Interdisciplinary Training in
Complex Networks and Systems

Abstract

Ecological systems have been understood as networks for at least the 150 years since Darwin famously articulated the “tangled banks” within which interacting species live, reproduce and evolve.  However, ecologists have only recently returned to the network concept having long preferred more reductionist approaches focused on simpler frameworks typically including fewer components and types of interactions.   This more recent network approach integrates much of what has been learned about these components including their interaction patterns and metabolic scaling with body size to successfully predict the complex structure and nonlinear dynamics of ecological systems.   The mechanistic basis of this integration consists of consumer-resource interactions among organisms including plants, animals, fungi, microbes and their environment.   Effects including competition, mutualism and impacts of species loss and invasion emerge from these mechanisms which allows better understanding and prediction of the sustainability of ecological systems including and excluding humans.   This presentation will describe this approach to ecological sustainability based on human-natural networks of consumer-resource interactions as well as several of its more notable achievements regarding the structure and dynamics of food webs, pollination networks and fisheries.   Both the scientific synthesis of ecological subdisciplines from organismal through population, community and ecosystem levels and the application of these advances to further integration with social sciences in order to manage ecosystems such as fisheries and grasslands will be highlighted.

Biography

Dr. Neo Martinez studies the structure and function of whole ecosystems by developing and empirically testing basic and applied theory about complex networks in general and ecological networks in specific including food webs and pollination networks.  Neo is an international leader in network, computational, ecological, and interdisciplinary science.  His lab’s research integrates biology, math, computer science, economics, and anthropology and his lab’s network visualizations have become widely recognized icons of ecological complexity.  Neo received his B.S. in Biology from Cornell, his M.S. in Limnology and Oceanography from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and his interdisciplinary M.S. and Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California at Berkeley where he is an Affiliated Faculty and taught graduate coursework on ecological economics.  He did his postdoctoral work at the Bodega Marine Lab of the University of California at Davis and the Centre for Population Biology of the Imperial College in the U.K.   He served as a Professor at San Francisco State University and the University of Arizona, as a visiting professor of nonlinear dynamics at Cornell University, and as faculty of the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School.  He also served as a senior research fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara as well as at the University of Potsdam in Germany.  Other positions include over a decade as principle investigator at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and his elected appointment to the Board of Directors of SACNAS Advancing Hispanics/Chicanos and Native Americans in Science which is nationally recognized as the preeminent society in supporting minorities in higher education in which Director Martinez has long been active.

CNS-NRT Student Discussion Seminar

• Lead: 
• Date/Time: November 2, 2018. 1:30pm
• Location: Informatics West, Room 105

Papers to be discussed

• A. Kuparinen, A. Boit, F.S. Valdovinos, H. Lassaux & Neo D. Martinez [2016] Fishing-induced life-history changes degrade and destabilize harvested ecosystems. Scientific Reports, 6:22245.