Identify key patterns of biodiversity dynamics

Identify key patterns of biodiversity dynamics (reference states, turn-over and tipping points) and relate them to environmental and anthropogenic drivers

Changes in the structure and stability of ecosystems due to anthropogenic forcing, such as climate warming or eutrophication, have become a major concern for society as they can negatively affect ecosystem services and resilience. The resilience of a system is defined as its capacity to recover the structures and functions of its previous state after a disturbance. Consequently, it buffers the natural variations of environmental conditions to keep the whole ecosystem in a stable and generally desired state. Lakes can exhibit different responses to anthropogenic forcings such as gradual linear changes, progressive but non-linear changes and/or sudden non-linear transitions leading the ecosystem to shift abruptly from a state to another, after crossing a threshold called a tipping point. Such abrupt non-linear changes considered as regime shifts can also be named as critical transitions when hysteresis, due to internal feedback loops, makes the recovery to the initial state hardly reversible. We conduct some work to better assess changes observed in our model ecosystems to better lie key patterns and significant changes of biodiversity dynamics with environmental factors.

Modification date : 26 April 2023 | Publication date : 24 September 2020 | Redactor : DB/SJ