One of the greatest challenges surrounding regime shifts is identifying them before they happen. In recent years there has been a variety of methods proposed for detecting early warning signals for regime shifts. Within this specialized field Craig Allen and colleagues have focused on patterns of discontinuity. In a recent paper Spanbauer et al, co-authored by Craig and several other RA members, they demonstrate how discontinuities over time in the body size of diatoms signaled a regime shift 150 years before it happened.

A regime shift implies crossing a threshold and changing how the system is structured and how it functions as well as how it maintains the new regime through system feedbacks. A well studied, climate-driven regime shift in Foy Lake in the northern Rocky Mountains made it possible for the authors to examine fossil diatoms spanning thousands of years to compare the size aggregations of diatoms with known stable periods in the history of the lake.

The authors found that size aggregations changed with the regime shift, suggesting that discontinuity analysis may provide a complementary method of detecting regime shifts that would potentially allow sufficient time to intervene and manage for resilience.

Paper link: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1833/20160249

Citation:
Body size distributions signal a regime shift in a lake ecosystem
Trisha L. Spanbauer, Craig R. Allen, David G. Angeler, Tarsha Eason, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Kirsty L. Nash, Jeffery R. Stone, Craig A. Stow, Shana M. Sundstrom
Proc. R. Soc. B 2016 283 20160249; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0249. Published 22 June 2016

Related research:
Spanbauer TL, Allen CR, Angeler DG, Eason T, Fritz SC, et al. (2014) Prolonged Instability Prior to a Regime Shift. PLoS ONE 9(10): e108936. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0108936

The collection of short articles includes several contributions from the Resilience Alliance network including perspectives on: Panarchy, Ecological Resilience, and Assessing and Managing Change in Complex Systems.

The short articles span concepts, approaches, and case studies across a range of sectors, providing a valuable resource to anyone interested in the broad spectrum of ways in which resilience is being conceptualized and applied, particularly in the area of risk governance.

Resource Guide on Resilience

The first of the two webinars asked How cities can help us achieve a +1.5C world? followed by the second webinar that focused on UN Global Goal #11: The Business Case for Sustainable Cities - Making Urban Centers Inclusive, Safe and Resilient.

In the first webinar expert panelists were drawn from a diverse range of sectors, including the Mayor's Office, ICLEI and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, to provide a different perspective on how cities can help us move towards a low carbon future. (More information here.)

The second webinar explores themes of resilience and sustainability in cities on every continent from a variety of perspectives provided by an expert panel that includes:
• Gary Sharkey - Programme Director, Global Cities Business Alliance
• Thomas Elmqvist - Stockholm Resilience Centre
• Andrew Waddelove - Arcadis / World Business Council for Sustainable Development
• Janet Turner QC - Minerva Smart Cities

More information on the second webinar can be found here.

Resilience Connections Network
Collaboration across boundaries is critical to developing systems resilience. The Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business is working with the Resilience Connections Network to help develop a strong, global network of resilience practitioners - planners, business, policy, science etc. You can join the network and add your professional profile at http://www.resilienceconnections.org/

Despite its quantitative roots, resilience has proven to be especially challenging to measure. The lack of a clear and consistent approach to measuring resilience may be contributing to the slower uptake and application of the concept by ecological managers. Tackling this issue head on and offering an update on progress made over the past decade, a special feature on Quantifying Resilience edited by Craig Allen and David Angeler has now been published in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Applied Ecology (Vol. 53, Issue3). The complete collection of special feature papers covers a range of approaches and case studies that explicitly address ways of quantifying resilience.

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Blog post by David Angeler "Resilience: buzzword or quantifiable theory with management application?" https://jappliedecologyblog.wordpress.com/tag/quantifying-resilience/

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See also the paper from Seidl et al: http://www.journalofappliedecology.org/view/0/quantifyingresilience.html

Recently published in Global Environmental Change, "Synthesizing theories of natural resource management and governance" by Michael Cox and colleagues, is an important output of a multi-year collaborative research project initiated by a group of RAYS researchers back in 2011. The paper aims to integrate different disciplines to explore human-environment interactions and uses a publicly available online database that the researchers developed to connect theoretical statements of coupled social-ecological systems to outcomes.

The online SESMAD database provides a broad collection of case studies carefully coded by trained researchers to facilitate their analysis and synthesis.

SESMAD database: https://sesmad.dartmouth.edu/

Excerpt from the SESMAD homepage:
"Welcome to the website for the social-ecological meta-analysis database (SESMAD) project! The goal of this project is to enable highly comparable case analyses of a diversity of social-ecological systems. The SESMAD project is unique in several respects. First and foremost, it is a collaboration that began with fourteen young scientists from diverse backgrounds, each trained to consistently code data into a common database. The SESMAD project began during a conference held by the Resilience Alliance in the spring of 2010 (sic). During this conference, a group known as the Resilience Alliance Young Scholars (RAYS) met and formed teams oriented around particular projects. SESMAD was one of those projects. Project members became part of the project either through their affiliation with RAYS or with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, a well-recognized leading center in the synthetic institutional study of small-scale common-pool resource management."

Full citation:

Cox, Michael, S.Villamayor-Tomas, G. Epstein, L. Evans, N.C. Ban, F. Fleischman, M. Nenadovic, G. Garcia-Lopez. Synthesizing theories of natural resource management and governance. Global Environmental Change 39:45-56.