Networks and Extinction
Since ecological systems are complex networks of interactions between different species, network dynamics can be used to predict the effect of human activity on ecological systems.
This paper studies the dynamics of pollination network, and find tipping points between between extinction and survival, as we would expect based on what we’ve learnt from this class. The paper also finds a number of interesting effects, namely that the resilience to perturbing (e.g. human) influences is higher than we thought, and that the effects of perturbations have some lag period, i.e. affect the system after some time delay, which makes it hard to time-critically judge the effect of human activity on the environment.