Publications

Nielja Knecht, Romi Amilia Lotcheris, Ingo Fetzer, Juan Rocha. 2025. Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events. EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4902

Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down (CSD) have been applied widely to r...

Sánchez-García, P.A., Galaz, V., Rocha, J.C. & Barbour, F. 2025. Climate change, nature degradation, and financial stability: a review of domino-effects between finance, climate, and the biosphere. Ecology & Society, vol. 30 (2). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16130-300236

The threat associated with climate change and nature degradation poses complex financial challenges. Our systematic literature review of 88 finance-related publications published between 2015 and early 2022 revealed a gap in research on nature-related financial risks and their connections to climate change, particularly regarding ocean-related risks beyond rising sea levels. Although methods are available to assess these risks...

Hannah Zoller, Juan Rocha, Ingo Fetzer, C. Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, Nitin Chaudhary, Steve Lade. 2025. A bottom-up spatial pattern of Earth system interactions. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-12239

The intricate interplay of the Earth system’s biophysical processes provides the basis for Earth resilience and human wellbeing. While this interplay has been systematically studied on a global scale, a better understanding of the sub-global interactions is crucial in order to fully assess the systemic environmental impact of human activities. Building on the quantitative framework provided by the Earth system impact metric ...

Nielja Knecht, Romi Lotcheris, Ingo Fetzer, Juan Rocha. 2025. Limitations of early warning signals: evaluating the performance of resilience loss detection methods to predict forest die-back events from remote sensing data. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18547

Terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are under increasing stress due to changing climate and weather regimes, as well as direct anthropogenic influences such as land use changes. The combination of stressors can erode an ecosystem’s ability to resist and recover from external shocks and pressures. Vegetation resilience loss is often assessed by applying temporal early warning signals (EWS) based on dynamical systems theory to rem...

Vajira Lasantha, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Juan Rocha, Ruud van der Ent, Markus Hrachowitz. 2025. Characterizing Anthropogenic Modification of Root Zone Storage Capacity. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18391

Vegetation plays a crucial role in regulating the water cycle through transpiration, which is influenced by the root zone storage capacity ( S R ). S R is dynamically influenced by climate, land use, and vegetation, with ecosystems adapting to environmental changes by modulating S R . Human interventions, such as deforestation, agriculture, and irrigation, significantly alter S R by changing vegetation cover and w...

André Pinto da Silva, Nielja Knecht, Romain Thomas, Romi Lotcheris, Beatrice Crona, Juan Rocha. 2025. Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts. EcoevoRxiv. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2X335

Financial investments will be affected by ecological regime shifts through the loss of natural resources underpinning dependencies of most economic sectors. We suggest one possible pathway to link industry and products to the likelihood of ecological regime shifts. The challenges and opportunities are discussed at each step, including datasets, methods and metrics. To this end, we identify recent large-scale, state-of-the-art ...

Chuixiang Yi, Max Rietkerk, John M Anderies, Deliang Chen, Vasilis Dakos, Paul D L Ritchie, Juan C Rocha, Manjana Milkoreit, Courtney Quinn. 2025. Principles for guiding future research on resilience and tipping points. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adb7f3

The world is currently experiencing a series of dramatic changes, from the consequences of global warming, flooding, forest fires and drought-induced forest mortality to the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts. These events have elevated the concepts of resilience and tipping points into widespread use across various disciplines. However, each discipline often interprets and defines these concepts differently, leading...

Paul Pearce-Kelly, Andrew H. Altieri, John F. Bruno, Christopher E. Cornwall, Melanie McField, Aarón Israel Muñiz-Castillo, Juan Rocha, Renee O. Setter, Charles Sheppard, Rosa Maria Roman-Cuesta, Chris Yesson. 2025. Considerations for determining warm-water coral reef tipping points. Earth System Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-275-2025

Warm-water coral reefs are facing unprecedented human-driven threats to their continued existence as biodiverse functional ecosystems upon which hundreds of millions of people rely. These impacts may drive coral ecosystems past critical thresholds, beyond which the system reorganises, often abruptly and potentially irreversibly; this is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022) define as a tipping point. ...

Vitor Hirata Sanches, Rubi Quiñones, Jonathan Vivas, Joseph H. A. Guillaume, Takuya Iwanaga, Jan Kwakkel, Allyson E. Quinlan, Juan Rocha, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Vasilis Dakos, Jonathan Donges, Steven J. Lade. 2025. Integrating Diversity and Agency into Social-Ecological Resilience Metrics. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2g3jp_v1

Resilience is an increasingly popular concept in research and practice, but quantitative resilience analyses are often disconnected from resilience theory. For example, previous studies argue that diversity, a key attribute for building resilience, and agency, essential for understanding local adaptation and transformation, are critical to understanding resilience. Despite significant progress in integrating them into qualitat...

Daniel Chrisendo, Venla Niva, Roman Hoffmann, Sina Masoumzadeh Sayyar, Juan Rocha, Vilma Sandström, Frederick Solt, Matti Kummu. 2024. Income inequality has increased for over two-thirds of the global population. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-5548291/v1

Income inequality is one of the most important measures to indicate economic health, social justice, and quality of life. Yet, especially at the subnational level, comprehensive global data on the distribution of incomes is widely missing. Such data is essential to assess patterns in inequality within countries and their development over time. We created seamless global subnational Gini coefficient and gross national income (G...