Research Projects

Traditional models of ecological and environmental systems have focused on natural resource dynamics and optimal management. Human behaviour has either been overlooked or oversimplified and remains a crucial uncertainty for sustainable management. Since natural resource use systems are social-ecological/social-environmental where humans both influence and depend on the environment, their adaptive responses to policies and environmental change must be explicitly modelled. Integrating human behaviour with ecological/environmental system is essential to understand interactions in systems such as consumer-resource dynamics, fisheries, forests, lakes, and land use. Such coupled models are crucial for evaluating social interventions, guiding policy, and preventing ecological collapse. Ocean acidification poses a major threat to marine ecosystems due to increasing atmospheric CO₂ levels. Predator–prey relationships play a crucial role in maintaining the balance and stability of marine ecosystems. These interactions regulate population sizes, promote biodiversity, and drive evolutionary adaptations in both predators and prey. Several experimental studies suggest that the capture success of predators in marine ecosystems significantly reduce when exposed to elevated CO₂ levels. Additionally, prey survival rates decline under high CO₂ conditions due to several behavioural disruptions. Since elevated CO₂ levels are primarily caused by human activities, human behaviour plays a critical role in the functioning of such predator–prey systems. We consider a socio-ecological system comprising an ecological subsystem that describes prey-predator interactions, and a socio-economic subsystem in which human behaviour is represented by a dynamic variable. This variable reflects individual opinions on CO₂ emissions resulting from anthropogenic activities. Individuals in the population may adopt behaviours to reduce CO₂ emissions by taking actions such as opposing deforestation (cooperators) or they may choose an economically costly option by higher CO₂ emissions and clear the forest for their own needs (non-cooperators). We consider logit best-response dynamics to model such human behaviour. Modelling such systems with socio-economic choices is referred to as socio-ecological systems. We validate our proposed mathematical model using real data and investigate the sensitivity of key model parameters with respect to CO₂ levels. The primary motivation of our study is to investigate how individuals within a population can most effectively prevent the extinction of the predator, or both the prey and predator species by adopting various environment-oriented actions. Moreover, we are interested in identifying abrupt changes in the associated system, which are characterized by a regime shift in ecosystems, often with significant consequences for people’s socio-economic choices.