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We discuss tipping phenomena (critical transitions) in nonautonomous systems using an example of a bistable ecosystem model with environmental changes represented by time-varying parameters [Scheffer et al., Ecosystems, 11 (2008), pp.…
Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…
With the growing number of discovered exoplanets, the Gaia concept finds its second wind. The Gaia concept defines that the biosphere of an inhabited planet regulates a planetary climate through feedback loops such that the planet remains…
A function with finite asymptotic limits gives rise to a transition equation between a "past system" and a "future system". This question is analyzed in the case of nonautonomous coercive nonlinear scalar ordinary differential equations…
Inflationary models, especially those with plateau-type potentials, are consistent with the cosmological data, but inflation itself does not resolve the initial singularity. This singularity is resolved, for example, by the idea of the…
With rising global temperatures Earth's tipping elements are becoming increasingly more vulnerable to crossing their critical thresholds. The reaching of such tipping points does not only impact other tipping elements through their…
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
Recent work suggests that many short-period super-Earth and sub-Neptune planets may have significant spin axis tilts ("obliquities"). When planets are locked in high-obliquity states, the tidal dissipation rate may increase by several…
Tree-grass coexistence is a defining feature of savanna ecosystems, which play an important role in supporting biodiversity and human populations worldwide. While recent advances have clarified many of the underlying processes, how these…
The radii of some transiting extrasolar giant planets are larger than would be expected by the standard theory. We address this puzzle with the model of coupled radius-orbit tidal evolution developed by \citet{Ibgui_and_Burrows_2009}. The…
In a multiplanet system, tides acting on the inner planet can significantly affect the orbital evolution of the entire system. While tides usually damp eccentricities, a novel mechanism identified by Correia et al. (2012) tends to raise…
An in-depth analysis of nonautonomous bifurcations of saddle-node type for scalar differential equations $x'=-x^2+q(t)\,x+p(t)$, where $q\colon\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ and $p\colon\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ are bounded and uniformly…
We introduce the Webworld model, which links together the ecological modelling of food web structure with the evolutionary modelling of speciation and extinction events. The model describes dynamics of ecological communities on an…
We consider the local bifurcation and global dynamics of a predator-prey model with cooperative hunting and Allee effect. For the model with weak cooperation, we prove the existence of limit cycle, heteroclinic cycle at a threshold of…
Drylands are pattern-forming systems showing self-organized vegetation patchiness, multiplicity of stable states and fronts separating domains of alternative stable states. Pattern dynamics, induced by droughts or disturbances, can result…
We investigate violations of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in two classes of trap models by studying the influence of the perturbing field on the transition rates. We show that for perturbed rates depending upon the value of the…
Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental noise drives populations toward extinction. In contrast, we report a paradoxical phenomenon in which stochasticity reverses a deterministic tipping point, thereby preventing collapse. Using a…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
We discuss the nonlinear phenomena of irreversible tipping for non-autonomous systems where time-varying inputs correspond to a smooth "parameter shift" from one asymptotic value to another. We express tipping in terms of pullback…
Sudden and abrupt changes can occur in a nonlinear system within many fields of science when such a system crosses a tipping point and rapid changes of the system occur in response to slow changes in an external forcing. These can occur…