Stress and resilience in northern European marine ecosystems

In the field of resilience, there is a current debate between those that find evidence of hysterical regimes shifts (i.e., a sudden change of state, where the path of return is different from the path of departure) in every marine ecosystem they investigate and those who are skeptical about this ubiquity. Here, we used the same technique of the first group but taking a precautionary approach. We let the data tell us whether a folded stability landscape adequately described the development of the ecosystem or not. We applied this approach to four data-rich northern European ecosystems and found evidence in two of them, the Baltic and the North Sea, but not in the Icelandic Waters and the Barents Sea.