Estonian Marine Institute, University of Tartu, Tallinn, Estonia.
Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
PLoS One. 2018 Dec 27;13(12):e0209568. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0209568. eCollection 2018.
Climate change in recent decades has been identified as a significant threat to natural environments and human wellbeing. This is because some of the contemporary changes to climate are abrupt and result in persistent changes in the state of natural systems; so called regime shifts (RS). This study aimed to detect and analyse the timing and strength of RS in Estonian climate at the half-century scale (1966-2013). We demonstrate that the extensive winter warming of the Northern Hemisphere in the late 1980s was represented in atmospheric, terrestrial, freshwater and marine systems to an extent not observed before or after the event within the studied time series. In 1989, abiotic variables displayed statistically significant regime shifts in atmospheric, river and marine systems, but not in lake and bog systems. This was followed by regime shifts in the biotic time series of bogs and marine ecosystems in 1990. However, many biotic time series lacked regime shifts, or the shifts were uncoupled from large-scale atmospheric circulation. We suggest that the latter is possibly due to complex and temporally variable interactions between abiotic and biotic elements with ecosystem properties buffering biotic responses to climate change signals, as well as being affected by concurrent anthropogenic impacts on natural environments.
近几十年来，气候变化已被确定为自然环境和人类福祉的重大威胁。这是因为当代气候变化中的一些变化是突然的，导致自然系统状态的持续变化，即所谓的气候状态突变（RS）。本研究旨在检测和分析爱沙尼亚气候在半个世纪（1966-2013 年）尺度上的 RS 发生时间和强度。我们表明，20 世纪 80 年代末北半球冬季的广泛变暖在大气、陆地、淡水和海洋系统中表现出来，在研究时间序列内或之前或之后都没有观察到这种情况。1989 年，大气、河流和海洋系统中的非生物变量显示出统计学上显著的 RS，但湖泊和沼泽系统中没有。随后，1990 年沼泽和海洋生态系统的生物时间序列也发生了 RS。然而，许多生物时间序列缺乏 RS，或者 RS 与大尺度大气环流脱钩。我们认为，后者可能是由于生物和非生物要素之间复杂且随时间变化的相互作用，以及生态系统特性对气候变化信号的生物反应进行缓冲，同时还受到对自然环境的同期人为影响的影响。
