Quantitative Models of Social-Ecological Systems

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Type

Analyzing the Impact of Agave Cultivation on Famine Risk in Arid Pre-Hispanic Northern Mexico

Model
Here, a simple model of a subsistence economy based solely on the cultivation of maize and agave is presented. While maize is an annual plant that humans can eat and store, agave is a perennial plant that can be used for multiple purposes: as edible materials yielding caloric values and as fiber materials for producing items like clothing, ropes, and baskets.  This model tries to capture the essence of a cultivation strategy of a portfolio of plants that have differing levels of sensitivity...
09 Aug 2016

A Two-Sector Growth Model: Economic Development, Demographics, and Renewable Resources

Model
This is a two-sector growth model that couples the dynamics of human demographics and a renewable resource base. The two sectors are agricultural and manufacturing sectors. To capture both the positive (Malthusian) and negative (modern growth) type relationships between population growth and output, it is important to model the shifting composition of output from agricultural to manufacturing as growth occurs. Thus, the model is a two sector (productions and consumptions in...
09 Aug 2016

A model of robustness tradeoffs in social-ecological system

Model
Feedback control systems in general exhibit inherent robustness-fragility tradeoffs. That is, by becoming very robust to a given set of disturbances for maintaining stability, feedback systems necessarily introduce hidden fragilities to disturbances outside this set. Even a small unanticipated disturbance can initiate cascading system-wide failures as a result. The model presented here demonstrates this phenomenon. In Anderies et al. (2012), an agricultural production system is illustrated as...
09 Aug 2016