PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Vasilis Dakos
AU  - Blake Matthews
AU  - Andrew Hendry
AU  - Jonathan Levine
AU  - Nicolas Loeuille
AU  - Jon Norberg
AU  - Patrik Nosil
AU  - Marten Scheffer
AU  - Luc De Meester
TI  - Ecosystem tipping points in an evolving world
AID  - 10.1101/447227
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 447227
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/24/447227.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/24/447227.full
AB  - There is growing concern over tipping points arising in ecosystems due to the crossing of environmental thresholds. Tipping points lead to strong and possibly irreversible shifts between alternative ecosystem states incurring high societal costs. Traits are central to the feedbacks that maintain alternative ecosystem states, as they govern the responses of populations to environmental change that could stabilize or destabilize ecosystem states. However, we know little about how evolutionary changes in trait distributions over time affect the occurrence of tipping points, and even less about how big scale ecological shifts reciprocally interact with trait dynamics. We argue that interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes should be taken into account for understanding the balance of feedbacks governing tipping points in nature.