Fig. 5: Averting crises in systems on unsustainable trajectories may require holding off of interventions until a window of opportunity emerges.
From: Long-term transients help explain regime shifts in consumer-renewable resource systems
In systems experiencing rapid population growth under relatively high resource availability, timely interventions may not be successful, as it may not be possible to move the system into the sustainable equilibrium’s basin of attraction in this stage. Note that this basin of attraction (green region) is drawn for the “no intervention” simulation; in the early immigration scenario, lower resource availability means that the system is no longer within the basin of attraction at the same population sizes. Parameter values as in Fig. 4, with initial conditions: P(t = 0) = 100 individuals, R(t = 0) = 50,000 resource units.
