Publications

Ayllon, D., Railsback, S.F., Gallagher, C., Augusiak, J., Baveco, H., Berger, U., Charles, S., Martin, R., Focks, A., Galic, N., Liu, C., Loon, E.E. van, Nabe-Nielsen, J., Piou, C., Polhill, J.G., Preuss, T.G., Radchuk, V., Schmolke, A., Stadnicka-Michalak, J., Thorbek, P. & Grimm, V. 2021. Keeping modelling notebooks with TRACE: Good for you and good for environmental research and management support. Environmental Modelling & Software 136, 104932

The acceptance and usefulness of simulation models are often limited by the efficiency, transparency, reproducibility, and reliability of the modelling process. We address these issues by suggesting that modellers (1) “trace” the iterative modelling process by keeping a modelling notebook corresponding to the laboratory notebooks used by empirical researchers, (2) use a standardized notebook structure and terminology based on ...

Martin, R., Radosavljevic, S. and Schlüter, M., 2020. Short-term decisions in lake restoration have long-term consequences for water quality. Regional Environmental Change, 20(3), pp.1-12.

Ecological regime shifts from clear to turbid water states in shallow temperate lakes are quite well-investigated phenomena but critical time lags from human interaction with the lake and restoration activities are much less understood. This is a complex challenge for institutions who manage lakes but are usually less familiar with non-linear dynamics, slow and fast influences on water quality and how to manage those from a so...

Martin, R., Schlüter, M., Blenckner, T. 2020. The importance of transient social dynamics for restoring ecosystems beyond ecological tipping points. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1817154117

Managing regime shifts is often associated with “turning back from the brink” assuming that once a system has transgressed a tipping point, it moves unavoidably toward the undesired state. We show that a regime shift is rather a slippery slope that can be managed and even reversed when transient dynamics and time lags in the coupled social-ecological system are taken into account. We constructed an empirically based simulatio...

Schlüter, M., Orach, K., Lindkvist, E., Martin, R., Wijermans, N. et al. 2019. Toward a methodology for explaining and theorizing about social-ecological phenomena. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Volume 39, August 2019, Pages 44-53

Explanations that account for complex causation, emergence, and social-ecological interdependence are necessary for building theories of social-ecological phenomena. Social-ecological systems (SES) research has accumulated rich empirical understanding of SES; however, integration of this knowledge toward contextualized generalizations, or middle-range theories, remains challenging. We discuss the potential of an iterative and ...

Schlüter, M., L. J. Haider, S. J. Lade, E. Lindkvist, R. Martin, K. Orach, N. Wijermans, and C. Folke. 2019. Capturing emergent phenomena in social-ecological systems: an analytical framework. Ecology and Society 24(3):11.https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11012-240311

 Social-ecological systems (SES) are complex adaptive systems. Social-ecological system phenomena, such as regime shifts, transformations, or traps, emerge from interactions among and between human and nonhuman entities within and across scales. Analyses of SES phenomena thus require approaches that can account for (1) the intertwinedness of social and ecological processes and (2) the ways they jointly give rise to emergent so...

Langhans, S.D., Domisch, S., Balbi, S., Delacámara, G., et.al. 2019. Combining eight research areas to foster the uptake of ecosystem‐based management in fresh waters. Aquatic Conservation, Volume 29, Issue 7, Special Issue: Freshwater Conservation in the Anthropocene, July 2019, Pages 1161-1173

Freshwater ecosystems are under a constant risk of being irreversibly damaged by human pressures that threaten their biodiversity, the sustainability of ecosystem services (ESs), and human well‐being. Despite the implementation of various environmental regulations, the challenges of safeguarding freshwater assets have so far not been tackled successfully. A promising way forward to stop the loss of freshwater biodiversity and...

Martin, R., A. Linstaedter, K. Frank, B. Mueller. 2016. Livelihood security in face of drought: Assessing the vulnerability of pastoral households. Environmental Modelling & Software 75: 414 – 423.

Livestock grazing in drylands supports pastoral livelihoods but is facing multiple changes including shocks such as severe droughts. Herdsmen specifically cite drought events as a reason for the abandonment of their transhumance practices. The purpose of this study is to assess the relevance of drought as a driving force for losses of livelihood security leading to a specific systemic change – households abandoning transhumant...

Schulze, J., R. Martin, A. Finger, C. Henzen, M. Lindner, K. Pietzsch, A. Werntze, U. Zander, R. Seppelt. 2015. Design, implementation and test of a serious online game for exploring complex relationships of sustainable land management and human well-being. Environmental Modelling and Software 65: 58–66.

Land is a limited resource providing various services. Decisions on land use shape the distribution of these life support functions and thus require understanding of complex feedbacks between decisions on land use and human resource appropriation. Due to multiple nonlinear feedbacks between management, productivity, environmental quality, and human well-being, complexity is an inherent property of land systems. We present an...

Martin, R., M. Schlüter. 2015. Combining system dynamics and agent-based modeling to analyze social-ecological interactions; An example from modeling restoration of a shallow lake. Frontiers in Environmental Science 3:66. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2015.00066

Modeling social-ecological interactions between humans and ecosystems to analyze their implications for sustainable management of social-ecological systems (SES) has multiple challenges. When integrating social and ecological dynamics, which are often studied separately, one has to deal with different modeling paradigms, levels of analysis, temporal and spatial scales, and data availabilities in the social and ecological domai...