Science Daily  March 10, 2020 Regime shifts can abruptly affect hydrological, climatic and terrestrial systems, leading to degraded ecosystems and impoverished societies. Researchers in the UK analysed empirical data from terrestrial, marine and freshwater environments and show positive sub-linear empirical relationships between the size and shift duration of systems. Each additional unit area of an ecosystem provides an increasingly smaller unit of time taken for that system to collapse, meaning that large systems tend to shift more slowly than small systems but disproportionately faster. They substantiated these findings with five computational models that reveal the importance of system structure in […]