early warning signals for critical transitions a generalized modeling approach预警信号转换一个通用建模方法至关重要.pdfVIP

Early Warning Signals for Critical Transitions: A Generalized Modeling Approach Steven J. Lade*, Thilo Gross Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany Abstract Critical transitions are sudden, often irreversible, changes that can occur in a large variety of complex systems; signals that warn of critical transitions are therefore highly desirable. We propose a new method for early warning signals that integrates multiple sources of information and data about the system through the framework of a generalized model. We demonstrate our proposed approach through several examples, including a previously published fisheries model. We regard our method as complementary to existing early warning signals, taking an approach of intermediate complexity between model-free approaches and fully parameterized simulations. One potential advantage of our approach is that, under appropriate conditions, it may reduce the amount of time series data required for a robust early warning signal. Citation: Lade SJ, Gross T (2012) Early Warning Signals for Critical Transitions: A Generalized Modeling Approach. PLoS Comput Biol 8(2): e1002360. doi:10.1371/ journal.pcbi.1002360 Editor: Mercedes Pascual, University of Michigan and Howard Hughes Med. Inst., United States of America Received July 15, 2011; Accepted December 9, 2011; Published February 2, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Lade, Gross. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was supported by the Max Planck Society. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have