The CASCADE project adresses catastrophic shifts in drylands in the Mediterranean region.
It aims at identifying key drivers of regime shifts, develop indicators for tipping-points and suggest procedures for land managers.
In the Mediterranean region, as well as in other arid and semi-arid regions of the world, these drivers include drought, grazing and recurring wildfires. In these systems, the response of the ecosystem is discontinous because positive feed-back mechanisms change the attractor of the ecosysem after a certain threshold, or tipping-point, is crossed. For instance, while over years the vegetation can sustain under the continous grazing pressure, it might collapse within very short time once the number of grazers reaches a threshold that triggers self-enhancing erosion processes.
The project includes six field sites where data are obtained on historical land use, as well as the current state of the vegetation and soil, and the grazing and fire regime are assessed. Additionally, there are experiments inducing drought stress on single plant individuals.
The interdisciplinary research team includes geographers, ecologists, soil scientists, as well as economists and social scientists.
CASCADE is funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for a period until june 2017.