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Humans have been able to tackle biosphere complexities by acting as ecosystem engineers, profoundly changing the flows of matter, energy and information. This includes major innovations that allowed to reduce and control the impact of…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated to a variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that might threaten…
Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
The sustainable use of common-pool resources (CPRs) is a major environmental governance challenge because of their possible over-exploitation. Research in this field has overlooked the feedback between user decisions and resource dynamics.…
In the analysis of complex ecosystems it is common to use random interaction coefficients, often assumed to be such that all species are statistically equivalent. In this work we relax this assumption by choosing interactions according to…
This work proposes to model the space environment as a stochastic dynamic network where each node is a group of objects of a given class, or species, and their relationship is represented by stochastic links. A set of stochastic dynamic…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
Motivated by the literature on opinion dynamics and evolutionary game theory, we propose a novel mathematical framework to model the intertwined coevolution of opinions and decision-making in a complex social system. In the proposed…
Cooperation in human society is sustained by reputation. In general, the reputation of an individual is determined by others who observe his behavior, but this rarely happens in private situations. This may cause people to behave…
Now that we know that Earth-like planets are ubiquitous in the universe, as well as that most of them are much older than the Earth, it is justified to ask to what extent evolutionary outcomes on other such planets are similar, or indeed…
The sustainable management of common resources often leads to a social dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons: individuals benefit from rapid extraction of resources, while communities as a whole benefit from more sustainable…
The evolution of cooperation among unrelated individuals in human and animal societies remains a challenging issue across disciplines. It is an important subject also in the evolutionary game theory to research how cooperation arises. The…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
The foundational concepts behind the persistence of ecological communities have been based on two ecological properties: dynamical stability and feasibility. The former is typically regarded as the capacity of a community to return to an…
Understanding the evolution of cooperation is pivotal in biology and social science. Public resources sharing is a common scenario in the real world. In our study, we explore the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation on a regular graph with…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Coviability refers to the multiple socio-ecological arrangements and governance structures under which humans and nature can coexist in functional, fair, and persistent ways. Transitioning to a coviable state in environmentally degraded and…
Decision-making societies may vary in their level of cooperation and degree of conservatism, both of which influence their overall performance. Moreover, these factors are not fixed -- they can change based on the decisions agents in the…