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We found that larger ecosystems do indeed take longer to collapse than small systems, due to the diffusion of stresses across large distances and time-lags. The relationship does seem to hold across different types of ecosystem: lakes take longer than ponds, forests take longer to collapse than a copse, and so on.

But what really stood out was that larger systems shift relatively faster. A forest that is 100 times bigger than another forest will not take 100 times longer to collapse–it actually collapses much more quickly than that. This is quite a profound finding because it means that large ecosystems that have been around for thousands of years could collapse in less than 50 years. Our mean estimates suggest the Caribbean coral reefs could collapse in only 15 years and the whole Amazon rainforest in just 49 years.