Ecological Resilience — Fold Bifurcation

Many ecosystems exhibit alternative stable states connected by catastrophic fold (saddle-node) bifurcations. A lake can flip from clear to turbid water with little warning. The "ball in a landscape" intuition of Holling's resilience shows how a slowly changing stressor can cause sudden, hard-to-reverse regime shifts — a major concern in climate and ecology.

p = 0.80
x = 0.30
σ = 0.05
× 1.0