Guim Aguadé-Gorgorió

Project summary

Global changes are threatening ecosystem functioning and the vital services they provide to human societies, imposing an urgent need to understand how they are coping with and reacting to global change. The complexity of ecosystems, however, makes predicting their fragility a difficult endeavor. This project focuses on a critical scenario in ecosystem degradation: large and abrupt transitions following gradual environmental changes, observed across ecosystems worldwide. Despite important progresses, key knowledge gaps remain in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these transitions, making them notoriously difficult to predict. Current research relates them to the presence of Multiple Stable States (MSS), with small perturbations able to induce large shifts from healthy, species-rich communities towards deteriorated ecosystem states. Understanding of MSS, however, is based on simple models that largely ignore the role of species diversity and interaction complexity, highlighting an extremely relevant gap in our capacity to uncover potential abrupt transitions in species-rich ecosystems. This project aims at addressing this gap by investigating the emergence of MSS in complex model ecosystems.

Project publications

G. Aguadé‐Gorgorió, J. Arnoldi, M. Barbier, S. Kéfi.
A taxonomy of multiple stable states in complex ecological communities..
Ecology Letters. 27(4): e14413

G. Aguadé-Gorgorió, S. Kéfi.
Alternative cliques of coexisting species in complex ecosystems..
Journal of Physics: Complexity. 5: 025022