About
Understanding how populations and ecosystems respond to change is becoming increasingly critical due to the rising incidence of environmental and social perturbations, including ‘natural’ disturbances (e.g., natural disasters, climatic extremes), side effects of human activities (e.g., wildlife habitat fragmentation; forced migration of human populations), or intentional management actions (e.g., translocations or culling in animal populations; lockdowns in human societies). Response to change is seen as an emergent property of populations and is made up of an aggregate of individual responses. Thus, understanding individuals' response and behavior can be key to linking the effects of perturbations from the individual level up to that of an entire ecological community.
In the face of environmental change, individuals (both animals and humans) will react behaviorally to survive and improve their outlook. Although each individual-level response has a small effect, at the population level they can magnify to produce complex and impactful emergent “bottom-up” changes. For instance, changes in temperature patterns may prompt shifts in migration patterns via individual movements, influencing the distribution and abundance of species across regions. Similarly, when wildfire smoke spreads into human areas it can drastically alter human recreational behaviors, with profound effects on the emergent interaction network that are difficult to predict a priori. These interaction networks are then expected to have important effects on disease dynamics in the wake of a disturbance. Conversely, intentional behavioral responses to sudden large-scale disturbances, such as adherence to social distancing during global pandemics, can influence the structure of interaction networks in a “top-down” fashion. These reciprocal processes underscore the dynamic interplay between the climate emergency and human decision-making processes, highlighting the need for adaptive strategies at a broader societal level. This interconnectedness necessitates a comprehensive understanding of behavioral processes from local microenvironments to global macroscopic phenomena, with feedback processes occurring in both directions. We propose here the first Satellite Meeting on Disturbance on Complex Interaction Networks, which will explore behavioral responses to disturbance and its impact on the structure of interaction networks across scales. Understanding these responses at different scales is integral to unraveling the complexities of how populations adapt to and navigate changing environments and emergencies. We feature a series of speakers that have investigated connections between environmental disturbance and behavioral interaction network structure in animals and humans. By featuring a variety of perspectives on the directionality of causal links, across several different ecological scales and systems, we will aim to derive a generalizable theory of the links between disturbance, behavior, and the function of complex systems such as infectious disease outbreaks and climate change adaptation. |