Ecosystem Tipping Points In an Era of Global Change

生态惊喜挑战着科学和社会。虽然对生态组织和功能突变的性质和时间仍然知之甚少，但新出现的证据表明，这些临界点存在于世界各地的各种生态系统中；从湖泊到沙漠，到珊瑚礁和海带森林。虽然在这个全球变化的时代，理解生态系统临界点的需求变得更加迫切，但揭示控制它们行为的机制是出了名的困难，因为它需要理解在空间、时间和生态组织的不同尺度上发生的现象。

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.