After the coming EcoSummit conference in Montpellier France (29 August – 1 September 2016) there will be a day of workshop on indicators of degradation in ecosystems organised by Sonia Kéfi and Pierre Couteron. This workshop is connected to the conference session on Indicators of Tipping Points.

The idea of the workshop is to get an overview about the underlying theory and the available tools. This day is open to everyone but especially targets students, young reserachers and anyone who would like to quantify indicators of degradation on his/her own data.

To stimulate discussions, participants can apply for a flash talk to present their research topic/data set (please apply by Friday 26 August).

Participation is free, but a subscription is requested (please send an email to Sonia Kéfi with the subject : “EWS day”).

Invited speakers :

Vishwesha Guttal, Indian Institute of Science, Bengalore, India

“Theory of tipping points and their indicators”

Vasilis Dakos, ETH, Zürich

“Temporal early warning signals”

Ehud Meron, Ben Gurion University, Israel

“Periodic vegetation patterns and dryland degradation”

Pierre Couteron, AMAP, Montpellier

“Quantification of spatial indicators on aerial images”

Location:

The workshop will take place at Amphithéatre Charles Flahaut, Institut de Botanique, 163 rue Auguste Broussonnet, 34090 Montpellier.

The nearest tram stops are Albert 1ier – Saint Charles (on tram line 1) or Albert 1ier – Cathédrale (on tram line 4).

Few weeks ago our paper on spatial indicators for critical transitions was published in PloS One. It is a follow up paper from our previous work on methods for timeseries. The methods of the paper are now summarized in the spatial indicators section of the EWS toolbox website. The actual R code soon will be part of the update R earlywarnings package.

Two interesting papers on empirically demonstrating the detection of critical transitions using the generic early warnings have been recently published in high profile journals. Dai et al showed experimentally that a disturbance in connected yeast populations affects longer spatial scales close to a critical transition. The authors introduced this effect as the analogue of ‘recovery time‘ in space: namely ‘recovery length’ to show that it increases prior to a critical transition. Streeter and Dugmore used transects to substitute time for space and measured early warnings for land surface transitions. They found signatures of variance and autocorrelation in tephra deposits along transects that cut across 6 types of landscape thresholds. This is the first study that early warning have been used for critical transitions across space in field observations for such types of transitions. Also in this study the authors have used our recently developed earlywarnings package for R. These two studies are brilliant examples of applying early warning research in creative ways performing experiments in the lab, or looking for experiments conducted by nature.

After working hard, we are happy to announce that our earlywarning package is ready to use directly from R! No need to download and install locally, as from R you can find it and install it using your selected CRAN repository. Also, we keep a live update of the toolbox in github, as we have created an organization earlywarningstoolbox that aims to host the further development of the project.