Ecosystem Tipping Points In an Era of Global Change

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Ecological surprises challenge science and society. While the nature and timing of abrupt changes in ecological organization and function remain poorly understood, emerging evidence points to the existence of these tipping points across a variety of ecosystems worldwide; from lakes to deserts, to coral reefs and kelp forests. While the need to understand ecosystem tipping points has become even more pressing in this era of global change, unraveling the mechanisms governing their behavior is notoriously difficult because it requires understanding phenomena that occur on very different scales of space, time and ecological organization.