Assessing Resilience of Complex Socio-ecological Systems through Loop Dominance Analysis

摘要

Although resilience is an important concept to assess the vulnerability of ecological systems, literature is still unclear on how to measure it in more complex social-ecological systems. This paper presents a practical procedure to assess the degree of resilience of fisheries which builds on system dynamics analysis, specifically on the recent field of research known as loop dominance analysis. It shows that such systems may lose resilience when they exceed certain thresholds beyond which shifts in dominance of feedback loops take place and suggests how to identify those thresholds.