Generalized modeling of empirical social-ecological systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews generalized modeling as a powerful approach to analyze complex social-ecological systems, demonstrated through its application to the Baltic Sea cod fishery, enabling understanding despite incomplete knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces generalized modeling as a method for analyzing social-ecological systems and demonstrates its application to empirical data, addressing challenges of complexity and limited knowledge.

Findings

Generalized modeling can analyze regime shifts in social-ecological systems.

Application to Baltic Sea cod fishery shows its practical utility.

Provides a framework for understanding complex system dynamics.

Abstract

Modeling social-ecological systems is difficult due to the complexity of ecosystems and of individual and collective human behavior. Key components of the social-ecological system are often over-simplified or omitted. Generalized modeling is a dynamical systems approach that can overcome some of these challenges. It can rigorously analyze qualitative system dynamics such as regime shifts despite incomplete knowledge of the model's constituent processes. Here, we review generalized modeling and use a recent study on the Baltic Sea cod fishery's boom and collapse to demonstrate its application to modeling the dynamics of empirical social-ecological systems. These empirical applications demand new methods of analysis suited to larger, more complicated generalized models. Generalized modeling is a promising tool for rapidly developing mathematically rigorous, process-based understanding of a social-ecological system's dynamics despite limited knowledge of the system.