Jennifer Dunne, vice president of science at SFI, studies the patterns and principles of ecological networks with computational modeling.
richness through change. Dunne studies food webs, and by using computational models and network theories (think Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon), she’s able to paint a picture of how ecosystems adapt to new dynamics, such as the introduction of humans. In the case of Sanak, an island off the coast of Alaska, she learned that hunter-gatherer societies first introduced to the region 6,000 years ago were linked to every species on the food chain without detriment through a tactic called prey-switching. “Humans were poised to have really big impacts on that system, potentially negative ones,” she says. “However, over the course of 6,000 years, there’s no evidence of long-term extinctions.” She believes the systems in Sanak thrived because the hunter-gatherers would consume whatever species were most available, like a food-chain buffet. By switching prey, humans
allowed less populous species to recuperate and minimized their own impact. Dunne is now studying a group of islands in Polynesia that were settled by humans about 1,000 years ago. Some settlers were hunter-gatherers, others brought species to farm, and a number of them traded. Some of the groups thrived while others didn’t, and Dunne wants to know why. “If we’re talking about sustainability with humans and the islands, ideally we’d like to be able to say something about how ‘if you do this, it’s going to have this kind of impact.’ But that’s a huge challenge,” she says. Dunne differentiates her work from environmentalism. SFI isn’t a sustainability center, she says, but what she can offer is a grounded scientific foundation that draws from social, computational, and ecological research. “That’s the kind of approach we trendmagazineglobal.com 191