The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While this article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you gloss over the math.
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Ecological Transients and the Ghost of Equilibrium Past
For SIAM News:
The sight and smell of eutrophication—in the form of a layer of stinking green algae on a lake or pond—is likely familiar to many readers. The result is detrimental, even toxic, to other species that rely on the water, ranging from tiny animals to birds and even humans. For example, eutrophication on Lake Erie affects millions (see Figure 1). But the real culprit is actually the substance that feeds the algae: excess phosphorous that is produced by human activities like fertilizer runoff and leaky septic systems.
To manage eutrophication, one must know whether the affected body of water resides in a eutrophic stable state, or if its state is a long transient. The second case mimics stability because it can last a long time but is sustained by another source of phosphorous in the lakebed sediments. According to Tessa Francis, an ecologist at the University of Washington Puget Sound Institute, the wrong management choice has major consequences in terms of costs and trade-offs.
“You’re investing all of this social, political, and economic capital into management, but you’re getting no results from it,” Francis said. “If you gave the system a bigger smack by adding an alternative management strategy to tackle the phosphorus pool at the bottom of the lake, that would be more likely to get your lake back to the state you want. This is just one consequence of long transients in terms of how they affect management decisions.”
Bowler Hat Science 