Nonequilibrium dynamics in conservation biology: Scales, attractors and critical points  

Ricard Solé

Preserving and restoring biodiversity is becoming a great challenge as we face a world where planetary boundaries will likely be crossed over the following decades. Such challenge needs to consider multiple scales of complexity, both in space and time. A common threat in most cases is the presence of nonlinear phenomena generating shifts among alternative states. These breaking points imply a new perception of risk and different management strategies. A broad range of phenomena affect the preservation of healthy communities and constrain the ways to deal with conservation, from local features associated with habitat loss or facilitation to mesoscale or global network-level ecological complexity and the role played by extreme events. How are these scales connected? How can the emergent properties associated with ecosystem dynamics be exploited? Here a synthesis of ideas is presented, with a complex systems view of the different scales involved, the emergent phenomena separating them, and the universal properties that allow defining simple models on each scale.

A summary of the diverse interacting nonlinearities that are involved in this paper is depicted in this drawing by the author. Bifurcations, space and time are connected through the presence of transient dynamics, which affects ecosystem responses and resilience across space and time. Transients, as those related to ghosts close to saddle-node bifurcations, modify our expectations as derived from deterministic models and the fixed-point view of stability. The way time windows are affected by fluctuations is both a challenge (for prediction) and an opportunity (for management).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320724001630

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