Publications

Rocha, J.C. & Daume, S. 2021. Data mining and pattern recognition. In: Biggs et al. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems, Taylor & Francis Group, pp.241–251.

This chapter is part of The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems which provides a synthetic guide to the range of methods that can be employed in social-ecological systems (SES) research. The book is primarily targeted at graduate students, lecturers and researchers working on SES, and has been written in a style that is accessible to readers entering the field from a variety of different disci...

Calderon-Contreras, R., Balvanera, P., Trimble, M., Langle-Flores, A., Jobbagy, E., Maass Moreno, M., Marcone, J., Mazzeo, N., Munoz Anaya, M.M., Ortiz-Rodriguez, I.A., Perevochtchikova, M., Avila-Foucat, S., Bonilla-Moheno, M., Clark, L.B., Equihua, M., Ayala-Orozco, B., Bueno, I., Hensler, L., Leyva Aguilera, J.C., Martinez Ramos, M., Mercon, J., Azahara Mesa-Jurado, M., Osterblom, H., Pacheco-Vega, R., Perez Alcantara, B., Perez-Maqueo, O., Porter-Bolland, L., Quijas, S., Quiroz Rosas, L.E., Rios Patron, E., Rocha-Gordo, J.C., Rojo Negrete, I.A., Piedad Romero-Duque, L., Rosell, J.A., Scheffer, M., Vazquez, L.-B., Villada Canela, M. & Velazquez, M. 2021. A regional PECS node built from place-based social-ecological sustainability research in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ecosystems and People doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2021.2000501

Sustainability requires a combination of meaningful co-production of locally relevant solutions, synthesis of insights gained across regions, and increased cooperation between science, policy and practice. The Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) has been coordinating Place-Based Social-Ecological Sustainability Research (PBSESR) across the globe and emphasizes the need for regional scientific nodes from diverse b...

Folke, C., Haider, L., Lade, S., Norström, A., Rocha, J.. 2021. Resilience and social-ecological systems: A handful of frontiers. Global Environmental Change. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102400

Fifteen years have passed since the publication in Global Environmental Change of the article Resilience: the emergence of a perspective of social-ecological systems analyses (Folke 2006). Resilience of social-ecological systems, now widely spread, is found in many academic fields, contributing exciting work and novel insights. Social-ecological resilience thinking has become part of practice, policy, and business, ranging fr...

Rocha, J., Lanyon, C., Peterson, G.. 2021. Upscaling the resilience assessment through comparative analysis. SocArXiv. July 8. doi:10.31235/osf.io/9ju2z.

Resilience is the capacity of any system to maintain its function, structure and identity despite disturbances. Assessing resilience has been elusive due to high levels of abstraction that are difficult to empirically test, or the lack of high quality data required once appropriate proxies are identified. Most resilience assessments are limited to specific situation arenas, making comparision one of the unresolved challenges. ...

Lade, S.J., Wang-Erlandsson, L., Staal, A. & Rocha, J.C. 2021. Empirical pressure-response relations can benefit assessment of safe operating spaces. Nature Ecology & Evolution 5(8), 1078–1079

In a recent study, Hillebrand et al. tested ecosystem pressure-response data from multiple meta-analyses for multimodality and changing variance, both indicators of ‘tipping point’ thresholds that lead to discontinuous responses such as regime shifts. They found that such thresholds were difficult to detect and argued that threshold and safe operating space concepts are therefore not suitable for environmental management and ...

Rockström, J., Gupta, J., Lenton, T.M., Qin, D., Lade, S.J., Abrams, J.F., Jacobson, L., Rocha, J.C., Zimm, C., Bai, X., Bala, G., Bringezu, S., Broadgate, W., Bunn, S.E., DeClerck, F., Ebi, K.L., Gong, P., Gordon, C., Kanie, N., Liverman, D.M., Nakicenovic, N., Obura, D., Ramanathan, V., Verburg, P.H., van Vuuren, D.P. & Winkelmann, R. 2021. Identifying a safe and just corridor for people and the planet. Earths Future 9(4), e2020EF001866.

Keeping the Earth system in a stable and resilient state, to safeguard Earth's life support systems while ensuring that Earth's benefits, risks, and related responsibilities are equitably shared, constitutes the grand challenge for human development in the Anthropocene. Here, we describe a framework that the recently formed Earth Commission will use to define and quantify target ranges for a “safe and just corridor” that meet...

Rocha, J., Mazzeo, N., Piaggio, M. and Carriquiry, M., 2020. Seeking sustainable pathways for land use in Latin America. Ecology and Society, 25(3).

Achieving sustainable development goals in Latin America, and doing resilience research for that matter, has its own challenges. The Global South is faced with different types of problems, and therefore solutions, in achieving global sustainability ambitions (Nagendra 2018, Nagendra et al. 2018). Although each country has its own particularities, the region shares a recent colonial past that focused on natural resource extract...

Rocha, J. C., Malmborg, K., Gordon, L. J., Brauman, K. A. & DeClerck. 2019. Mapping social ecological systems archetypes. Environ Res Lett (2019). doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ab666e

Achieving sustainable development goals requires targeting and monitoring sustainable solutions tailored to different social and ecological contexts. A social-ecological systems (SESs) framework was developed to help diagnose problems, identify complex interactions, and solutions tailored to each SES. Here we develop a data-driven method for upscaling the SES framework and apply it to a context where data is scarce, but also ...

Rocha, J. C., M. Baraibar, L. Deutsch, A. de Bremond, J. Oestreicher, F. Rositano, and C. Gelabert. 2019. Toward understanding the dynamics of land change in Latin America: potential utility of a resilience approach for building archetypes of land-systems change. Ecology and Society 24(1):17. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10349-240117

Climate change, financial shocks, and fluctuations in international trade are some of the reasons why resilience is increasingly invoked in discussions about land-use policy. However, resilience assessments come with the challenge of operationalization, upscaling their conclusions while considering the context-specific nature of land-use dynamics and the common lack of long-term data. We revisit the approach of system archetyp...

Rocha, JC, Peterson, G, Bodin, Ö, and Levin, S. 2018. Science 362 (6421), 1379-1383. DOI: 10.1126/science.aat7850

Regime shifts are large, abrupt, and persistent critical transitions in the function and structure of ecosystems. Yet, it is unknown how these transitions will interact, whether the occurrence of one will increase the likelihood of another or simply correlate at distant places. We explored two types of cascading effects: Domino effects create one-way dependencies, whereas hidden feedbacks produce two-way interactions. We compa...