Assessing impacts of bycatch policies and fishers' heterogeneous information on food webs and fishery sustainability.

Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) has emerged as a promising framework for understanding and managing the long-term interactions between fisheries and the larger marine ecosystems in which they are nested. However, successful implementation of EBFM has been elusive because we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the network of interacting species in marine ecosystems (the food web) and the dynamic relationship between the food web and the humans who harvest those ecosystems. Here, we advance such understanding by developing a network framework that integrates the complexity of food webs with the economic dynamics of different management policies.

Effect of migrations on synchrony in host-parasitoid system.

Insect outbreaks can cause large scale defoliation of forest trees or destruction of crops, leading to ecosystem degradation and economic losses. Some outbreaks occur simultaneously across large geographic scales and some outbreaks occur periodically every few years across space. Parasitoids are a natural enemy of these defoliators and could help mitigate these pest outbreaks.

When big data fails: Adaptive agents using coarse-grained information have competitive advantage.

The recent trend for acquiring big data assumes that possessing quantitatively more and qualitatively finer data necessarily provides an advantage that may be critical in competitive situations. Using a model complex adaptive system where agents compete for a limited resource using information coarse grained to different levels, we show that agents having access to more and better data perform worse than others in certain situations. The relation between information asymmetry and individual payoffs is seen to be complex, depending on the composition of the population of competing agents.