NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology combine research and training to prepare young scientists for careers in emerging areas where biology intersects with other scientific disciplines, in this case with mathematics and economics. The Fellows are expected to be leaders of the nation's scientific workforce of the future. This fellowship to Zak Ratajczak supports research and training that address the question, "Does economic connectedness undermine environmental stability?" The host institutions for this fellowship are the University of Virginia and Stockholm University and the sponsoring scientists are Drs. Paolo D'Odorico and Carl Folke, respectively. Training goals for the fellowship include developing skills in theoretical modeling of modern social-ecological systems, including nonlinear dynamics and network theory. The research results are expected to be useful to public policy and are being disseminated through workshops with multiple stakeholder groups and policy recommendations. Educational outreach to K-12 and undergraduate groups seeks to foster deeper thinking of how humans and ecosystems affect each other. This fellowship is jointly funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering, the Directorate for Geosciences, and the Directorate for Biological Sciences.
This research addresses the extent to which ecological and social-ecological systems are capable of abrupt and difficult-to-reverse transitions, referred to as 'tipping points.' The research represents ecosystems as a series of ecological components interconnected over long distances by human economies an advance over many models that consider only naturally occurring connections between ecosystems. It addresses whether these economic connections accentuate existing tipping points and create large-scale ecological tipping points that do not exist in the absence of humans. Using these models, the research seeks to identify adaptive strategies to avoid tipping points, including alterations of underlying biological diversity. Analyses of different modes of market behavior and resource sharing should provide strategies for navigating stochastic fluctuations in natural resources. Furthermore, by explicitly integrating conspicuous components of ecosystem structure and the price indexes of key biological goods into the models, it should be possible to detect dynamic behaviors that often emerge near tipping points in social-ecological networks. Being aware of such behaviors could help avoid large ecological tipping in economically important ecosystems such as croplands, rangelands, and fisheries.
