Integrating Social and Natural Sciences to Explore Human-Natural Networks.

 

NEO MARTINEZ

PACIFIC ECOINFORMATICS AND COMPUTATIONAL ECOLOGY LAB (PEACE LAB)

 

Understanding the complex networks that bind nature and humans into interdependent nonlinear systems is one of the most difficult and vital challenges for humans to live sustainably on Earth. Few of these systems are as vivid or important as the networks that link humans and the rest of Earth’s species into interdependent webs based on biological and social demand for food, fiber, fuel, and timber. This presentation describes how recent advances in modeling the ecological and economic aspects of these networks have been synthesized to address this challenge. Specific findings from this approach include the unusual topological role and subsequent dynamic ecological consequences of humans engaged in consumption of ecosystem biomass for subsistence. Other findings include the economic and ecological consequences of humans engaged in such consumption for financial gain.This synthesis aims to increase the breadth and depth of human-natural system research as well as the scientific and social understanding needed to address critical environmental problems facing civilization. This synthesis also shows how network science can powerfully contribute to an increasingly important and relatively new interdisciplinary synthetic research frontier quite different than the more established disciplinary reductionist frontiers.