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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- CHAPTER 1. Introduction -- Part I THEORY OF CRITICAL TRANSITIONS -- CHAPTER 2. Alternative Stable States -- CHAPTER 3. Cycles and Chaos -- CHAPTER 4. Emergent Patterns in Complex Systems -- CHAPTER 5. Implications of Fluctuations, Heterogeneity, and Diversity -- CHAPTER 6. Conclusion: From Theoretical Concepts to Reality -- Part II CASE STUDIES -- CHAPTER 7. Lakes -- CHAPTER 8. Climate -- CHAPTER 9. Evolution -- CHAPTER 10. Oceans -- CHAPTER 11. Terrestrial Ecosystems -- CHAPTER 12. Humans -- CHAPTER 13. Conclusion: Critical Transitions in a Complex World -- Part III DEALING WITH CRITICAL TRANSITIONS -- CHAPTER 14. How to Know if Alternative Basins of Attraction Exist -- CHAPTER 15. How to Know if a Threshold Is Near -- CHAPTER 16. The Winding Road from Science to Policy -- CHAPTER 17. New Approaches to Managing Change -- CHAPTER 18. Prospects -- Appendix -- Glossary -- Notes -- Index

Ecology of Shallow Lakes brings together current understanding of the mechanisms that drive the diametrically opposite states of water clarity, shown by the cover paintings, found in many shallow lakes and ponds. It gives an outline of the knowledge gained from field observations, experimental work, and restoration studies, linked by a solid theoretical framework. The book focuses on shallow lakes, but the lucid treatment of plankton dynamics, resuspension, light climate and the role of vegetation is relevant to a much wider range of aquatic systems. The models that are used remain simple and most analyses are graphical rather than algebraic. The text will therefore appeal to students, scientists and policy makers in the field of ecology, fisheries, pollution studies and water management, and also to theoreticans who will benefit from the many real-world examples of topics such as predation and competition theory, bifurcation analysis and catastrophe theory. Perhaps most importantly, the book is a remarkable example of how large field experiments and simple models can catalyze our insight into complex ecosystems. Marten Scheffer wrote this book while at the Institute of Inland Water Management and Waste Treatment, RIZA, Lelystad, The Netherlands. He is currently at the Department of Water Quality Management and Aquatic Ecology of the Wageningen Agricultural University. Reviews`Much rarer are textbooks that so succinctly sum up the state-of-the-art knowledge about a subject that they become instant `bibles'. This book is one of these. It is probably one of the best biological textbooks I have read. Scheffer masterfully pulls all this information together under one cover and presents a coherent account, which will serve as a benchmark for the subject. The reader will not gain any great insight into the breeding biology of pike from this book, nor learn much about dragonflies or newts. They will, however, come to understand the essential nature of shallow lakes or, as the author puts it, `how shallow lakes work'. Overall, this book will be of great interest to practical and theoretical ecologists, students and managers in all fields of biology. All freshwater ecologists should certainly read it.' Simon Harrison in Journal of Ecology, 86 `The book by Scheffer can be seen as a milestone in the recognition of shallow lakes as a research topic in its own right. Scheffer uses three approaches concurrently to unravel the functioning of shallow lakes: 1) statistical ...

We characterized > 150 countries' resilience to COVID-19 as the nationwide decay rate of daily cases or deaths from peak levels. Resilience to COVID-19 varies by a factor of ~ 40 between countries for cases/capita and ~ 25 for deaths/capita. Trust within society is positively correlated with country-level resilience to COVID-19, as is the adaptive increase in stringency of government interventions when epidemic waves occur. By contrast, countries where governments maintain greater background stringency tend to have lower trust within society and tend to be less resilient. All countries where > 40% agree "most people can be trusted" achieve a near complete reduction of new cases and deaths, but so do several less-trusting societies. As the pandemic progressed, resilience tended to decline, as adaptive increases in stringency also declined. These results add to evidence that trust can improve resilience to epidemics and other unexpected disruptions, of which COVID-19 is unlikely to be the last.

The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as "determine" and "conclusion," rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as "feel" and "believe" declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as "I"/"we" and "he"/"they." Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

The latest global assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns that biodiversity loss can make ecosystems more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and other stressors. Economic growth has been identified as one of the key drivers of these losses, however, the impact pathway may depend on how society organizes economic activity and distributes its benefits. Here we use a global country-level dataset to show how the strength of national institutions and economic inequality in society can mediate the loss of biodiversity worldwide. We find that the interplay of institutions and inequality fully mediates the impact of economic growth on plant biodiversity, but only partially mediates the impact on animal biodiversity. Furthermore, in sustaining biodiversity, the effectiveness of institutions depends on inequality in society, such that biodiversity loss is ameliorated when institutions are strong and inequality low, but in regions with high inequality, institutions tend to lose their efficacy. The analysis also uncovers nonlinearities in inequality, institutions, and biodiversity interactions, which are important to investigate further and consider for policy purposes.