Achievement

Regime shifts are generally defined as the point of ‘abrupt’ change in the state of a system. However, the time it takes for a complex environmental system to move from one stable state to an alternative stable state can take much longer than has previously been shown through statistical analysis of single variable systems. Analysis of a long-term high-resolution paleoecological dataset with multivariate statistical analysis shows that the transition between alternative states of an ecosystem can take more than 2000 years. Therefore, acknowledging and identifying long-term transitory behavior in ecosystems is an important aspect of regime shift prediction. This work is part of the dissertation of Trisha Spanbauer. She is a married student and may not have been able to attend graduate school without the IGERT assistantship, nor would she have been exposed to resilience and regime shift literature, or developed the collaborations that are now at the core of her dissertation.