as well as prioritization of managerial options.

Other emerging areas of research include the role of regime shifts in the earth system, cascading consequences among regime shifts, and regime shifts in social-ecological systems.