Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-93843-z
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Funding
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) [01LC1826]
- BMBF [03F0863, 01LC1825]
- City of Hamburg
- PhD Scholarship Programme of the German Federal Environmental Foundation (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt, Osnabrueck) [2017/480]
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Understanding tipping point dynamics in harvested ecosystems is crucial for sustainable resource management. Western Baltic cod has surpassed a tipping point due to unsustainable exploitation levels and climate change, leading to irreversible low productivity. Ignoring non-linear resource dynamics has resulted in the demise of an economically and culturally important social-ecological system.
Understanding tipping point dynamics in harvested ecosystems is of crucial importance for sustainable resource management because ignoring their existence imperils social-ecological systems that depend on them. Fisheries collapses provide the best known examples for realizing tipping points with catastrophic ecological, economic and social consequences. However, present-day fisheries management systems still largely ignore the potential of their resources to exhibit such abrupt changes towards irreversible low productive states. Using a combination of statistical changepoint analysis and stochastic cusp modelling, here we show that Western Baltic cod is beyond such a tipping point caused by unsustainable exploitation levels that failed to account for changing environmental conditions. Furthermore, climate change stabilizes a novel and likely irreversible low productivity state of this fish stock that is not adapted to a fast warming environment. We hence argue that ignorance of non-linear resource dynamics has caused the demise of an economically and culturally important social-ecological system which calls for better adaptation of fisheries systems to climate change.
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