Vegetation recovery in tidal marshes reveals critical slowing down under increased inundation.
Vegetation recovery in tidal marshes reveals critical slowing down under increased inundation.
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DOI：
10.1038/ncomms15811
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发表时间：
2017-06-09
影响因子：
16.6
通讯作者：
Bouma TJ
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
van Belzen J;van de Koppel J;Kirwan ML;van der Wal D;Herman PMJ;Dakos V;Kéfi S;Scheffer M;Guntenspergen GR;Bouma TJ
有人提出，扰动后恢复率下降是复杂系统即将出现临界点的一个重要预警。尽管有广泛的理论和实验室研究，这种“临界减速”在现实世界生态系统的复杂环境中仍然没有得到很大程度的测试。在这里，我们提供了观测和实验支持的临界减缓沿着自然应力梯度在潮汐沼泽生态系统。欧洲沼泽发展的航空图像的时间序列揭示了一致的延长恢复时间的淹没应力的增加。我们证实了这一发现与移植实验在欧洲和北美的潮汐沼泽。特别是，我们的研究结果强调了直接观察或实验的恢复措施的力量，间接的统计特征，如空间方差或自相关。我们的研究结果表明，临界减缓现象可以提供一个强大的工具，探测自然生态系统的弹性。理论和控制实验表明，生态变量从扰动中恢复的速度在临界临界点之前会减慢。在这里，货车贝尔岑和他的同事们证明，减缓植被恢复干扰也是明显的自然系统的潮汐沼泽。
A declining rate of recovery following disturbance has been proposed as an important early warning for impending tipping points in complex systems. Despite extensive theoretical and laboratory studies, this ‘critical slowing down' remains largely untested in the complex settings of real-world ecosystems. Here, we provide both observational and experimental support of critical slowing down along natural stress gradients in tidal marsh ecosystems. Time series of aerial images of European marsh development reveal a consistent lengthening of recovery time as inundation stress increases. We corroborate this finding with transplantation experiments in European and North American tidal marshes. In particular, our results emphasize the power of direct observational or experimental measures of recovery over indirect statistical signatures, such as spatial variance or autocorrelation. Our results indicate that the phenomenon of critical slowing down can provide a powerful tool to probe the resilience of natural ecosystems. Theory and controlled experiments have shown that the recovery rate of an ecological variable from perturbation slows down before a critical tipping point. Here, van Belzen and colleagues demonstrate that slowed vegetation recovery to disturbance is also apparent in the natural system of a tidal marsh.