Romina

Martin

PhD

Researcher

romina.martin@su.se

+46 8-674 7718

RSS-link

Profile summary

  • Social-ecological interactions
  • Agent-based modeling
  • Participatory modeling
  • Resilience principles
  • Ecosystem services
  • Freshwater management
  • Anticipatory governance

As a modeller, Romina investigates complexity in social-ecological interactions to better explain and support sustainable management and governance in European landscapes

Martin is passionate about learning together. To her, it feels most meaningful to learn within a diverse team and with a shared purpose of jointly disentangling complexity in social-ecological systems.

Since 2013, she has worked with professor Maja Schlüter, and focused on the formal description of social-ecological interactions and the analysis of emerging, characteristic patterns, such as regime shifts or bundles of ecosystem services. For ten years, this was related to mainly lake management and governance. Now, Martin studies forestry and how policies in Europe have shaped it.

Martin is interested in diverse modelling tools which enable better thinking and understanding of how ecosystems link to human well-being. Towards this aim, Martin develops bioeconomic, agent-based, and system dynamics models and simulates decision-making in the human-environmental interface. Further, she engages in participatory, transdisciplinary processes in order to facilitate systematic thinking on social-ecological systems.

Martin is teaching courses at the Bachelors and Masters level on sustainability science, adaptive processes in social-ecological systems, and systems thinking.

Martin graduated in computer science and biology and holds a PhD in biology from the University in Cologne (2013), Germany, supervised by Prof. Michael Bonkowski and Dr. Anja Linstädter. The topic of her PhD was pastoral livelihood security and rangeland management in drylands using ecological-economic modelling approaches. The project was conducted in close collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig in the Department of Ecological Modelling, where most of the work was carried out and supervised by Prof. Karin Frank and Dr. Birgit Müller. In 2013, she moved to the SRC to work with centre professor Maja Schlüter, in three consecutive projects focusing on lake management with regime shifts and biodiversity scenarios: LimnoTip, Aquacross.eu, and LimnoScenES. In 2023, Martin started working in FairTrans with Thomas Hahn and in ReConnect with Erik Andersson.

Since its creation in 2019, Martin has been a member of the Researchers’ Desk, a researchers network to communicate about the climate crises to the broad public. The network is based in Sweden with most of its members situated in Stockholm but also from Uppsala, Götheborg and Lund. Since 2021, Martin has been a board member at Researchers’ Desk.

In 2023, Martin is co-convening the new working group on Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.

Beyond simulating complex features from social-ecological systems, Martin is interested in disentangling and translating these complexities for transdisciplinary activities or environmental education purposes. Along with her PhD, Martin developed a board game on pastoral rangeland management, “NomadSed”, and was involved in analysing and improving an online game on sustainable land management, “LandYous”.

Supervision

Aminta Estrada-Leyva

MSc

Co-supervisor

Jorinde-Marie Rieger

MSc

Co-supervisor

Publications by Martin, Romina

Keeping modelling notebooks with TRACE: Good for you and good for environmental research and management support

Journal / article | 2021

Ayllon, D., Railsback, S.F., Gallagher, C., Augusiak, J., Baveco, H., Berger, U., Charles, S., Martin, R., Focks, A., Galic, N., Liu, C., Loon, E.E. van, Nabe-Nielsen, J., Piou, C., Polhill, J.G., Preuss, T.G., Radchuk, V., Schmolke, A., Stadnicka-Michalak, J., Thorbek, P. & Grimm, V. 2021. Keeping modelling notebooks with TRACE: Good for you and good for environmental research and management support. Environmental Modelling & Software 136, 104932

The acceptance and usefulness of simulation models are often limited by the efficiency, transparency, reproducibility, and reliability of the modelling process. We address these issues by suggesting that modellers (1) “trace” the iterative modelling process by keeping a modelling notebook corresponding to the laboratory notebooks used by empirical researchers, (2) use a standardized notebook structure and terminology based on ...

Short-term decisions in lake restoration have long-term consequences for water quality

Journal / article | 2020

Martin, R., Radosavljevic, S. and Schlüter, M., 2020. Short-term decisions in lake restoration have long-term consequences for water quality. Regional Environmental Change, 20(3), pp.1-12.

Ecological regime shifts from clear to turbid water states in shallow temperate lakes are quite well-investigated phenomena but critical time lags from human interaction with the lake and restoration activities are much less understood. This is a complex challenge for institutions who manage lakes but are usually less familiar with non-linear dynamics, slow and fast influences on water quality and how to manage those from a so...

The importance of transient social dynamics for restoring ecosystems beyond ecological tipping points

Journal / article | 2020

Martin, R., Schlüter, M., Blenckner, T. 2020. The importance of transient social dynamics for restoring ecosystems beyond ecological tipping points. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1817154117

Managing regime shifts is often associated with “turning back from the brink” assuming that once a system has transgressed a tipping point, it moves unavoidably toward the undesired state. We show that a regime shift is rather a slippery slope that can be managed and even reversed when transient dynamics and time lags in the coupled social-ecological system are taken into account. We constructed an empirically based simulatio...

Toward a methodology for explaining and theorizing about social-ecological phenomena

Journal / article | 2019

Schlüter, M., Orach, K., Lindkvist, E., Martin, R., Wijermans, N. et al. 2019. Toward a methodology for explaining and theorizing about social-ecological phenomena. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Volume 39, August 2019, Pages 44-53

Explanations that account for complex causation, emergence, and social-ecological interdependence are necessary for building theories of social-ecological phenomena. Social-ecological systems (SES) research has accumulated rich empirical understanding of SES; however, integration of this knowledge toward contextualized generalizations, or middle-range theories, remains challenging. We discuss the potential of an iterative and ...