Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 14, Issue 1, Pages 29-35Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01553.x
Keywords
Deviations from power laws; indicators of transitions; local interactions; patch size distribution; power law; power law with an exponential cutoff; robust criticality; scaling; spatial patterns; truncated power law
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Funding
- Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research/Earth and Life Sciences (NWO-ALW)
- Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
- Alexander von Humboldt foundation
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P>Robust critical systems are characterized by power laws which occur over a broad range of conditions. Their robust behaviour has been explained by local interactions. While such systems could be widespread in nature, their properties are not well understood. Here, we study three robust critical ecosystem models and a null model that lacks spatial interactions. In all these models, individuals aggregate in patches whose size distributions follow power laws which melt down under increasing external stress. We propose that this power-law decay associated with the connectivity of the system can be used to evaluate the level of stress exerted on the ecosystem. We identify several indicators along the transition to extinction. These indicators give us a relative measure of the distance to extinction, and have therefore potential application to conservation biology, especially for ecosystems with self-organization and critical transitions.
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