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Trabajo presentado en el IFISC Poster Party (online).-- The IFISC Poster Party is an annual activity where PhD students and postdoctoral researchers of IFISC present their research in a poster format.-- Dynamics and Collective Phenomena in Social and Socio-technical Systems., Fisheries in waters beyond national jurisdiction (“high seas”) are difficult to monitor and manage. Their regulation for sustainability requires critical information on how fishing effort is distributed across fishing and landing areas, including possible border effects at the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) limits. We infer the global network linking harbors supporting fishing vessels to fishing areas in high seas from automatic identification system tracking data in 2014, observing a modular structure, with vessels departing from a given harbor fishing mostly in a single province. The top 16% of these harbors support 84% of fishing effort in high seas, with harbors in low-and middle-income countries ranked among the top supporters. Fishing effort concentrates along narrow strips attached to the boundaries of EEZs with productive fisheries, identifying a free-riding behavior that jeopardizes efforts by nations to sustainably manage their fisheries, perpetuating the tragedy of the commons affecting global fishery resources.

18 pages, 5 figures, supplementary data https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109175.-- The data supporting the findings of this study are available in the Supplementary Materials (Appendix 3–5, Table A3-A5). Raw datasets (where available) and results summary tables for each analysis of human mobility and empirical datasets are deposited in a github repository: https://github.com/rjcommand/PAN-Environment, The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence. However, negative effects of lockdown on conservation also emerged, as confinement resulted in some park officials being unable to perform conservation, restoration and enforcement tasks, resulting in local increases in illegal activities such as hunting. Overall, there is a complex mixture of positive and negative effects of the pandemic lockdown on nature, all of which have the potential to lead to cascading responses which in turn impact wildlife and nature conservation. While the net effect of the lockdown will need to be assessed over years as data becomes available and persistent effects emerge, immediate responses were detected across the world. Thus initial qualitative and quantitative data arising from this serendipitous global quasi-experimental perturbation highlights the dual role that humans play in threatening and protecting species and ecosystems. Pathways to favorably tilt this delicate balance include reducing impacts and increasing conservation effectiveness, The Canada Research Chairs program provided funding for the core writing team. Field research funding was provided by A.G. Leventis Foundation; Agence Nationale de la Recherche, [grant number ANR-18-32–0010CE-01 (JCJC PEPPER)]; Agencia Estatal de Investigaci; Agência Regional para o Desenvolvimento da Investigação Tecnologia e Inovação (ARDITI), [grant number M1420-09-5369-FSE-000002]; Alan Peterson; ArcticNet; Arkadaşlar; Army Corp of Engineers; Artificial Reef Program; Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), National Collaborative; Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), University of Tasmania; Australian Institute of Marine Science; Australian Research Council, [grant number LP140100222]; Bai Xian Asia Institute; Batubay Özkan; BC Hydro Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Bertarelli Foundation; Bertarelli Programme in Marine Science; Bilge Bahar; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Biology Society of South Australia; Boston University; Burak Över; California State Assembly member Patrick O'Donnell; California State University Council on Ocean Affairs, Science & Technology; California State University Long Beach; Canada Foundation for Innovation (Major Science Initiative Fund and funding to Oceans Network Canada), [grant number MSI 30199 for ONC]; Cape Eleuthera Foundation; Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Charles Darwin Foundation, [grant number 2398]; Colombian Institute for the Development of Science and Technology (COLCIENCIAS), [grant number 811–2018]; Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, [grant number 0041–2020]; Columbia Basin Trust; Commission for Environmental Cooperation; Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Cultural practices and environmental certification of beaches, Universidad de la Costa, Colombia, [grant number INV.1106–01–002-15, 2020–21]; Department of Conservation New Zealand; Direction de l'Environnement de Polynésie Française; Disney Conservation Fund; DSI-NRF Centre of; Excellence at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology; Ecology Project International; Emin Özgür; Environment and Climate Change Canada; European Community: RTD programme - Species Support to Policies; European Community's Seventh Framework Programme; European Union; European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, [grant number 798091, 794938]; Faruk Eczacıbaşı; Faruk Yalçın Zoo; Field research funding was provided by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology; Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program; Fisheries and Oceans Canada; Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, [grant numbers FWC-12164, FWC-14026, FWC-19050]; Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional; Fonds québécois de la recherche nature et technologies; Foundation Segré; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT Portugal); Galapagos National Park Directorate research, [grant number PC-41-20]; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, [grant number GBMF9881 and GBMF 8072]; Government of Tristan da Cunha; Habitat; Conservation Trust Foundation; Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment; Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, Sevastopol, Russia; Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt; Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Brazil; Israeli Academy of Science's Adams Fellowship; King Family Trust; Labex, CORAIL, France; Liber Ero Fellowship; LIFE (European Union), [grant number LIFE16 NAT/BG/000874]; María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D; Ministry of Science and Innovation, FEDER, SPASIMM,; Spain, [grant number FIS2016–80067-P (AEI/FEDER, UE)]; MOE-Korea, [grant number 2020002990006]; Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund; Montreal Space for Life; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program; National Geographic Society, [grant numbers NGS-82515R-20]; National Natural Science Fund of China; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; National Parks Board, Singapore; National Science and Technology Major Project of China; National Science Foundation, [grant number DEB-1832016]; Natural Environment Research Council of the UK; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Alliance COVID-19 grant program, [grant numbers ALLRP 550721–20, RGPIN-2014-06229 (year: 2014), RGPIN-2016-05772 (year: 2016)]; Neiser Foundation; Nekton Foundation; Network of Centre of Excellence of Canada: ArcticNet; North Family Foundation; Ocean Tracking Network; Ömer Külahçıoğlu; Oregon State University; Parks Canada Agency (Lake Louise, Yoho, and Kootenay Field Unit); Pew Charitable Trusts; Porsim Kanaf partnership; President's International Fellowship Initiative for postdoctoral researchers Chinese Academy of Sciences, [grant number 2019 PB0143]; Red Sea Research Center; Regional Government of the Azores, [grant number M3.1a/F/025/2015]; Regione Toscana; Rotary Club of Rhinebeck; Save our Seas Foundation; Science & Technology (CSU COAST); Science City Davos, Naturforschende Gesellschaft Davos; Seha İşmen; Sentinelle Nord program from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund; Servizio Foreste e Fauna (Provincia Autonoma di Trento); Sigrid Rausing Trust; Simon Fraser University; Sitka Foundation; Sivil Toplum Geliştirme Merkezi Derneği; South African National Parks (SANParks); South Australian Department for Environment and Water; Southern California Tuna Club (SCTC); Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness; Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; State of California; Sternlicht Family Foundation; Suna Reyent; Sunshine Coast Regional Council; Tarea Vida, CEMZOC, Universidad de Oriente, Cuba, [grant number 10523, 2020]; Teck Coal; The Hamilton Waterfront Trust; The Ian Potter Foundation, Coastwest, Western Australian State NRM; The Red Sea Development Company; The Wanderlust Fund; The Whitley Fund; Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline; Tula Foundation (Hakai Institute); University of Arizona; University of Pisa; US Fish and Wildlife Service; US Geological Survey; Valencian Regional Government; Vermont Center for Ecostudies; Victorian Fisheries Authority; VMRC Fishing License Fund; and Wildlife Warriors Worldwide, With funding from the Spanish government through the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S

Understanding the response of ecological networks to perturbations and disruptive events is needed to anticipate the biodiversity loss and extinction cascades. Here, we study how network plasticity reshapes the topology of mutualistic networks in response to species loss. We analyze more than one hundred empirical mutualistic networks and considered random and targeted removal as mechanisms of species extinction. Network plasticity is modeled as either random rewiring, as the most parsimonious approach, or resource affinity-driven rewiring, as a proxy for encoding the phylogenetic similarity and functional redundancy among species. This redundancy should be positively correlated with the robustness of an ecosystem, as functions can be taken by other species once one of them is extinct. We show that effective modularity, i.e. the ability of an ecosystem to adapt or restructure, increases with increasing numbers of extinctions, and with decreasing the replacement probability. Importantly, modularity is mostly affected by the extinction rather than by rewiring mechanisms. These changes in community structure are reflected in the robustness and stability due to their positive correlation with modularity. Resource affinity-driven rewiring offers an increase of modularity, robustness, and stability which could be an evolutionary favored mechanism to prevent a cascade of co-extinctions., S.Sh., J.F.G. and V.M.E. acknowledge funding by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) through project SPASIMM FIS2016-80067-P (AEI/FEDER, UE). J.F.G. acknowledges funding through the postdoc program of the University of the Balearic Islands.

The voter model rules are simple, with agents copying the state of a random neighbor, but they lead to non-trivial dynamics. Besides opinion processes, the model has also applications for catalysis and species competition. Inspired by the temporal inhomogeneities found in human interactions, one can introduce ageing in the agents: the probability to update their state decreases with the time elapsed since the last change. This modified dynamics induces an approach to consensus via coarsening in single-layer complex networks. In this work, we investigate how a multilayer structure affects the dynamics of the ageing voter model. The system is studied as a function of the fraction of nodes sharing states across layers (multiplexity parameter q). We find that the dynamics of the system suffers a notable change at an intermediate value q*. Above it, the voter model always orders to an absorbing configuration. While below it a fraction of the realizations falls into dynamical traps associated to a spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this latter case, the majority opinion in the different layers takes opposite signs and the arrival at the absorbing state is indefinitely delayed due to ageing., Partial financial support has been received from the Spanish Ministry of Economy (MINECO) and FEDER (EU) under the project ESOTECOS (FIS2015-63628-C2-2-R).

8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, supplementary information https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-54936-y.-- The TARA expedition dataset is available at http://ocean-microbiome.embl.de/companion.html; the Malaspina expedition dataset is available at https://github.com/GuillemSalazar/MolEcol_2015; and the experimental data have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under the accession number SRP051855, Global ocean expeditions have provided minimum estimates of ocean’s prokaryote diversity, supported by apparent asymptotes in the number of prokaryotes with sampling effort, of about 40,000 species, representing, This research was funded by the Malaspina Circumnavigation Expedition supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project Consolider-Ingenio Malaspina 2010 (CSD2008-00077) as well as King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) through baseline funding to C.M. Duarte and X. Irigoien; by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) through projects SPASIMM FIS2016-80067-P (AEI/FEDER, UE) and REMEI (CTM2015-70340-R); and by the Spanish State Research Agency through the María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711 to IFISC). S.S. is supported by the ETH and Helmut Horten Foundation

International audience; Animal telemetry is a powerful tool for observing marine animals and the physical environments that they inhabit, from coastal and continental shelf ecosystems to polar seas and open oceans. Satellite-linked biologgers and networks of acoustic receivers allow animals to be reliably monitored over scales of tens of meters to thousands of kilometers, giving insight into their habitat use, home range size, the phenology of migratory patterns and the biotic and abiotic factors that drive their distributions. Furthermore, physical environmental variables can be collected using animals as autonomous sampling platforms, increasing spatial and temporal coverage of global oceanographic observation systems. The use of animal telemetry, therefore, has the capacity to provide measures from a suite of essential ocean variables (EOVs) for improved monitoring of Earth's oceans. Here we outline the design features of animal telemetry systems, describe current applications and their benefits and challenges, and discuss future directions. We describe new analytical techniques that improve our ability to not only quantify animal movements but to also provide a powerful framework for comparative studies across taxa. We discuss the application of animal telemetry and its capacity to collect biotic and abiotic data, how the data collected can be incorporated into ocean observing systems, and the role these data can play in improved ocean management.

We study how the community structure of bipartite mutualistic networks changes in a dynamic context. First, we consider a real mutualistic network and introduce extinction events according to several scenarios. We model extinctions as node or interaction removals. For node removal, we consider random, directed and sequential extinctions; for interaction removal, we consider random extinctions. The bipartite network reorganizes showing an increase of the effective modularity and a fast decrease of the persistence of the species in the original communities with increasing number of extinction events. Second, we compare extinctions in a real mutualistic network with the growth of a bipartite network model. The modularity reaches a stationary value and nodes remain in the same community after joining the network. Our results show that perturbations and disruptive events affect the connectivity pattern of mutualistic networks at the mesoscale level. The increase of the effective modularity observed in some scenarios could provide some protection to the remaining ecosystem., VME received funding from Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI, Spain) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional through the Project SPASIMM [FIS2016-80067-P (AEI/FEDER, UE)].

Telemetry is a key, widely used tool to understand marine megafauna distribution, habitat use, behavior, and physiology; however, a critical question remains: “How many animals should be tracked to acquire meaningful data sets?” This question has wide-ranging implications including considerations of statistical power, animal ethics, logistics, and cost. While power analyses can inform sample sizes needed for statistical significance, they require some initial data inputs that are often unavailable. To inform the planning of telemetry and biologging studies of marine megafauna where few or no data are available or where resources are limited, we reviewed the types of information that have been obtained in previously published studies using different sample sizes. We considered sample sizes from one to >100 individuals and synthesized empirical findings, detailing the information that can be gathered with increasing sample sizes. We complement this review with simulations, using real data, to show the impact of sample size when trying to address various research questions in movement ecology of marine megafauna. We also highlight the value of collaborative, synthetic studies to enhance sample sizes and broaden the range, scale, and scope of questions that can be answered., A. M. M. Sequeira was supported by an ARC Grant (DE170100841), and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, G.C. Hays by the Bertarelli Foundation as part of the Bertarelli Programme in Marine Science, and H. J. Calich by an Australian Government RTP scholarship at UWA. Workshop funding was granted to M. Thums, A. M. M. Sequeira, and C. M. Duarte by the UWA Oceans Institute, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and the Office of Sponsored Research at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Tracking data have led to evidence-based conservation of marine megafauna, but a disconnect remains between the many 1000s of individual animals that have been tracked and the use of these data in conservation and management actions. Furthermore, the focus of most conservation efforts is within Exclusive Economic Zones despite the ability of these species to move 1000s of kilometers across multiple national jurisdictions. To assist the goal of the United Nations General Assembly’s recent effort to negotiate a global treaty to conserve biodiversity on the high seas, we propose the development of a new frontier in dynamic marine spatial management. We argue that a global approach combining tracked movements of marine megafauna and human activities at-sea, and using existing and emerging technologies (e.g., through new tracking devices and big data approaches) can be applied to deliver near real-time diagnostics on existing risks and threats to mitigate global risks for marine megafauna. With technology developments over the next decade expected to catalyze the potential to survey marine animals and human activities in ever more detail and at global scales, the development of dynamic predictive tools based on near real-time tracking and environmental data will become crucial to address increasing risks. Such global tools for dynamic spatial and temporal management will, however, require extensive synoptic data updates and will be dependent on a shift to a culture of data sharing and open access. We propose a global mechanism to store and make such data available in near real-time, enabling a holistic view of space use by marine megafauna and humans that would significantly accelerate efforts to mitigate impacts and improve conservation and management of marine megafauna., Workshop funding and support granted by ARC Grant No. DE170100841, AIMS, KAUST, and UWA Oceans Institute through a Research Impact Grant. AS was supported by an ARC Grant No. DE170100841 and AIMS. DS was supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/R00997X/1) and the Save Our Seas Foundation. NQ was supported by FCT (Portugal). HC was supported by an Australian Government RTP scholarship at UWA.

Models of social diffusion reflect processes of how new products, ideas or behaviors are adopted in a population. These models typically lead to a continuous or a discontinuous phase transition of the number of adopters as a function of a control parameter. We explore a simple model of social adoption where the agents can be in two states, either adopters or non-adopters, and can switch between these two states interacting with other agents through a network. The probability of an agent to switch from non-adopter to adopter depends on the number of adopters in her network neighborhood, the adoption threshold $T$ and the adoption coefficient $a$, two parameters defining a Hill function. In contrast, the transition from adopter to non-adopter is spontaneous at a certain rate $\mu$. In a mean-field approach, we derive the governing ordinary differential equations and show that the nature of the transition between the global non-adoption and global adoption regimes depends mostly on the balance between the probability to adopt with one and two adopters. The transition changes from continuous, via a transcritical bifurcation, to discontinuous, via a combination of a saddle-node and a transcritical bifurcation, through a supercritical pitchfork bifurcation. We characterize the full parameter space. Finally, we compare our analytical results with Montecarlo simulations on annealed and quenched degree regular networks, showing a better agreement for the annealed case. Our results show how a simple model is able to capture two seemingly very different types of transitions, i.e., continuous and discontinuous and thus unifies underlying dynamics for different systems. Furthermore the form of the adoption probability used here is based on empirical measurements., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

The rise of the internet coupled with technological innovations such as smartphones have generated massive volumes of geo-referenced data (big data) on human mobility. This has allowed the number of studies of human mobility to rapidly overtake those of animal movement. Today, telemetry studies of animals are also approaching big data status. Here, we review recent advances in studies of human mobility and identify the opportunities they present for advancing our understanding of animal movement. We describe key analytical techniques, potential bottlenecks and a roadmap for progress toward a synthesis of movement patterns of wild animals.

We present a social network and forensic analysis of the vote counts of Spanish national elections that took place in December 2015 and their sequel in June 2016. We initially consider the phenomenon of bipartisanship breakdown by analyzing spatial distributions of several bipartisanship indices. We find that such breakdown is more prominently close to cosmopolite and largely populated areas and less important in rural areas where bipartisanship still prevails, and its evolution mildly consolidates in the 2016 round, with some evidence of bipartisanship reinforcement which we hypothesize to be due to psychological mechanisms of risk aversion. Subsequently, a functional network analysis detects an effective partition of municipalities which remarkably coincides with the first-level political and administrative division of autonomous communities. Finally, we explore to which extent vote data are faithful by applying forensic techniques to vote statistics. Results based on deviation from Benford’s law are mixed and vary across different levels of aggregation. As a complementary metric, we further explore the cooccurring statistics of vote share and turnout, finding a mild tendency in the clusters of the conservative party to smear out towards the area of high turnout and vote share, what has been previously interpreted as a possible sign of incremental fraud., Lucas Lacasa acknowledges funding from EPSRC Early Career Fellowship EP/P01660X/1.

The extent of increasing anthropogenic impacts on large marine vertebrates partly depends on the animals’ movement patterns. Effective conservation requires identification of the key drivers of movement including intrinsic properties and extrinsic constraints associated with the dynamic nature of the environments the animals inhabit. However, the relative importance of intrinsic versus extrinsic factors remains elusive. We analyze a global dataset of ∼2.8 million locations from >2,600 tracked individuals across 50 marine vertebrates evolutionarily separated by millions of years and using different locomotion modes (fly, swim, walk/paddle). Strikingly, movement patterns show a remarkable convergence, being strongly conserved across species and independent of body length and mass, despite these traits ranging over 10 orders of magnitude among the species studied. This represents a fundamental difference between marine and terrestrial vertebrates not previously identified, likely linked to the reduced costs of locomotion in water. Movement patterns were primarily explained by the interaction between species-specific traits and the habitat(s) they move through, resulting in complex movement patterns when moving close to coasts compared with more predictable patterns when moving in open oceans. This distinct difference may be associated with greater complexity within coastal microhabitats, highlighting a critical role of preferred habitat in shaping marine vertebrate global movements. Efforts to develop understanding of the characteristics of vertebrate movement should consider the habitat(s) through which they move to identify how movement patterns will alter with forecasted severe ocean changes, such as reduced Arctic sea ice cover, sea level rise, and declining oxygen content., Workshop funding was granted by the University of Western Australia (UWA) Oceans Institute, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). A.M.M.S. was supported by Australian Research Council Grant DE170100841 and an Indian Ocean Ocean Marine Research Centre (UWA, AIMS, Commonwealth of Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) fellowship. J.P.R., V.M.E., and J.F.G. were supported by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI, Spain) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) through project Spatiotemporality in Sociobological Interactions, Models and Methods (SPASIMM) (FIS2016-80067-P AEI/FEDER, European Union), and by research funding from KAUST. J.P.R. was supported by Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Formación de Profesorado Universitario Grant, Spain). D.W.S. was supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council and Save Our Seas Foundation. N.Q. was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal). M.M.C.M. was supported by a Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de Nível Superior fellowship (Ministry of Education).

Mobile phones and other geolocated devices have produced unprecedented volumes of data on human movement. Analysis of pooled individual human trajectories using big data approaches has revealed a wealth of emergent features that have ecological parallels in animals across a diverse array of phenomena including commuting, epidemics, the spread of innovations and culture, and collective behaviour. Movement ecology, which explores how animals cope with and optimize variability in resources, has the potential to provide a theoretical framework to aid an understanding of human mobility and its impacts on ecosystems. In turn, big data on human movement can be explored in the context of animal movement ecology to provide solutions for urgent conservation problems and management challenges., The research reported in this publication was supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) through the baseline fund and the Award No. 63150414 from the Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. A.M.M.S. was supported by an IOMRC (AIMS, CSIRO, and UWA) Collaborative Post-doctoral Fellowship, J.F.-G. by NIH grant U54GM088558-06 (Lipsitch) and V.M.E. by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) through project SPASIMM (FIS2016-80067-P (AEI/FEDER, UE)).

Rapid loss of sea ice is opening up the Arctic Ocean to shipping, a practice that is forecasted to increase rapidly by 2050 when many models predict that the Arctic Ocean will largely be free of ice toward the end of summer. These forecasts carry considerable uncertainty because Arctic shipping was previously considered too sparse to allow for adequate validation. Here, we provide quantitative evidence that the extent of Arctic shipping in the period 2011–2014 is already significant and that it is concentrated (i) in the Norwegian and Barents Seas, and (ii) predominantly accessed via the Northeast and Northwest Passages. Thick ice along the forecasted direct trans-Arctic route was still present in 2014, preventing transit. Although Arctic shipping remains constrained by the extent of ice coverage, during every September, this coverage is at a minimum, allowing the highest levels of shipping activity. Access to Arctic resources, particularly fisheries, is the most important driver of Arctic shipping thus far., The research reported in this Article was supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), MINECO (Spain), and FEDER (EU) through project MODASS (FIS2011-24785).

The voter model has been studied extensively as a paradigmatic opinion dynamics model. However, its ability to model real opinion dynamics has not been addressed. We introduce a noisy voter model (accounting for social influence) with recurrent mobility of agents (as a proxy for social context), where the spatial and population diversity are taken as inputs to the model. We show that the dynamics can be described as a noisy diffusive process that contains the proper anisotropic coupling topology given by population and mobility heterogeneity. The model captures statistical features of U.S. presidential elections as the stationary vote-share fluctuations across counties and the long-range spatial correlations that decay logarithmically with the distance. Furthermore, it recovers the behavior of these properties when the geographical space is coarse grained at different scales - from the county level through congressional districts, and up to states. Finally, we analyze the role of the mobility range and the randomness in decision making, which are consistent with the empirical observations. © 2014 American Physical Society., J. F.-G. receives economic support from the Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Universitats of the Government of the Balearic Islands and the ESF. J. J. R. acknowledges funding from the Ramón y Cajal program of the Spanish Ministry of Economy (MINECO). Partial support was received from MINECO and FEDER through projects FIS2011-24785 and FIS2012-30634 and from the EU Commission through the FP7 projects EUNOIA and LASAGNE.