Managing ecological thresholds in coupled environmental-human systems.

ABSTRACT: Many ecosystems appear subject to regime shifts--abrupt changes from one state to another after crossing a threshold or tipping point. Thresholds and their associated stability landscapes are determined within a coupled socioeconomic-ecological system (SES) where human choices, including those of managers, are feedback responses. Prior work has made one of two assumptions about managers: that they face no institutional constraints, in which case the SES may be managed to be fairly robust to shocks and tipping points are of little importance, or that managers are rigidly constrained with no flexibility to adapt, in which case the inferred thresholds may poorly reflect actual managerial flexibility. We model a multidimensional SES to investigate how alternative institutions affect SES stabil

SUBMITTER: Horan RD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3088591 | biostudies-literature | 2011 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature