Early-warning signals of critical transitions in global ecoregions
Abstract
Terrestrial ecoregions represent coherent ecological units shaped by shared environmental conditions and biological communities. As ecosystems approach critical transitions, their resilience declines, showing slower recovery from perturbations and increasing temporal autocorrelation. Here, we analyze 22 years of global satellite vegetation data to detect early warning signals of structural ecological change across all terrestrial ecoregions. By combining spatial clustering, vegetation trend analysis, and resilience indicators, we identify ecoregions exhibiting both vegetation change and declining resilience. We find that approximately one-quarter of ecoregions, covering over one-third of Earth’s land surface, show consistent signals of emerging structural transitions. Many of these occur in regions with low direct human modification, suggesting a strong role for large-scale environmental drivers. The detected patterns reveal increasing internal fragmentation within ecoregions and highlight regions potentially approaching critical transitions. This framework provides a scalable approach for identifying ecosystems at risk and supports targeted monitoring and conservation planning.
Related
- Pseudo-bifurcations in stochastic non-normal systems and the limits of early-warning signals
- Projection, Memory, and the Validity of Scalar Early-Warning Signals: A Schur--Volterra Theory with an AMOC Application
- Early warning of road icing from antecedent meteorological conditions without consistent critical slowing down
- Unsupervised probing critical transitions in complex systems using generative diffusion models
- Systemic Tau and Hierarchical Ordinal Conjunctions: A Relational Theory of Critical Transitions
BibTeX
@article{hirsch2026earlywarning,
title = {{Early-warning signals of critical transitions in global ecoregions}},
author = {Eitan Hirsch and Ilan Koren},
journal = {iScience},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1016/j.isci.2026.117964},
url = {https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(26)03347-X},
note = {CC BY-NC 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Early-warning signals of critical transitions in global ecoregions
AU - Eitan Hirsch
AU - Ilan Koren
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
JO - iScience
DO - 10.1016/j.isci.2026.117964
UR - https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(26)03347-X
AB - Terrestrial ecoregions represent coherent ecological units shaped by shared environmental conditions and biological communities. As ecosystems approach critical transitions, their resilience declines, showing slower recovery from perturbations and increasing temporal autocorrelation. Here, we analyze 22 years of global satellite vegetation data to detect early warning signals of structural ecological change across all terrestrial ecoregions. By combining spatial clustering, vegetation trend analysis, and resilience indicators, we identify ecoregions exhibiting both vegetation change and declining resilience. We find that approximately one-quarter of ecoregions, covering over one-third of Earth’s land surface, show consistent signals of emerging structural transitions. Many of these occur in regions with low direct human modification, suggesting a strong role for large-scale environmental drivers. The detected patterns reveal increasing internal fragmentation within ecoregions and highlight regions potentially approaching critical transitions. This framework provides a scalable approach for identifying ecosystems at risk and supports targeted monitoring and conservation planning.
SN - 2589-0042
ER -