Critical transition

Recovery from such shifts may require more than a simple return to the conditions at which a transition occurred, a phenomenon called hysteresis.

[1][2][3][4] In addition to natural systems, critical transitions are also studied in psychology,[5] medicine,[6][7] economics,[8][9] sociology,[10] military,[11] and several other disciplines.

This, in turn, may lead to an increase in (spatial or temporal) autocorrelation and variance, while variance spectra tend to lower frequencies,[15][18][19] and the 'direction of critical slowing down' in a system's state space may be indicative of a system's future state when delayed negative feedbacks leading to oscillatory or other complex dynamics are weak.

[12] Researchers have explored early-warning signals in lakes, climate dynamics, the Amazon rainforest,[22] forests worldwide,[13] food webs, dry-land transitions and epilepsy attacks.

[24] The idea has been applied widely, to studies of ecological resilience[25] (such as eutrophication of a lake [26]) and to larger systems such as the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

Graphical representation of alternative stable states and the direction of critical slowing down prior to a critical transition (taken from Lever et al. 2020). [ 12 ] Top panels (a) indicate stability landscapes at different conditions. Middle panels (b) indicate the rates of change akin to the slope of the stability landscapes, and bottom panels (c) indicate a recovery from a perturbation towards the system's future state (c.I) and in another direction (c.II).
Temporal variations of forest resilience and its key drivers [ 13 ]
Emerging signals of declining forest resilience under climate change [ 13 ]