Related papers: Panarchy: ripples of a boundary concept
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
1. Theoretical models pertaining to feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes are prevalent in multiple biological fields. An integrative overview is currently lacking, due to little crosstalk between the fields and the use of…
Transformations to create more sustainable social-ecological systems are urgently needed. Structural change is a feature of transformations of social-ecological systems that is of critical importance but is little understood. Here, we…
The study of ecological systems is gaining momentum in modern scientific research, driven by an abundance of empirical data and advancements in bioengineering techniques. However, a full understanding of their dynamical and thermodynamical…
Palaeoclimate archives contain information on climate variability, trends and mechanisms. Models are developed to explain observations and predict the response of the climate system to perturbations, in particular perturbations associated…
Innovation and obsolescence describe the dynamics of ever-churning social and biological systems, from the development of economic markets to scientific and technological progress to biological evolution. They have been widely discussed,…
The concept of biological adaptation was closely connected to some mathematical, engineering and physical ideas from the very beginning. Cannon in his "The wisdom of the body" (1932) used the engineering vision of regulation. In 1938, Selye…
Eco-evolutionary game dynamics which characterizes the mutual interactions and the coupled evolutions of strategies and environments has been of growing interests in very recent years. Since such feedback loops widely exist in a range of…
In this report, I will review some of the most used models in theoretical ecology along with appealing reformulations and recent results in terms of diversity, stability, and functioning of large well-mixed ecological communities.
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points in socio-ecological systems are the main threats to sustainability. These behaviors have been extensively studied, notably to predict, and arguably deviate, dead-end trajectories. Behind the…
The emergence and impact of tipping points have garnered significant interest in both the social and natural sciences. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of feedbacks between human and natural systems, it is often assumed that…
Motivated by the results of recent laboratory experiments (Yoshida et al. Nature, 424, 303-306 (2003)) as well as many earlier field observations that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time…
The human niche represents the intersection of biological, ecological, cultural, and technological processes that have co-evolved to shape human adaptation and societal complexity. This paper explores the human niche through the lens of…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
In ecology, climate and other fields, (sub)systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping…
This topic review communicates working experiences regarding interaction of a multiplicity of processes. Our experiences come from climate change modelling, materials science, cell physiology and public health, and macroeconomic modelling.…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…