Related papers: Is incoherence required for sustainability?
Anthropogenic activity threatens biodiversity through climate change, habitat fragmentation, and increasing frequency and scale of disturbance. Various theoretical studies have sought to shed light on how these factors could promote or…
In theoretical studies, the most commonly used measure of ecological stability is resilience: ecosystems asymptotic rate of return to equilibrium after a pulse-perturbation $-$or shock. A complementary notion of growing popularity is…
Technology is increasingly shaping our social structures and is becoming a driving force in altering human biology. Besides, human activities already proved to have a significant impact on the Earth system which in turn generates complex…
Adaptive transport networks in biological and physical systems exhibit hierarchical organization, characteristic channel spacing, and robust scaling relations. Existing adaptive network models, formulated on a lattice, successfully…
Ecological communities are composed of species interactions that respond to environmental fluctuations. Despite increasing evidence of temporal variation in these interactions, most theoretical frameworks remain rooted in static…
Tipping elements in the Earth System receive increased scientific attention over the recent years due to their nonlinear behavior and the risks of abrupt state changes. While being stable over a large range of parameters, a tipping element…
Transients are fundamental to ecological systems with significant implications to management, conservation, and biological control. We uncover a type of transient synchronization behavior in spatial ecological networks whose local dynamics…
Power system coherency refers to the phenomenon that machines in a power network exhibit similar frequency responses after disturbances, and is foundational for model reduction and control design. Despite abundant empirical observations,…
Indirect reciprocity maintains cooperation in stranger societies by mapping individual behaviors onto reputation signals via social norms. Existing theoretical frameworks assume static environments with constant resources and fixed payoff…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…
Stability is a desirable property of complex ecosystems. If a community of interacting species is at a stable equilibrium point then it is able to withstand small perturbations to component species' abundances without suffering adverse…
This paper is to show that most discrete models used for population dynamics in ecology are inherently pathological that their predications cannot be independently verified by experiments because they violate a fundamental principle of…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
The term 'resilience' is increasingly being used in social-technical-environmental systems sciences and particularly also in the Earth system sciences. However, the diversity of resilience concepts and a certain (sometimes intended)…
Following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, a deep analogy between the origins of instability in financial systems and complex ecosystems has been pointed out: in both cases, topological features of network structures influence how easily…
Human behavioral patterns and consumption paradigms have emerged as pivotal determinants in environmental degradation and climate change, with quotidian decisions pertaining to transportation, energy utilization, and resource consumption…
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…
Complex systems with nonreciprocal interactions are often stratified into layers. Ecosystems are a prime example, where species at one trophic level grow by consuming those at another. Yet the dynamical consequences of such stratified…