Socioecological regime shifts in the setting of complex social interactions

Abstract

The coupling between social and ecological system has become more ubiquitous and predominant in the current era. The strong interaction between these systems can bring about regime shifts which in the extreme can lead to the collapse of social cooperation and the extinction of ecological resources. In this paper, we study the occurrence of such regime shifts in the context of a coupled social-ecological system where social cooperation is established by means of sanction that punishes local selfish act and promotes norms that prescribe nonexcessive resource extraction. In particular, we investigate the role of social networks on social-ecological regimes shift and the corresponding hysteresis effects caused by the local ostracism mechanism under different social and ecological parameters. Our results show that a lowering of network degree reduces the hysteresis effect and also alters the tipping point, which is duly verified by our numerical results and analytical estimation. Interestingly, the hysteresis effect is found to be stronger in scale-free network in comparison with random network even when both networks have the same average degree. These results provide deeper insights into the resilience of these systems, and can have important implications on the management of coupled social-ecological systems with complex social interactions.