The effect of climate change on the resilience of ecosystems with adaptive spatial pattern formation

In a rapidly changing world, quantifying ecosystem resilience is an important challenge. Historically, resilience has been defined via models that do not take spatial effects into account. These systems can only adapt via uniform adjustments. In reality, however, the response is not necessarily uniform, and can lead to the formation of (self‐organised) spatial patterns – typically localised vegetation patches. Classical measures of resilience cannot capture the emerging dynamics in spatially self‐organised systems, including transitions between patterned states that have limited impact on ecosystem structure and productivity. We present a framework of interlinked phase portraits that appropriately quantifies the resilience of patterned states, which depends on the number of patches, the distances between them and environmental conditions. We show how classical resilience concepts fail to distinguish between small and large pattern transitions, and find that the variance in interpatch distances provides a suitable indicator for the type of imminent transition. Subsequently, we describe the dependency of ecosystem degradation based on the rate of climatic change: slow change leads to sporadic, large transitions, whereas fast change causes a rapid sequence of smaller transitions. Finally, we discuss how pre‐emptive removal of patches can minimise productivity losses during pattern transitions, constituting a viable conservation strategy.     

Beyond Turing: The response of patterned ecosystems to environmental change

Spatially periodic patterns can be observed in a variety of ecosystems. Model studies revealed that patterned ecosystems may respond in a nonlinear way to environmental change, meaning that gradual changes result in rapid degradation. We analyze this response through stability analysis of patterned states of an arid ecosystem model. This analysis goes one step further than the frequently applied Turing analysis, which only considers stability of uniform states. We found that patterned arid ecosystems systematically respond in two ways to changes in rainfall: (1) by changing vegetation patch biomass or (2) by adapting pattern wavelength. Minor adaptations of pattern wavelength are constrained to conditions of slow change within a high rainfall regime, and high levels of stochastic variation in biomass (noise). Major changes in pattern wavelength occur under conditions of either low rainfall, rapid change or low levels of noise. Such conditions facilitate strong interactions between vegetation patches, which can trigger a sudden loss of half the patches or a transition to a degraded bare state. These results highlight that ecosystem responses may critically depend on rates, rather than magnitudes, of environmental change. Our study shows how models can increase our understanding of these dynamics, provided that analyses go beyond the conventional Turing analysis.     

Perspectives for ecosystem management based on ecosystem resilience and ecological thresholds against multiple and stochastic disturbances

Ecosystem resilience is the inherent ability to absorb various disturbances and reorganize while undergoing state changes to maintain critical functions. When ecosystem resilience is sufficiently degraded by disturbances, ecosystem is exposed at high risk of shifting from a desirable state to an undesirable state. Ecological thresholds represent the points where even small changes in environmental conditions associated with disturbances lead to switch between ecosystem states. There is a growing body of empirical evidence for such state transitions caused by anthropogenic disturbances in a variety of ecosystems. However, fewer studies addressed the interaction of anthropogenic and natural disturbances that often force an ecosystem to cross a threshold which an anthropogenic disturbance or a natural disturbance alone would not have achieved. This fact highlights how little is known about ecosystem dynamics under uncertainties around multiple and stochastic disturbances. Here, we present two perspectives for providing a predictive scientific basis to the management and conservation of ecosystems against multiple and stochastic disturbances. The first is management of predictable anthropogenic disturbances to maintain a sufficient level of biodiversity for ensuring ecosystem resilience (i.e., resilience-based management). Several biological diversity elements appear to confer ecosystem resilience, such as functional redundancy, response diversity, a dominant species, a foundation species, or a keystone species. The greatest research challenge is to identify key elements of biodiversity conferring ecosystem resilience for each context and to examine how we can manage and conserve them. The second is the identification of ecological thresholds along existing or experimental disturbance gradients. This will facilitate the development of indicators of proximity to thresholds as well as the understanding of threshold mechanisms. The implementation of forewarning indicators will be critical particularly when resilience-based management fails. The ability to detect an ecological threshold along disturbance gradients should therefore be essential to establish a backstop for preventing the threshold from being crossed. These perspectives can take us beyond simply invoking the precautionary principle of conserving biodiversity to a predictive science that informs practical solutions to cope with uncertainties and ecological surprises in a changing world.     

Implications of reef ecosystem change for the stability and maintenance of coral reef islands

Coral reef islands are among the most vulnerable environments on Earth to climate change because they are low lying and largely constructed from unconsolidated sediments that can be readily reworked by waves and currents. These sediments derive entirely from surrounding coral reef and reef flat environments and are thus highly sensitive to ecological transitions that may modify reef community composition and productivity. How such modifications – driven by anthropogenic disturbances and on‐going and projected climatic and environmental change – will impact reef island sediment supply and geomorphic stability remains a critical but poorly resolved question. Here, we review the unique ecological–geomorphological linkages that underpin this question and, using different scenarios of environmental change for which reef sediment production responses can be projected, explore the likely resilience of different island types. In general, sand‐dominated islands are likely to be less resilient than those dominated by rubble grade material. However, because different islands typically have different dominant sediment constituents (usually either coral, benthic foraminifera or Halimeda) and because these respond differently to individual ecological disturbances, island resilience is likely to be highly variable. Islands composed of coral sands are likely to undergo major morphological change under most near‐future ecological change scenarios, while those dominated by Halimeda may be more resilient. Islands composed predominantly of benthic foraminifera (a common state through the Pacific region) are likely to exhibit varying degrees of resilience depending upon the precise combination of ecological disturbances faced. The study demonstrates the critical need for further research bridging the ecological–geomorphological divide to understand: (1) sediment production responses to different ecological and environmental change scenarios; and (2) dependant landform vulnerability.     

Resilience to Stress and Disturbance,and Resistance to Bromus tectorum L. Invasion in Cold Desert Shrublands of Western North America

Alien grass invasions in arid and semi-arid ecosystems are resulting in grass–fire cycles and ecosystem-level transformations that severely diminish ecosystem services. Our capacity to address the rapid and complex changes occurring in these ecosystems can be enhanced by developing an understanding of the environmental factors and ecosystem attributes that determine resilience of native ecosystems to stress and disturbance, and resistance to invasion. Cold desert shrublands occur over strong environmental gradients and exhibit significant differences in resilience and resistance. They provide an excellent opportunity to increase our understanding of these concepts. Herein, we examine a series of linked questions about (a) ecosystem attributes that determine resilience and resistance along environmental gradients, (b) effects of disturbances like livestock grazing and altered fire regimes and of stressors like rapid climate change, rising CO₂, and N deposition on resilience and resistance, and (c) interacting effects of resilience and resistance on ecosystems with different environmental conditions. We conclude by providing strategies for the use of resilience and resistance concepts in a management context. At ecological site scales, state and transition models are used to illustrate how differences in resilience and resistance influence potential alternative vegetation states, transitions among states, and thresholds. At landscape scales management strategies based on resilience and resistance—protection, prevention, restoration, and monitoring and adaptive management—are used to determine priority management areas and appropriate actions.     

Evolutionary regime shifts in simulated ecosystems

Catastrophic regime shifts in ecosystems occur when the system is tipped into a new attractor state under some external forcing. Here we consider whether evolutionary adaptations within ecosystems can trigger similar transitions. We use an individual‐based, evolutionary model of interconnected ecosystems to analyze nonlinear changes in global state resulting from local adaptations. Transitions between periods of stability occur when new traits arise that allow exploitation of under‐utilized resources. Subsequent rapid growth of the population carrying the new trait causes abrupt environmental change that drives incumbent species extinct. We call these transitions ‘evolutionary regime shifts’. These internally generated perturbations can result in ecosystem collapse, followed by recovery to an alternate stable state, or occasionally system‐wide extinction. While these disruptions may have a negative impact on ecosystem productivity in individual simulation runs, mean results over many simulations show a trend for increasing ecosystem productivity and stability over time. Feedback between life and the abiotic environment in the model creates a ‘long‐tailed’ distribution of extinction sizes without any external trigger for large extinction events.     

Moving forward in global‐change ecology: capitalizing on natural variability

Natural resources managers are being asked to follow practices that accommodate for the impact of climate change on the ecosystems they manage, while global‐ecosystems modelers aim to forecast future responses under different climate scenarios. However, the lack of scientific knowledge about short‐term ecosystem responses to climate change has made it difficult to define set conservation practices or to realistically inform ecosystem models. Until recently, the main goal for ecologists was to study the composition and structure of communities and their implications for ecosystem function, but due to the probable magnitude and irreversibility of climate‐change effects (species extinctions and loss of ecosystem function), a shorter term focus on responses of ecosystems to climate change is needed. We highlight several underutilized approaches for studying the ecological consequences of climate change that capitalize on the natural variability of the climate system at different temporal and spatial scales. For example, studying organismal responses to extreme climatic events can inform about the resilience of populations to global warming and contribute to the assessment of local extinctions. Translocation experiments and gene expression are particular useful to quantitate a species' acclimation potential to global warming. And studies along environmental gradients can guide habitat restoration and protection programs by identifying vulnerable species and sites. These approaches identify the processes and mechanisms underlying species acclimation to changing conditions, combine different analytical approaches, and can be used to improve forecasts of the short‐term impacts of climate change and thus inform conservation practices and ecosystem models in a meaningful way.     

Modelling climate‐change‐induced nonlinear thresholds in cephalopod population dynamics

A significant global challenge lies in our current inability to anticipate, and therefore prepare for, critical ecological thresholds (i.e. tipping points in ecosystems). This deficit stems largely from an inadequate understanding of the many complex interactions between species and the environment at the ecosystem level, and the paucity of mechanistic models relating environment to population dynamics at the species level. In marine ecosystems, abundant, short‐lived and fast‐growing species such as anchovies or squids, consistently function as ‘keystone’ groups whose population dynamics affect entire ecosystems. Increasing exploitation coupled with climate change impacts has the potential to affect these ecological groups and consequently, the entire marine ecosystem. There are currently very few models that predict the impact of climate change on these keystone groups. Here we use a combination of individual‐based bioenergetics and stage‐structured population models to characterize the fundamental capacity of cephalopods to respond to climate change. We demonstrate the potential for, and mechanisms behind, two unfavourable climate‐change‐induced thresholds in future population dynamics. Although one threshold was the direct consequence of a decrease in incubation time caused by ocean warming, the other threshold was linked to survivorship, implying the possibility of management through a modification of fishing mortality. Additional substantive changes in phenology were also predicted, with a possible loss in population resilience. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of predicting complex nonlinear dynamics with a reasonably simplistic mechanistic model, and highlight the necessity of developing such approaches for other species if attempts to moderate the impact of climate change on natural resources are to be effective.     

Ecological assessments with algae: a review and synthesis

Algae have been used for a century in environmental assessments of water bodies and are now used in countries around the world. This review synthesizes recent advances in the field around a framework for environmental assessment and management that can guide design of assessments, applications of phycology in assessments, and refinements of those applications to better support management decisions. Algae are critical parts of aquatic ecosystems that power food webs and biogeochemical cycling. Algae are also major sources of problems that threaten many ecosystems goods and services when abundances of nuisance and toxic taxa are high. Thus, algae can be used to indicate ecosystem goods and services, which complements how algal indicators are also used to assess levels of contaminants and habitat alterations (stressors). Understanding environmental managers' use of algal ecology, taxonomy, and physiology can guide our research and improve its application. Environmental assessments involve characterizing ecological condition and diagnosing causes and threats to ecosystems goods and services. Recent advances in characterizing condition include site‐specific models that account for natural variability among habitats to better estimate effects of humans. Relationships between algal assemblages and stressors caused by humans help diagnose stressors and establish targets for protection and restoration. Many algal responses to stressors have thresholds that are particularly important for developing stakeholder consensus for stressor management targets. Future research on the regional‐scale resilience of algal assemblages, the ecosystem goods and services they provide, and methods for monitoring and forecasting change will improve water resource management.     

How do we overcome abrupt degradation of marine ecosystems and meet the challenge of heat waves and climate extremes?

Extreme heat wave events are now causing ecosystem degradation across marine ecosystems. The consequences of this heat‐induced damage range from the rapid loss of habitat‐forming organisms, through to a reduction in the services that ecosystems support, and ultimately to impacts on human health and society. How we tackle the sudden emergence of ecosystem‐wide degradation has not yet been addressed in the context of marine heat waves. An examination of recent marine heat waves from around Australia points to the potential important role that respite or refuge from environmental extremes can play in enabling organismal survival. However, most ecological interventions are being devised with a target of mid to late‐century implementation, at which time many of the ecosystems, that the interventions are targeted towards, will have already undergone repeated and widespread heat wave induced degradation. Here, our assessment of the merits of proposed ecological interventions, across a spectrum of approaches, to counter marine environmental extremes, reveals a lack preparedness to counter the effects of extreme conditions on marine ecosystems. The ecological influence of these extremes are projected to continue to impact marine ecosystems in the coming years, long before these interventions can be developed. Our assessment reveals that approaches which are technologically ready and likely to be socially acceptable are locally deployable only, whereas those which are scalable—for example to features as large as major reef systems—are not close to being testable, and are unlikely to obtain social licence for deployment. Knowledge of the environmental timescales for survival of extremes, via respite or refuge, inferred from field observations will help test such intervention tools. The growing frequency of extreme events such as marine heat waves increases the urgency to consider mitigation and intervention tools that support organismal and ecosystem survival in the immediate future, while global climate mitigation and/or intervention are formulated.     

Riparian Ecosystems in the 21st Century: Hotspots for Climate Change Adaptation?

Riparian ecosystems in the 21st century are likely to play a critical role in determining the vulnerability of natural and human systems to climate change, and in influencing the capacity of these systems to adapt. Some authors have suggested that riparian ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts due to their high levels of exposure and sensitivity to climatic stimuli, and their history of degradation. Others have highlighted the probable resilience of riparian ecosystems to climate change as a result of their evolution under high levels of climatic and environmental variability. We synthesize current knowledge of the vulnerability of riparian ecosystems to climate change by assessing the potential exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of their key components and processes, as well as ecosystem functions, goods and services, to projected global climatic changes. We review key pathways for ecological and human adaptation for the maintenance, restoration and enhancement of riparian ecosystem functions, goods and services and present emerging principles for planned adaptation. Our synthesis suggests that, in the absence of adaptation, riparian ecosystems are likely to be highly vulnerable to climate change impacts. However, given the critical role of riparian ecosystem functions in landscapes, as well as the strong links between riparian ecosystems and human well-being, considerable means, motives and opportunities for strategically planned adaptation to climate change also exist. The need for planned adaptation of and for riparian ecosystems is likely to be strengthened as the importance of many riparian ecosystem functions, goods and services will grow under a changing climate. Consequently, riparian ecosystems are likely to become adaptation ‘hotspots’ as the century unfolds.     

Contemplating the future: Acting now on long‐term monitoring to answer 2050's questions

In 2050, which aspects of ecosystem change will we regret not having measured? Long‐term monitoring plays a crucial part in managing Australia's natural environment because time is a key factor underpinning changes in ecosystems. It is critical to start measuring key attributes of ecosystems – and the human and natural process affecting them – now, so that we can track the trajectory of change over time. This will facilitate informed choices about how to manage ecological changes (including interventions where they are required) and promote better understanding by 2050 of how particular ecosystems have been shaped over time. There will be considerable value in building on existing long‐term monitoring programmes because this can add significantly to the temporal depth of information. The economic and social processes driving change in ecosystems are not identical in all ecosystems, so much of what is monitored (and the means by which it is monitored) will most likely target specific ecosystems or groups of ecosystems. To best understand the effects of ecosystem‐specific threats and drivers, monitoring also will need to address the economic and social factors underpinning ecosystem‐specific change. Therefore, robust assessments of the state of Australia's environment will be best achieved by reporting on the ecological performance of a representative sample of ecosystems over time. Political, policy and financial support to implement appropriate ecosystem‐specific monitoring is a perennial problem. We suggest that the value of ecological monitoring will be demonstrable, when plot‐based monitoring data make a unique and crucial contribution to Australia's ability to produce environmental accounts, environmental reports (e.g. the State of the Environment, State of the Forests) and to fulfilling reporting obligations under international agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity. This paper suggests what must be done to meet Australia's ecological information needs by 2050.     

Spatial early warning signals for impending regime shifts: A practical framework for application in real‐world landscapes

Prediction of ecosystem response to global environmental change is a pressing scientific challenge of major societal relevance. Many ecosystems display nonlinear responses to environmental change, and may even undergo practically irreversible ‘regime shifts’ that initiate ecosystem collapse. Recently, early warning signals based on spatiotemporal metrics have been proposed for the identification of impending regime shifts. The rapidly increasing availability of remotely sensed data provides excellent opportunities to apply such model‐based spatial early warning signals in the real world, to assess ecosystem resilience and identify impending regime shifts induced by global change. Such information would allow land‐managers and policy makers to interfere and avoid catastrophic shifts, but also to induce regime shifts that move ecosystems to a desired state. Here, we show that the application of spatial early warning signals in real‐world landscapes presents unique and unexpected challenges, and may result in misleading conclusions when employed without careful consideration of the spatial data and processes at hand. We identify key practical and theoretical issues and provide guidelines for applying spatial early warning signals in heterogeneous, real‐world landscapes based on literature review and examples from real‐world data. Major identified issues include (1) spatial heterogeneity in real‐world landscapes may enhance reversibility of regime shifts and boost landscape‐level resilience to environmental change (2) ecosystem states are often difficult to define, while these definitions have great impact on spatial early warning signals and (3) spatial environmental variability and socio‐economic factors may affect spatial patterns, spatial early warning signals and associated regime shift predictions. We propose a novel framework, shifting from an ecosystem perspective towards a landscape approach. The framework can be used to identify conditions under which resilience assessment with spatial remotely sensed data may be successful, to support well‐informed application of spatial early warning signals, and to improve predictions of ecosystem responses to global environmental change.     

Conceptualizing ecosystem tipping points within a physiological framework

Connecting the nonlinear and often counterintuitive physiological effects of multiple environmental drivers to the emergent impacts on ecosystems is a fundamental challenge. Unfortunately, the disconnect between the way “stressors” (e.g., warming) is considered in organismal (physiological) and ecological (community) contexts continues to hamper progress. Environmental drivers typically elicit biphasic physiological responses, where performance declines at levels above and below some optimum. It is also well understood that species exhibit highly variable response surfaces to these changes so that the optimum level of any environmental driver can vary among interacting species. Thus, species interactions are unlikely to go unaltered under environmental change. However, while these nonlinear, species‐specific physiological relationships between environment and performance appear to be general, rarely are they incorporated into predictions of ecological tipping points. Instead, most ecosystem‐level studies focus on varying levels of “stress” and frequently assume that any deviation from “normal” environmental conditions has similar effects, albeit with different magnitudes, on all of the species within a community. We consider a framework that realigns the positive and negative physiological effects of changes in climatic and nonclimatic drivers with indirect ecological responses. Using a series of simple models based on direct physiological responses to temperature and ocean pCO₂, we explore how variation in environment‐performance relationships among primary producers and consumers translates into community‐level effects via trophic interactions. These models show that even in the absence of direct mortality, mismatched responses resulting from often subtle changes in the physical environment can lead to substantial ecosystem‐level change.     

Marine reserves help coastal ecosystems cope with extreme weather

Natural ecosystems have experienced widespread degradation due to human activities. Consequently, enhancing resilience has become a primary objective for conservation. Nature reserves are a favored management tool, but we need clearer empirical tests of whether they can impart resilience. Catastrophic flooding in early 2011 impacted coastal ecosystems across eastern Australia. We demonstrate that marine reserves enhanced the capacity of coral reefs to withstand flood impacts. Reserve reefs resisted the impact of perturbation, whilst fished reefs did not. Changes on fished reefs were correlated with the magnitude of flood impact, whereas variation on reserve reefs was related to ecological variables. Herbivory and coral recruitment are critical ecological processes that underpin reef resilience, and were greater in reserves and further enhanced on reserve reefs near mangroves. The capacity of reserves to mitigate external disturbances and promote ecological resilience will be critical to resisting an increased frequency of climate‐related disturbance.     

Human‐aided admixture may fuel ecosystem transformation during biological invasions: theoretical and experimental evidence

Biological invasions can transform our understanding of how the interplay of historical isolation and contemporary (human‐aided) dispersal affects the structure of intraspecific diversity in functional traits, and in turn, how changes in functional traits affect other scales of biological organization such as communities and ecosystems. Because biological invasions frequently involve the admixture of previously isolated lineages as a result of human‐aided dispersal, studies of invasive populations can reveal how admixture results in novel genotypes and shifts in functional trait variation within populations. Further, because invasive species can be ecosystem engineers within invaded ecosystems, admixture‐induced shifts in the functional traits of invaders can affect the composition of native biodiversity and alter the flow of resources through the system. Thus, invasions represent promising yet under‐investigated examples of how the effects of short‐term evolutionary changes can cascade across biological scales of diversity. Here, we propose a conceptual framework that admixture between divergent source populations during biological invasions can reorganize the genetic variation underlying key functional traits, leading to shifts in the mean and variance of functional traits within invasive populations. Changes in the mean or variance of key traits can initiate new ecological feedback mechanisms that result in a critical transition from a native ecosystem to a novel invasive ecosystem. We illustrate the application of this framework with reference to a well‐studied plant model system in invasion biology and show how a combination of quantitative genetic experiments, functional trait studies, whole ecosystem field studies and modeling can be used to explore the dynamics predicted to trigger these critical transitions.     

Resilience in a two-population system: interactions between Allee effects and connectivity

Resilience in ecosystems and resistance to regime shifts has been a major focus in ecological research. How migration and general network dynamics affect the resilience of populations or induce regime shift cascades is a particularly challenging open question in theoretical ecology. We focus on regime shifts in populations with variable-strength Allee effects to demonstrate the effect of migration on resilience in two-population systems with critical transitions. The result is a mathematical model that justifies the assumption that resilience can be averaged across connected populations and suggests several management strategies to either avoid or induce regime shift cascades.     

Slow recovery from perturbations as a generic indicator of a nearby catastrophic shift

The size of the basin of attraction in ecosystems with alternative stable states is often referred to as "ecological resilience." Ecosystems with a low ecological resilience may easily be tipped into an alternative basin of attraction by a stochastic event. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to measure ecological resilience in practice. Here we show that the rate of recovery from small perturbations (sometimes called "engineering resilience") is a remarkably good indicator of ecological resilience. Such recovery rates decrease as a catastrophic regime shift is approached, a phenomenon known in physics as "critical slowing down." We demonstrate the robust occurrence of critical slowing down in six ecological models and outline a possible experimental approach to quantify differences in recovery rates. In all the models we analyzed, critical slowing down becomes apparent quite far from a threshold point, suggesting that it may indeed be of practical use as an early warning signal. Despite the fact that critical slowing down could also indicate other critical transitions, such as a stable system becoming oscillatory, the robustness of the phenomenon makes it a promising indicator of loss of resilience and the risk of upcoming regime shifts in a system.     

Slow Recovery from Local Disturbances as an Indicator for Loss of Ecosystem Resilience

A range of indicators have been proposed for identifying the elevated risk of critical transitions in ecosystems. Most indicators are based on the idea that critical slowing down can be inferred from changes in statistical properties of natural fluctuations and spatial patterns. However, identifying these signals in nature has remained challenging. An alternative approach is to infer changes in resilience from differences in standardized experimental perturbations. However, system-wide experimental perturbations are rarely feasible. Here we evaluate the potential to infer the risk of large-scale systemic transitions from local experimental or natural perturbations. We use models of spatially explicit landscapes to illustrate how recovery rates upon small-scale perturbations decrease as an ecosystem approaches a tipping point for a large-scale collapse. We show that the recovery trajectory depends on: (1) the resilience of the ecosystem at large scale, (2) the dispersal rate of organisms, and (3) the scale of the perturbation. In addition, we show that recovery of natural disturbances in a heterogeneous environment can potentially function as an indicator of resilience of a large-scale ecosystem. Our analyses reveal fundamental differences between large-scale weak and local-scale strong perturbations, leading to an overview of opportunities and limitations of the use of local disturbance-recovery experiments.     

Climate change causes critical transitions and irreversible alterations of mountain forests

Mountain forests are at particular risk of climate change impacts due to their temperature limitation and high exposure to warming. At the same time, their complex topography may help to buffer the effects of climate change and create climate refugia. Whether climate change can lead to critical transitions of mountain forest ecosystems and whether such transitions are reversible remain incompletely understood. We investigated the resilience of forest composition and size structure to climate change, focusing on a mountain forest landscape in the Eastern Alps. Using the individual‐based forest landscape model iLand, we simulated ecosystem responses to a wide range of climatic changes (up to a 6°C increase in mean annual temperature and a 30% reduction in mean annual precipitation), testing for tipping points in vegetation size structure and composition under different topography scenarios. We found that at warming levels above +2°C a threshold was crossed, with the system tipping into an alternative state. The system shifted from a conifer‐dominated landscape characterized by large trees to a landscape dominated by smaller, predominantly broadleaved trees. Topographic complexity moderated climate change impacts, smoothing and delaying the transitions between alternative vegetation states. We subsequently reversed the simulated climate forcing to assess the ability of the landscape to recover from climate change impacts. The forest landscape showed hysteresis, particularly in scenarios with lower precipitation. At the same mean annual temperature, equilibrium vegetation size structure and species composition differed between warming and cooling trajectories. Here we show that even moderate warming corresponding to current policy targets could result in critical transitions of forest ecosystems and highlight the importance of topographic complexity as a buffering agent. Furthermore, our results show that overshooting ambitious climate mitigation targets could be dangerous, as ecological impacts can be irreversible at millennial time scales once a tipping point has been crossed.