Related papers: Sacred Ecology
Estimating the influence of religion on innovation is challenging because of both complexness and endogeneity. In order to untangle these issues, we use several measures of religiosity, adopt an individual-level approach to innovation and…
One of the first beings affected by changes in the climate are trees, one of our most vital resources. In this study tree species interaction and the response to climate in different ecological environments is observed by applying a joint…
The space of possible human cultures is vast, but some cultural configurations are more consistent with cognitive and social constraints than others. This leads to a ``landscape'' of possibilities that our species has explored over…
The boreal forest plays a crucial role as a global carbon sink. This study uses two 250-year simulations of Canada's Taiga Plains, an area targeted by the 2 Billion Trees Program to evaluate afforestation and reforestation strategies that…
Successful collective action on issues from climate change to the maintenance of democracy depends on societal properties such as cultural tightness and social cohesion. How these properties evolve is not well understood because they emerge…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
Rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change threaten to destabilize key planetary carbon pools, especially the Earth's forests which link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate. To the extent…
Electric vehicles (EVs) represent a significant advancement in automotive technology, utilizing electricity as a power source instead of traditional fossil fuels, while incorporating sophisticated navigation and autopilot systems. These…
In tropical regions, fires propagate readily in grasslands but typically consume only edges of forest patches. Thus forest patches grow due to tree propagation and shrink by fires in surrounding grasslands. The interplay between these…
Sustainability became the most important component of world development, as countries worldwide fight the battle against the climate change. To understand the effects of climate change, the ecological footprint, along with the biocapacity…
In many dryland environments, vegetation self-organizes into bands that can be clearly identified in remotely-sensed imagery. The status of individual bands can be tracked over time, allowing for a detailed remote analysis of how human…
Large responses of ecosystems to small changes in the conditions--regime shifts--are of great interest and importance. In spatially extended ecosystems, these shifts may be local or global. Using empirical data and mathematical modeling, we…
Malaria remains endemic in tropical areas, especially in Africa. For the evaluation of new tools and to further ourunderstanding of host-parasite interactions, knowing the environmental risk of transmission-even at a very local…
Global warming is a major environmental concern of our times. It has been suggested that the planting of trees could constitute a way of mitigating the adverse effects of the increasing anthropogenic carbon emissions. We developed a simple…
In the Sahel region the population depends largely on rain-fed agriculture. In West Africa in particular, climate models turn to be unable to capture some basic features of present-day climate variability. This study proposes a contribution…
In the context of global warming, tree populations rely on two primary mechanisms of adaptation: phenotypic plasticity, which enables individuals to adjust their behavior in response to environmental stress, and genetic evolution, driven by…
There are two main life cycles in plants, annual and perennial. These life cycles are associated with different traits that determine ecosystem function. Although life cycles are textbook examples of plant adaptation to different…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
Vegetation patterns are abundant in arid and semiarid ecosystems, but how they form remains unclear. One of the most extended theories lies in the existence of scale-dependent feedbacks (SDF) in plant-to-plant and plant-water interactions.…
Tropical deforestation and rural poverty are deeply intertwined, yet isolating the causal effect of income on forest loss remains challenging. We use the 2015 global vanilla price boom, triggered by food-industry shifts toward natural…