BRIEF: Vulnerability of freshwater ecosystems ...

Vulnerability of freshwater ecosystems to tipping points

January 2019

Freshwater ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to major changes in the structure of biological communities following small increases in stressors (tipping points).

Protecting against tipping points is a goal of environmental policy that seeks to limit environmental change to within acceptable bounds.

Identifying which particular characteristics of ecosystems underpin vulnerability will facilitate more directed management and better policy to protect against tipping points. We investigated the attributes of freshwater ecosystems that increase their vulnerability to tipping points, especially situations where undesirable ecosystem changes become reinforced by feedbacks that make them particularly hard to reverse (known as hysteresis).