Spatial Nonlinearities: Cascading Effects in the Earth System

Abstract

describing the spread of catastrophic events using one historical example (the Dust Bowl) and two current ex-amples (wildfires, invasive species and desertification). Finally, we discuss the consequences of applying these ideas to forecasting future dynamics under a changing global environment. Given the continuing challenges as-sociated with global change, our synthetic approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries to include interactions and feedbacks across multiple scales shows great po-tential to increase our ability to forecast catastrophic events and to develop strategies for minimizing their occurrence and impacts. 14.2 Conceptual Framework In our framework, we focus on catastrophic events that start small, and propagate nonlinearly to influence broad spatial extents (described in detail in Peters et al. 2004). Mathematically, spatial nonlinearities can be illustrated as: dY/dt = g(I g , E g) + f(Y, E f) + D(Y, E D) + c(Y, E c)