Tipping
points are critical thresholds for large, abrupt and (quasi-) irreversible
changes happening in the biosphere. Generally referred to as regime shifts, these
changes can totally remake an ecosystem’s structure and function. The resulting
new state, stabilized by feedback mechanisms, is persistent in time, and
impossible (or very difficult) to reverse due to hysteresis. Regime shifts
usually cause strong ecological, social, and economic impacts and hence need to
be accounted for in sustainable natural resource management.
Marine
ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to such shifts. The development of
ecosystem-based management approaches has created a cornerstone for integrating
regimes shifts in management processes and decisions. The first step to
successful integration requires the development of suitable indicators to
understand, detect, and prevent unwanted future shifts of a system to a
non-desired state or from a non-desired to a desired-state. Thus, defining
tipping points and identifying their associated drivers is of primary
importance.
Drivers
causing tipping points may be natural or caused by humans, act at multiple
temporal and spatial scales, and have lagged effects on social-ecological
systems, acting directly and immediately (proximate) or causing a chain reaction
(distal). Differences in causation (proximate vs distal) and interactions
between drivers impacting different system components as well as lagged and
cross-scale effects are a real challenge for the understanding of tipping
points. The complexity of social-ecological systems requires collaboration,
particularly when attempting to define tipping points based on empirical data
and account for them in management.
This session
will explore links and interactions between tipping points connected to shifts
in marine ecosystems. It will examine implications of tipping points for ecosystem-based
management and society. Presentations will therefore come from a variety of
research areas (for example historical ecology, sociology, archaeology, economics,
biology, politics) to allow cross-disciplinary discussion and understanding of
tipping point mechanisms, as well as to support the development of more
comprehensive management strategies.
Contributions
are invited on, for example:
- definition of tipping points and their drivers, based on empirical data
- theoretical studies and conceptual models linking different drivers and tipping points
- evidence for linked tipping points in marine social-ecological systems
- tipping points and drivers comparison, differences and relationships (lagged effects, cross scale studies, etc.)
- recent advances in marine ecosystem-based management accounting for tipping points
- comparisons of different strategies (mitigation, adaptation, restoration) for managing tipping points
- frameworks allowing to take into account tipping points in marine management decisions
- methods related to tipping point detection (early warning signals)