When ecological and social change intertwine.
Societal acclimation. Worryingly, there can be a short window of time before societies give up on solving environmental problems. We find that local economies and public perception often acclimate to the loss of ecosystem services within 5-20y; this erodes the incentive for stakeholders to mitigate. Thus, socio-ecological feedbacks can lock-in a degraded socio-ecological regime unless societies and managers begin mitigating quickly. In review; bioRxiv PDF |
Conservation policy strategies. How do we transition societies to sustainability quickly? Establishing the institutions required for this (eg laws, social norms) is often difficult: legally binding global agreements on climate change remain elusive, for example. We discover that institutions at different scales synergistically promote mitigation adoption: focusing on regional climate agreements for now allows early adopters to hold their neighbors accountable. As local efforts ratchet up mitigation, shifting to global agreements will be critical to sway along hold-out countries.
Nature Communications, 2021 |
Diversity. Do the feedbacks we study in simple models become dissipated across many different species in diverse ecosystems? Developing a generalized model of consumer collapse, we show that alternative stable states can arise in food webs when functional redundancy is high, for instance different herbivores all promoting high coral cover. Low redundancy however means the food web collapses at lower mortality – a resistance / resilience tradeoff. American Naturalist, accepted. bioRxiv 20 min talk
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Spatial heterogeneity. Does immigration from unimpacted areas ensure local recovery from disturbance? We show that it does not: kelp and urchin predator larvae, for example, die without habitat-forming kelp on urchin-dominated reefs. Through such settlement feedbacks, we quantitatively explain the decades-long dominance of kelp or urchins on adjacent reefs and how spatial patterns form in highly interconnected ecosystems generally.
Published in Ecology, 2020. PDF file |