It is with great pleasure and pride that the Wageningen University has learned of the award of the 2009 NWO/Spinoza Prize to Marten Scheffer, Professor of Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management. It is the third successive year that a researcher at Wageningen University has been honored with this highest science award in the Netherlands. The amount of the prize is 2.5 million euros.
Marten Scheffer receives the 2009 NWO/Spinoza Prize for his pioneering research into the emergence of abrubt transitions in complex systems such as nature, the climate and even society. The main publications from this work have appeared in leading international academic journals, such as Nature and Science.
Scheffer has also written various books. For the Dutch language audience, he wrote with a colleague, the popular scientific book Vijver, Sloot en Plas (Ponds, Ditches and Lakes); a field guide that explains in simple terms how these ecosystems work.
For the scientific audience, he wrote the now classic Ecology of Shallow Lakes. His newest book, Critical Transitions in Nature and Society, was published just this month. That book deals with the central theme of much of Scheffer’s work: The phenomenon that gradual changes can undermine the resilience of a system, making it unnoticeably more fragile to the point that even a very small disturbance can induce an astonishingly abrubt transition to a whole new state. For example, a constant stream of nutrients to a shallow lake might trigger it suddenly turn from clear to turbid. Because both states are stable, a return from turbid to clear is often possible only with rigerous measures (such as temporarily removing fish from the turbid waters). Scheffer showed that such transition points exist in a variety of ecosystems, such as that of the Sahara or coral reefs, but also in the climate and in complex societal systems. His work explains why cultures are systematically very late in responding to new problems, and why attitudes after long periods of inertia can shift abrubtly and en masse.
In addition to his work on the tipping points in complex systems, Scheffer developed, with colleague Egbert van Nes, a radical new theory on the evolution of the vast number of species on earth. This suggests that the bulk of species are ‘more of the same’ and therefore that not all species have their own niche. He also showed with others that ecosystems are fundamentally chaotic and therefore to a great extent unpredictable.
At Wageningen University professor Marten Scheffer heads the Department of Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management, which has a staff of more than thirty.