When and why ecological systems respond to the rate rather than the magnitude of environmental changes

Ecologists and conservation biologists have become quite familiar with the concept of tipping points: abrupt changes in an ecosystem's state that occur after a period of relative stasis. Most of the familiar ecological examples of tipping points occur either because a once-stable state has lost stability, or the system has been subjected to a particularly large perturbation and transitions to an alternative stable state, distinct from the preperturbed state. A different class of tipping points, known as rate-induced tipping (or r-tipping) points, are likely present in many ecological communities but remain little known in the field. Rate-induced tipping occurs when an environmental change is too fast for the community to track; even though the original state never loses stability, the ecological response to the change is too slow to remain in that stable state's basin of attraction. Rtipping is part of the broader phenomenon of rate dependence that arises because ecological systems cannot respond instantaneously to external changes. In this article, we provide a non-technical introduction to the theory of rate dependent responses to change, discuss the implications of this theory to conservation problems, and illustrate its application through a series of case studies. When a tipping point is rate dependent, effective management relies not only on the type of intervention used but also the rate at which it is applied. Our work highlights how a mechanistic understanding of different types of tipping points leads to stronger guidance on when, where, and how different interventions can used to achieve conservation goals.