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Symposium

Session: : Ecosystem Transitions Across Ecosystems; From Basic to Applied

SYMP 19-1 - Synthesizing evidence of ecosystem transitions in grassland ecosystems

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
1:30 PM – 1:50 PM PDT
Location: 258
Experimental evidence suggests that perturbations associated with global change can result in major shifts in plant community composition. However, considerable debate remains on whether these ecosystem transitions are readily reversible after a perturbation ends. While some studies in terrestrial ecosystems find that these shifts in ecosystems are difficult to reverse and might be indicative of systems with alternative attractors, other studies find evidence for communities in alternative trajectories that could eventually reach a common stable point. It is possible that these discrepancies in experimental evidence are due to other transient dynamics, like increased climate variability or climate extremes, which could promote or prevent state shifts within ecosystems. To test this, we conducted a systematic review of the literature where we searched for field experiments in terrestrial ecosystems to test for the existence of alternative attractors in these systems.

Using the Web of Science database, our search consisted of 47 search terms informed by previous efforts to synthesize evidence on similar questions. We found 3,213 unique research articles that met our initial search criteria. We reviewed all these titles and abstracts and developed a text mining algorithm to score the relevance of each paper for our questions. From this, we narrowed our efforts to fully examining evidence from 830 papers. So far, we find that there is a geographic bias for experiments located in North America, Europe, and China. We also find that publication of papers on ecosystem transitions has steadily increased in the last 20 years and has more than doubled since 2010. We are currently in the process of analyzing whether author reported evidence for or against their system experiencing difficult to reverse transitions is correlated with increased variability or climate extremes in the location and timeframe of the experiment. Our results will help us further develop and inform theory of systems with alternative attractors and will allow us to make and test predictions on the magnitude and frequency of perturbations and climate variability needed to promote or prevent compositional shifts in ecosystems.