Critical Challenges and Impacts in Mass Extinction Research Workshop

  The Program of ‘Critical Challenges and Impacts in Mass Extinction Research Workshop’

May 2nd, 2024

Location: The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Virtual attendance (via Microsoft Teams): TBA

The workshop organizer: Ivan Sudakow (The Open University, UK)

Mass extinctions are like natural laboratories, offering insights into the effects of pushing ecosystems beyond their limits, with profound and lasting impacts on biodiversity. Yet, understanding these events is complicated by their diverse drivers and mechanisms. To make real progress, we need interdisciplinary collaboration in mass extinction research. Despite this, the anticipated impact of our research on the looming 6th mass extinction remains unclear. This workshop aims to unite scientists from various disciplines—natural, mathematical, and social sciences—to brainstorm ways to translate our findings into meaningful action.

The event is sponsored by the London Mathematical Society (LMS) and the Open Societal Challenges (OSC) program of the Open University.

To take part in the workshop, please register at https://forms.office.com/e/ex0euu99P6. 

Participation is free of charge, but the number of available places is limited. The workshop registration will be closed on Tuesday, April 30 at 11:59 pm BST. 

Morning session: Alan Turing Building 306 

Keynote speaker

12:15 - 13:00  Craig Ritchie, Centre for Biocultural Diversity, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Inhabiting the sixth extinction

This exploratory paper will engage with the ecological conditions of the Anthropocene and the proposed ‘sixth extinction’ to imagine a world extending beyond simply crisis and loss. Whilst it is irrefutable that life is becoming increasingly deadly for many of the planet’s lifeforms, it is not the case that all are diminishing. Some are thriving and taking advantage of the human-made opportunities now available to them. Not only is this offsetting some of the detrimental impacts of human activities in real-time, but over the long term, it holds the potential to yield even greater species diversity than currently exists. That there is little formal recognition or awareness of this within popular academic and public discourses, despite its grounding in biology, suggests both a difficulty in engaging with the ‘new world’ conditions of the Anthropocene and a refusal or inability to envision the possibility of other worlds to come.

13:00-14:00 - Lunch and coffee

Afternoon session: Gass Seminar Room (ground floor), Gass Building. 

Plenary speaker

14:00 -15:00 Valerie Livina, Data Science Department, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK

Tipping point analysis of real-world complex systems

In the recent years, tipping point analysis became popular in diverse applications, from ecology to structure health monitoring. These techniques help anticipate, detect and forecast critical transitions in dynamical systems. The methodology combines monitoring short- and long-term memory in time series with potential analysis that analyses and extrapolates the system states.

For anticipating tipping points, early warning signal (EWS) indicators utilise dynamically derived lag-1 autocorrelation (ACF, [Held & Kleinen 2004]), power-law scaling exponent of Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA, [Livina & Lenton 2007]), and the power-spectrum-based EWS indicator (PS, [Prettyman et al 2018]). A few applications in engineering systems [Livina et al 2014; Livina et al, 2020; Mesa et al, 2021; Billuroglu and Livina, 2022] have broadened the range of the tipping point analysis in real-world complex systems and provided a methodology for data-driven failure analysis and prevention.

We also demonstrate an application of potential forecasting [Livina et al, Physica A 2013] to the WISE water accounts of European river basins (European Environmental Agency, https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/datahub). We identify basins under stress and discuss various scenarios of water use and stochastic projections of hydrological dynamics in European regions.

15:00-16:00 - Discussion 'Impact resulting from research on mass extinctions'.