Socioecological regime shifts in the setting of complex social interactions.

The coupling between social and ecological system has become more ubiquitous and predominant in the current era. The strong interaction between these systems can bring about regime shifts which in the extreme can lead to the collapse of social cooperation and the extinction of ecological resources. In this paper, we study the occurrence of such regime shifts in the context of a coupled social-ecological system where social cooperation is established by means of sanction that punishes local selfish act and promotes norms that prescribe nonexcessive resource extraction.