Community ecology foundations of social-ecological collapse

Abstract Social-ecological collapse research often borrows concepts from community ecology, including resilience, redundancy, modularity, and critical slowing down, yet rarely grounds them in the ecological mechanisms that give them predictive power. The article proposes that community resilience is an emergent property of mutualistic interaction networks in social-ecological systems, arising from network architecture rather than loose analogy. Here, community embeddedness denotes cooperative tie density within human communities and is proposed as the social-ecological counterpart of connectance in mutualistic networks. Resilience itself emerges from the wider cooperative-network architecture, of which connectance is one dimension alongside redundancy, modularity, nestedness, and mutualistic strength. This correspondence yields a conditional hypothesis. Provided human cooperative systems exhibit the dynamical prerequisites for a fold-type transition (bistability, timescale separation, and a slow control parameter approaching a threshold), embeddedness erosion should exhibit the early-warning signatures preceding ecological collapse: declining recovery speed, rising temporal variance, and rising autocorrelation before visible fragmentation. Community embeddedness loss is identified as a theoretically motivated candidate early-warning indicator of social-ecological collapse; four falsifiable predictions are derived, and the framework connects community ecology directly with catastrophic risk research.