As the planet faces unprecedented environmental change, understanding how ecosystems respond is increasingly important. A new study, co-authored by the Centre for Ecosystem Management’s Charlotte Ward, Dr. Kevin McCann, and Dr. Kayla Hale, sheds light on a widespread ecological phenomenon.

When we talk about climate change, we often think in extremes—heat waves, vanishing glaciers, and species on the brink. But nature’s responses to these shifts are far more nuanced, and according to a new paper co-authored by the Centre for Ecosystem Management’s Dr. Joey Bernhardt, understanding when ecosystems respond may be just as important as understanding how they respond.

You don’t always need massive datasets to learn something important about nature. While modern ecology often focuses on large-scale “big data,” a recent study carried out, in part, by one of our collaborators Dr. Robert Hanner shows that smaller, less-than-perfect datasets can still reveal important patterns—if analyzed carefully.