Resilience thinking addresses the dynamics and development of complex social–ecological systems (SES). Three aspects are central: resilience, adaptability and transformability. These aspects interrelate across multiple scales. Resilience in this context is the capacity of a SES to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds. Adaptability is part of resilience. It represen...

Evolutionary ecological frameworks can give us new insights into the emergence of human adaptations such as language and cultural learning. There now exist several well-speciŽed models of the social and ecological conditions in which the human capacity for language came under strong positive selection pressure. We critically review them, and ask how we can test them using archaeological evidenc...

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Adaptation to varied habitats confers ecological versatility and the capacity for coarse-grained distribution across heterogeneous habitats, whereas ecological specialization implies a restricted pattern. Ecogeography and adaptive trairs help to determine whether farmers are able to adjust their diverse erops to socioeeonomie and environmental changes (a process known as in situ conservation) o...

State capacity matters for growth. I test Bates’ explanation of pre-colonial African states. He argues that trade across ecological boundaries promoted states. I find that African societies in ecologically diverse environments had more centralized states. This is robust to reverse causation, omitted heterogeneity, and alternative interpretations of the link between diversity and states. Ecologi...

Adaptation to varied habitats confers ecological versatility and the capacity for coarse-grained distribution across heterogeneous habitats, whereas ecological specialization implies a restricted pattern. Ecogeography and adaptive trairs help to determine whether farmers are able to adjust their diverse erops to socioeeonomie and environmental changes (a process known as in situ conservation) o...

How to explain the effect of seasonal water transfer on the carbon stocks of Baiyangdian wetland is studied. The ecological model of the relationship between the carbon stocks and water depth fluctuation of the reed was established by using STELLA software. For the first time the Michaelis-Menten equation (1) introduced the relation function between the water depth and reed environmental carryi...

We present properties of Lotka-Volterra equations describing ecological competition among a large number of interacting species. First we extend previous stability conditions to the case of a non-homogeneous niche space, i.e. that of a carrying capacity depending on the species trait. Second, we discuss mechanisms leading to species clustering and obtain an analytical solution for a state with ...