Networks
What connects to what
Everything that matters in the Anthropocene is a network: food webs, supply chains, river basins, grids, migration routes, kinship. Network science gives a common language for all of them, and with it a practical gift. It identifies the few nodes and links whose protection or repair changes the behaviour of the whole, which is how limited effort produces disproportionate result.
12 ways in
Scale-Free Networks
Networks in which a few nodes hold very many connections while most hold few, following a power law.
Open →Social Network Analysis
The mapping and measurement of relationships between people, organisations, or institutions.
Open →Small-World Networks
Networks that are highly clustered locally yet reachable globally in very few steps.
Open →Community Identification
Finding groups of nodes more densely connected to each other than to the rest of a network.
Open →Centrality
Measures of how important a node is within a network, by connections, by position, or by the flow it carries.
Open →Network Motifs
Small recurring wiring patterns that appear far more often in real networks than chance would allow.
Open →Graph Theory
The mathematics of nodes and edges, and the foundation beneath every network science result.
Open →Scaling
Regular mathematical relationships between the size of a system and its properties.
Open →Robustness and Vulnerability
How much damage a network absorbs before its function breaks, and where the breaking points lie.
Open →Systems Biology
The study of living systems as integrated networks of genes, proteins, cells, and signals rather than as parts lists.
Open →Dynamical Networks
Networks whose structure or state changes over time rather than standing still.
Open →Adaptive Networks
Networks in which the structure changes the dynamics and the dynamics in turn change the structure.
Open →