Ana Jacinta Soares
CMAT, Universidade do Minho
ANAP group seminar
An essential concept in our society is the territorial resilience, which represents the ability of a system to tolerate the impact of adverse circumstances and gradually adapt its configuration. The intricate structure of an environmental system can be modelled using ecological networks that describe a mosaic of interconnected non-uniform landscape regions.
Motivated by these considerations, we developed a human-landscape model for a network of Landscape Units (LUs), consisting of a network of interacting dynamical systems, all sharing the same qualitative structure. The interaction among the various dynamical systems is defined by a linear diffusivity term describing the coupling between each LU in the mosaic and its neighbours in terms of exchanging biological energy. We studied the dynamical system, existence of equilibria and their stability, and possible occurrence of Hopf bifurcations leading to periodic oscillations of environmental and human variables.
In this seminar, we present the model and its main properties. Then we show some numerical simulations of the network model for different scenarios of an environmental system where rather compact built-up territorial patches interact with high quality green areas.
The main results presented here have been obtained in a joint work with Rossella Della Marca and Maria Groppi.