Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, 95616, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2010 Apr;13(4):464-72. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01439.x. Epub 2010 Feb 8.
Predicting regime shifts - drastic changes in dynamic behaviour - is a key challenge in ecology and other fields. Here we show that the class of ecological systems that will exhibit leading indicators of regime shifts is limited, and that there is a set of ecological models and, therefore, also likely to be a class of natural systems for which there will be no forewarning of a regime change. We first describe how nonlinearities in combination with environmental variability lead to model descriptions that will not have smooth potentials, concluding that many ecological systems are described by systems without smooth potentials and thus will not show typical leading indicators of regime shifts. We then illustrate the impact of these general arguments by numerically examining the dynamics of several model ecological systems under slowly changing conditions. Our results offer a cautionary note about the generality of forecasting sudden changes in ecosystems.
预测动态行为的重大转变——即体制转变，是生态学和其他领域的一个关键挑战。在这里，我们表明，将表现出体制转变的先导指标的生态系统类别是有限的，而且存在一系列生态模型，因此，也可能存在一类自然系统，它们将没有体制转变的预警。我们首先描述了非线性如何与环境变化相结合，导致模型描述将不会具有平滑的势能，得出的结论是，许多生态系统都是由没有平滑势能的系统描述的，因此不会表现出典型的体制转变先导指标。然后，我们通过数值研究几个模型生态系统在缓慢变化条件下的动态，说明了这些一般论点的影响。我们的结果对生态系统中突然变化预测的普遍性提出了一个警示。
