Publications related to Socio-ecological system

At what spatial scale does natural selection operate? Using multiscale frameworks to calibrate the effects of environmental factors across landscape continuums

Patterns in nature arise from processes interacting across a continuum of spatial scales, where new relationships emerge at each level of investigation. These patterns are nested features encompassing fine-scale local patterns, such as topography and geolo ...

EPFL2024

Tree diversity reduces variability in sapling survival under drought

Charlotte Grossiord, Jingjing Liang, Xiaojuan Liu

Enhancing tree diversity may be important to fostering resilience to drought-related climate extremes. So far, little attention has been given to whether tree diversity can increase the survival of trees and reduce its variability in young forest plantatio ...

Wiley2024

The microbial genomics of glacier-fed streams: adaptations to an extreme ecosystem

Massimo Bourquin

Glacier-fed streams are the cold, ultra-oligotrophic, and unstable streams that are fed by glacial meltwater. Despite these extreme conditions, they harbour a diverse and abundant microbial diversity that develops into biofilms, covering the boulders and s ...

EPFL2024

Atlas Narratives of Anthropogenic Transformations across the Vietnamese Mekong Delta's Urban-Rural Territories: Water Ecosystems as Subject for the Social Ecological Transition

Sylvie Tram Nguyen

Well beyond the impact of climate change, anthropogenic modifications of the Vietnam Mekong Delta's ecosystems have resulted in environmental degradation and subsequent loss in ecosystems. The environmental impacts include but are not limited to accelerate ...

EPFL2023

Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation

Devis Tuia, Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger

Inexpensive and accessible sensors are accelerating data acquisition in animal ecology. These technologies hold great potential for large-scale ecological understanding, but are limited by current processing approaches which inefficiently distill data into ...

Nature Research2022

On the fractal structure of soil moisture fields

Andrea Rinaldo

We study the spatial structure of soil moisture fields within savanna ecosystems, whose persistence is vital because it is the driver of the entire ecological structure and function. These include changes in the physical and biogeochemical conditions of th ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2021

The architecture of benthic biofilms - Linking hydraulics to spatially structured processes

Anna Depetris

Biofilms are spatially structured ecosystems, characterized by patterns and architectural features determined by the interplay between endogenous and exogenous processes. As in many other structured ecosystems, the characterization of spatial interactions ...

EPFL2021

Key rules of life and the fading cryosphere: impacts in alpine lakes and streams

Tom Ian Battin, Chenxi Wu, Jun Wen, Xiong Xiong

Alpine regions are changing rapidly due to loss of snow and ice in response to ongoing climate change. While studies have documented ecological responses in alpine lakes and streams to these changes, our ability to predict such outcomes is limited. We prop ...

2020

Earth and field observations underpin metapopulation dynamics in complex landscapes: Near-term study on carabids

Andrea Rinaldo, Damiano Pasetto, Francisco Javier Perez Saez, Jonathan Giezendanner

Understanding risks to biodiversity requires predictions of the spatial distribution of species adapting to changing ecosystems and, to that end, Earth observations integrating field surveys prove essential as they provide key numbers for assessing landsca ...

2020

Towards simple tools to assess functional effects of contaminants on natural microbial and invertebrate sediment communities

Benoît Jean Dominique Ferrari, Maria del Carmen Casado Martinez, Sophie Campiche

Surface sediments can accumulate contaminants that affect microorganisms and invertebrates and disturb benthic ecological functions. However, effects of contaminants on ecological functions supported by sediment communities are understudied. Here, we teste ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2020

New perspectives for spatial planning in Switzerland: the role of ecosystem services

Rémi Jaligot

Spatial planning deals with the spatial expression of human activities in an integrated way to minimize their negative impacts on the natural and land systems. Rapid land use and land cover changes are important drivers of change of the benefits people der ...

EPFL2020

Critical Infrastructure Resilience: Lessons from Insurance

Marie-Valentine Renée Agnès Florin

This policy brief suggests five factors and describes use cases to guide and inspire attempts to develop resilience-based insurance solutions and to enhance a positive feedback between insurance and resilience. ...

EPFL International Risk Governance Center (IRGC)2019

A field-based modelling framework of the ecohydrology of schistosomiasis

Francisco Javier Perez Saez

Successful control of schistosomiasis, a water-borne parasitic disease, is challenged by the intricacy of the wormâ s lifecycle, which depends on aquatic snail intermediate hosts, and involves environmental, ecologic, and socio-economic factors. Current s ...

EPFL2018

Aquatic Fungi: A Disregarded Trophic Level in Ecological Risk Assessment of Organic Fungicides

Freshwater fungi are a diverse group of organisms and fulfill important functions in the food web dynamics of surface water ecosystems. Ascomycetic and basidiomycetic hyphomycetes play key roles in leaf litter breakdown in rivers and creeks, while parasiti ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2018

A generalized definition of reactivity for ecological systems and the problem of transient species dynamics

Andrea Rinaldo, Lorenzo Mari, Marino Gatto

Perturbations to an ecosystem's steady state can trigger transient responses of great ecological relevance. Asymptotic stability determines whether a generic perturbation will fade out in the long run, but falls short of characterizing the dynamics imme ...

Wiley2017

The Architecture of the Metacity: Land Use Change, Patch Dynamics and Urban Form in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Martina Barcelloni Corte

This essay analyzes the spatial and temporal dynamics which have emerged from the rapid development of Chiang Mai, Thailand over the last four decades. Modern urbanization since the 1980s in the previously remote Chiang Mai-Lamphun Valley has coincided wit ...

Cogitatio Press2017

Modelling socio-ecological systems with MAIA: A biogas infrastructure simulation

Reinier Verhoog, Amineh Ghorbani

Similar to other renewable energy technologies, the development of a biogas infrastructure in the Netherlands is going through social, institutional and ecological evolution. To study this complex evolutionary process, we built a comprehensive agent-based ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2016

Geomorphic controls on elevational gradients of species richness

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Lorenzo Mari, Francesco Carrara, Florian Altermatt

Elevational gradients of biodiversity have been widely investigated, and yet a clear interpretation of the biotic and abiotic factors that determine how species richness varies with elevation is still elusive. In mountainous landscapes, habitats at differe ...

Natl Acad Sciences2016

A diagnostic procedure for applying the social-ecological systems framework in diverse cases

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer

The framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems (SES) framework of Elinor Ostrom is a multitier collection of concepts and variables that have proven to be relevant for understanding outcomes in diverse SES. The first tier of this f ...

Resilience Alliance2015

The role of fluctuations in ecological patterns and processes

Andrea Giometto

Fluctuations are ubiquitous in nature and are relevant for nearly every ecological process. The main sources of fluctuations in population abundances are demographic and environmental stochasticity, whose effect on local population dynamics, metapopulation ...

EPFL2015