Related papers: Physics for the environment and sustainable develo…
The notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts has a long tradition in science. This, of course, also applies to the Earth system. With its myriad of processes, spanning from purely physical to life and human activity, the…
Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…
The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…
With increased access to data and the advent of computers, the use of statistical tools and numerical simulations is becoming commonplace for ecologists. These approaches help improve our understanding of ecological phenomena and their…
World models, which explicitly learn environmental dynamics to lay the foundation for planning, reasoning, and decision-making, are rapidly advancing in predicting both physical dynamics and aspects of social behavior, yet predominantly in…
Rising interest in the resilience of ecological systems has spawned diverse interpretations of the term's precise meaning. This paper classifies and explores definitions of resilience from the ecological literature using a dynamical systems…
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…
Infrastructure shapes societies and scientific discovery. Traditional scientific infrastructure, often static and fragmented, leads to issues like data silos, lack of interoperability and reproducibility, and unsustainable short-lived…
In line of the intermediate-term monitoring of seismic activity aimed at prediction of the world largest earthquakes the seismic dynamics of the Earth's lithosphere is analysed as a single whole, which is the ultimate scale of the complex…
Decision-makers abhor uncertainty, and it is certainly true that the less there is of it the better. However, recognizing that uncertainty is part of the equation, particularly for deciding on environmental policy, is a prerequisite for…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
Whilst the partial differential equations that govern the dynamics of our world have been studied in great depth for centuries, solving them for complex, high-dimensional conditions and domains still presents an incredibly large…
The 20th-century engineering feat that most improved the quality of human life, the electric power system, now faces discipline-spanning challenges that threaten that distinction. So multilayered and complex that they resemble ecosystems,…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
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…
We argue that most advances in science and technology during the past and the present centuries rely on modern physics concepts developed in the early $20$th century. The reliance is so profound that any improvement of literacy of science…
Resilience in coupled systems is increasingly critical in addressing global challenges such as climate change and pandemics. These systems show unpredictable behaviour due to dynamic complexity and deep uncertainty across spatiotemporal…
The problem of error growth due to the incomplete knowledge of the evolution law which rules the dynamics of a given physical system is addressed. Major interest is devoted to the analysis of error amplification in systems with many…
Tipping points are one of the hot topics in modern physics of complex systems. But what is a tipping point? A generic definition declares it as ``a state of the system where a small change in its parameters can lead to a significant change…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…