Related papers: Explaining the emergence of land-use frontiers
Urban land growth presents a major sustainability challenge, yet its growth patterns and dynamics remain unclear. We quantified urban land evolution by analyzing its statistical distribution in 14 regions and countries over 29 years. The…
Feeding a larger and wealthier global population without transgressing ecological limits is increasingly challenging, as rising food demand (especially for animal products) intensifies pressure on ecosystems, accelerates deforestation, and…
The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…
Historical trends suggest the decline in importance of land as a production factor but its continued importance as a store of value. Using an overlapping generations model with land and aggregate uncertainty, we theoretically study the…
We face unprecedented resource stresses in the 21st Century such as global climate disruptions, freshwater scarcity, expanding energy demands, and the threat of global pandemics. Historically, societies have relieved resource stress by…
A pervasive trend in economic development is the shift from agricultural to manufacturing and finally to service economies. Because the type of employment associated with each sector influences natural resource use this global trend may…
Modeling environmental ecosystems is essential for effective resource management, sustainable development, and understanding complex ecological processes. However, traditional data-driven methods face challenges in capturing inherently…
Despite major advances in climate science over the last 30 years, persistent uncertainties in projections of future climate change remain. Climate projections are produced with increasingly complex models which attempt to represent key…
Invasion fronts in ecology are well studied but very few mathematical results concern the case with variable motility (possibly due to mutations). Based on an apparently simple reaction-diffusion equation, we explain the observed phenomena…
Land management intensity shapes ecosystem service provision, socio-ecological resilience and is central to sustainable transformation. Yet most land use models emphasise economic and biophysical drivers, while socio-psychological factors…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
Spatial patterns are widely observed in numerous nonequilibrium natural systems, often undergoing complex transitions and bifurcations, thereby exhibiting significant importance in many physical and biological systems such as embryonic…
Dryland vegetation can survive water stress by forming spatial patterns but is often subjected to herbivory as an additional stress that puts it at risk of desertification. Understanding the mutual relationships between vegetation…
Adaptive networks are a versatile approach to model phenomena such as contagion and spreading dynamics, critical transitions and structure formation that emerge from the dynamic coevolution of complex network structure and node states.…
Sedentism was a decisive moment in the history of humankind. In a review article Kay and Kaplan quantified land use for early human settlements and found that sedentism and the emergence of farming go hand in hand. For these settlements two…
Previous work indicates that tropical forest can exist as an alternative stable state to savanna. Therefore, perturbation by climate change or human impact may lead to crossing of a tipping point beyond which there is rapid forest dieback…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
The energy market, and specifically the renewable sector carries volatility and risks, similar to the financial market. Here, we leverage on a well-established, return-risk approach, commonly used by equity portfolio-managers and apply it…
We introduce the logistic model of consumption growth, which captures a negative feedback loop preventing an unlimited growth of consumption due to finite biophysical resources of our planet. This simple dynamic model allows for derivation…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…