Background

Under the broad heading of 'Sustainability and Resilience', my interests are in how the resilience of natural systems changes over time, and how humans can best interact with natural systems in ways which optimise both service provision and system sustainability/resilience.

Many human-environmental systems, and arguably all of them, be classified as 'complex systems'. Such systems are composed of many interacting elements, whose behaviour is often dominated by local interactions with other similar elements/agents. Repeated and simultaneous interactions between individuals can produce strong emergent phenomena, evident at larger scales, which bare little resemblance to the behaviour of individual elements at the micro-scale. The emergent properties can be in the domains of time and/or space, evident for example in observable spatial structures/patterns, swarms, trends, regime shifts. The global system-wide (macro-scale) phenomena can of course feed back down to the individuals, completing the bottom-up / top-down connection. Finding, exploring and modelling the links between micro-scale and system-wide behaviours, in the context of human-environmental systems, is a theme common to much of the work described in this section.