Ecosystems respond nonlinearly to environmental stressors which can lead to drastic and irreversible change. This Innovative Working Group (IWG) met to identify cross-disciplinary approaches for detecting trends of ecosystem response amidst natural variability via complementary and quasi-orthogonal indicators.
The ability to predict, identify and manage ecosystems at the brink of unexpected thresholds clear of historical and current experience is critical for environmental management. The inelasticity of societal responses to abrupt changes in ecosystems and associated dramatic reductions in ecosystem services highlights the urgency regarding thresholds because of the escalating pace of changing drivers and increasing vulnerabilities of ecosystem services. A spectrum of indicators is currently being used to track these responses and identify tipping points for vulnerable ecosystems, especially in regards to climate change. However, complexities and insufficient deterministic understanding of ecosystem functions suggest that not one indicator may describe ecosystem resilience, but that integrated or cascading indicators may provide better predictive measures for ecosystem change triggers. This IWG examined approaches for detecting trends of ecosystem response amidst natural variability across different disciplines. We convened a cross-disciplinary group of researchers to explore a collaborative process of model development including a wide spectrum of metrics. The interdisciplinary nature of the problem suggested a unique opportunity to leverage efforts across disciplines and apply it to study risks in coupled ecosystem-human interactions. IWG Participants represented ecology, hydrology, socioeconomics, sociology, statistics, and remote sensing, with foci’s integrating across different spatial and temporal scales. Immediate results of the IWG include proposing two sessions at the 2011 American Geophysical Union meeting, developing a synthesis paper of approaches for interdisciplinary indicator assessment, and pursue two grant opportunities.