All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Two Asst. Professor Jobs at Stockholm Resilience Centre

February 20, 2011 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University is looking for two tenure track assistant professors. The deadline is soon, 1 March 2001.

Associate Senior lecturer in environmental sciences, in particular ecosystem-based management of the Baltic Sea
The subject includes analysis of social-ecological systems that integrates ecology and management-related societal functions, including economy.

Main tasks are research and coordination of research on ecosystem based management within the research programme Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management (BEAM), and to some extent teaching and supervision.

Read more and apply here

Associate Senior Lecturer in Environmental Sciences with emphasis on modeling of social-ecological systems
The subject area involves modeling, analysis and simulation of social-ecological systems, thus integrating several different ecological and/or socioeconomic factors and issues, including resilience.

Main tasks are research, to some extent teaching and supervision, and manager of a modelling and visualisation lab.

Read more and apply here

Visualization

Mapping Greenland’s melt

February 20, 2011 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

The same arctic weather patterns that have been cooling N. Europe and the Eastern USA have been warming Greenland as is shown in NASA’s image of the day Record Melting in Greenland during 2010:

2010 was an exceptional year for Greenland’s ice cap. Melting started early and stretched later in the year than usual. Little snow fell to replenish the losses. By the end of the season, much of southern Greenland had set a new record, with melting that lasted 50 days longer than average.

This image was assembled from microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program. Snow and ice emit microwaves, but the signal is different for wet, melting snow than for dry. Marco Tedesco, a professor at the City College of New York, uses this difference to chart the number of days that snow is melting every year. This image above shows 2010 compared to the average number of melt days per year between 1979 and 2009.

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When snow melts, the fine, bright powder turns to larger-grained, gravely snow. These large grains reflect less light, which means that they can absorb more energy and melt even faster. When the annual snow is melted away, parts of the ice cap are exposed. The surface of the ice is also darker than snow. Since dark ice was exposed earlier and longer in 2010, it absorbed more energy, leading to a longer melt season. A fresh coat of summer snow would have protected the ice sheet, but little snow fell.

Ecological Economics, Visualization

Energy intensity convergence

February 7, 2011 Garry Peterson 2 Comments

In climate change discussions, energy intensity is the amount of energy required to produce a dollars worth of GDP. While there are big differences in energy intensity around the world. Generally poor countries are more energy intensive than rich, and the US, Canada and Australia are more energy intensive than Europe and Japan. A recent graph from the Economist illustrates how energy intensities are falling and converging, unfortunately at a slower rate than economic growth, meaning that energy use, and hence CO2 emissions, continue to grow.

From the Economist:

Ecological Management

Special feature on interdisciplinarity in Environmental Conservation on

February 4, 2011 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

Environmental Conservation has published a thematic issue on Interdisciplinary Progress in Environmental Science & Management (Vol. 37 Issue 04) which looks quite interesting. The table of contents is below:

Berkes, F. 2010. Devolution of environment and resources governance: trends and future. Environmental Conservation 37:489-500.
Brunckhorst, D. J. Using context in novel community-based natural resource management: landscapes of property, policy and place. Environmental Conservation 37:16-22.
D’Agnes, L., H. D’Agnes, J. B. Schwartz, M. L. Amarillo, and J. Castro. 2010. Integrated management of coastal resources and human health yields added value: a comparative study in Palawan (Philippines). Environmental Conservation 37:398-409.
Evely, A. C., I. Fazey, X. Lambin, E. Lambert, S. Allen, and M. Pinard. 2010. Defining and evaluating the impact of cross-disciplinary conservation research. Environmental Conservation 37:442-450.
Fearnside, P. M. 2010. Interdisciplinary research as a strategy for environmental science and management in Brazilian Amazonia: potential and limitations. Environmental Conservation 37:376-379.
Hicks, C. C., C. Fitzsimmons, and N. V. C. Polunin. 2010. Interdisciplinarity in the environmental sciences: barriers and frontiers. Environmental Conservation 37:464-477.
Khagram, S., K. A. Nicholas, D. M. Bever, J. Warren, E. H. Richards, K. Oleson, J. Kitzes, R. Katz, R. Hwang, R. Goldman, J. Funk, and K. A. Brauman. 2010. Thinking about knowing: conceptual foundations for interdisciplinary environmental research. Environmental Conservation 37:388-397.
Newing, H. 2010. Interdisciplinary training in environmental conservation: definitions, progress and future directions. Environmental Conservation 37:410-418.
Ommer, R. E. 2010. The Coasts Under Stress project: a Canadian case study of interdisciplinary methodology. Environmental Conservation 37:478-488.
Ostrom, E. and M. Cox. 2010. Moving beyond panaceas: a multi-tiered diagnostic approach for social-ecological analysis. Environmental Conservation 37:451-463.
Perz, S. G., S. Brilhante, F. Brown, A. C. Michaelsen, E. Mendoza, V. Passos, R. Pinedo, J. F. Reyes, D. Rojas, and G. Selaya. 2010. Crossing boundaries for environmental science and management: combining interdisciplinary, interorganizational and international collaboration. Environmental Conservation 37:419-431.
Reyers, B., D. J. Roux, and P. J. O’Farrell. 2010. Can ecosystem services lead ecology on a transdisciplinary pathway? Environmental Conservation 37:501-511.
Szabo, P. 2010. Why history matters in ecology: an interdisciplinary perspective. Environmental Conservation 37:380-387.
Young, J and M. Marzano. 2010. Embodied interdisciplinarity: what is the role of polymaths in environmental research? Environmental Conservation 37: 373-375

Ecosystem services

Water Footprint in Food Production

February 3, 2011 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

By Max Troell

New studies that focus on the emerging issue of water usage in agriculture have been released.

Researchers from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, have provided a comprehensive account of the global green, blue and grey water footprints of different sorts of farm animals and animal products, distinguishing between different production systems and considering the conditions in all countries of the world separately. Some of the main findings from this study were:

the blue and grey water footprints of animal products are larger for industrial systems than for mixed or grazing systems. From a freshwater perspective, animal products from grazing or mixed systems are therefore to be preferred above products from the bio-industry;
the water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of a wisely chosen crop product with equivalent nutritional value;
About 29% of the total water footprint of the agricultural sector in the world is related to the production of animal products; and
one third of the global water footprint of animal production is related to beef cattle.

The same researchers have also carried out a complementary study that quantifies the green, blue and grey water footprints of hundreds of crops and crop products, showing variations from province to province, for all crops around the world.

You can download the two reports from:

ANIMALS-WATER

CROPS-WATER

Ideas, Regime Shifts, Visualization

Reading through computer eyes

February 1, 2011 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

by Juan Carlos Rocha (PhD student at Stockholm Resilience Centre working on Regime Shifts)

An N-gram is a sequence of characters separated by a space in a text. An N-gram may be a word, a number or a combination of both. The concept of N-grams simplifies the application of statistical methods to assess the frequency of a word or a phrase in body of text. N-gram statistical analyses have been around for years, but recently Jean-Baptiste Michel and collaborators had the opportunity to applying N-gram text analysis techniques to the massive Google Books collection of digitalized books. They analyzed over 5 million documents which they estimate are about 4% of all books ever published, and published their work in Science [doi].

The potential of exploring huge amounts of text, which no single person could read, provides the opportunity to trace the use of words over time. This allows researchers to track the impact of events on word use and even the evolution of language, grammar and culture. For example, by counting the words used in English books, the team found that in the year 2000 the English lexicon had over one million words, and it has been growing about 8500 words per year. Similarly, they were able to track word fads, for example the changes in the regular or irregular forms of verb conjugations over time (e.g. burned vs burnt). More interestingly, based on particular events and famous names they identified that our collective memory, as recorded in books, has both a short-term and long-term component; we are forgetting our past faster than before; but we are also learning faster when it comes to, for example, the adoption of technologies.

The options for reading books with machine eyes does not end there. Censorship during the German Nazi regime was identified by comparing the frequency of author’s names in the German and English corpus. The researchers could detect a fingerprint of the suppression of a person’s ideas in the language corpus.

The researchers term this quantitative analysis of our historic knowledge and culture through the analysis of this huge amount of data – culturomics. They plan further research will incorporate newspapers, manuscripts, artwork, maps and other human creations. Possible future applications are the development of methods for historical epidemiology (e.g. influenza peaks), the analysis of conflicts and wars, the evolution of ideas (e.g. feminism), and I think, why not ecological regime shifts?

Above you can see the frequency of some of the regime shifts we are working with in the English corpus. Soil salinization and lake eutrophication appear in 1940’s and 1960’s respectively, probably with the first description of such shifts. Similarly, coral bleaching take off during the 1980’s when reef degradation in the Caribbean basin began to be documented. Similarly, the concept of regime shift has been more and more used since 1980’s, probably not only to describe ecological shifts but also political and managerial transitions.

Although data may be noisy, the frequency of shock events may be tracked as well. Here for example we plot oil spill and see the peak corresponding to the case of January 1989 in Floreffe, Pennsylvania. Note that it does not show the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year because the database is updated to 2008.

If you want to play around with your favorite words or your theme of interest, have a look to the n-gram viewer at Google Labs and have fun!

Big Back Loop, Reorganization, Vulnerability

OECD global shock reports

January 25, 2011 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

The OECD’s Risk Management project has commissioned a number of reports to examine possible future global shocks and how society can become resilient to them. They write:

The Project … recognises that shocks can provide opportunities for progress, not just negative consequences. Amongst the inputs from which the final report will draw are six background papers and case studies on the following themes: Systemic Financial Risk ; Pandemics ; Cyber Risks ; Geomagnetic Storms ; Social Unrest and Anticipating Extreme Events.

I haven’t read these reports (which are available through the links above), but they look interesting. For example, prolific complexity scientist John Casti wrote the report on Anticipating Extreme Events.

thanks to Victor Galaz for the tip.

Visualization

Brisbane floods: before and after

January 18, 2011 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

From Australian Broadcasting Company the Brisbane floods: before and after:

High-resolution aerial photos taken over Brisbane last week have revealed the scale of devastation across dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

The aerial photos of the Brisbane floods were taken in flyovers on January 13 and January 14.

See part one and part two.

Ecological Management

BP wins ‘2010 Accidental Earth Experiment’ Prize

January 16, 2011 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Bill Chameides Dean of the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke awards BP his 2010 Accidental Earth Experiment’ Prize!!! on his blog the Green Grok. His award recognizes that BP’s incompetence created a disaster that created novel conditions allowing scientists to learn how the Earth works. He writes:

For the Environmental Scientist, the Ultimate Lab Is Earth

Science is at its core an empirical endeavor. You can come up with all the clever and compelling theories you want, but data gathered from experiments are and will always be the ultimate arbiters of truth. That presents a problem for environmental and Earth scientists. The only laboratory that accurately replicates the thing we study is our little blue planet.

As a result, environmental scientists are forever looking for real-world events that, like a chemist’s laboratory experiments, directly test specific aspects of the Earth system. For example, volcanoes that spew tons of small particles into the upper atmosphere and variations in sunspots provide unique experiments to test the accuracy of climate models built on the basis of our understanding of climate.

The Accidental Experiments

But natural events are not the only sources of environmental experiments. Humanity is now arguably the greatest driver of environmental change on the globe, and as a result is increasingly and inadvertently causing events that double as experiments for inquisitive environmental scientists.

Unfortunately these “accidental experiments” often carry devastating consequences, but nevertheless provide a kind of consolation prize in the form of unique data to learn about the Earth with.

Case in Point: The Oil Rig Blowout in the Gulf of Mexico Last Spring

We can all agree the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a mess. But let’s not forget it’s also a grand experiment. How else could we learn what happens when you dump billions of barrels of oil into the gulf roughly a mile below the surface?

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For example, we’ve learned that some bugs that inhabit the gulf’s waters have been effective in gobbling up the stuff the blown wellhead spewed into their home turf. A paper published last year in the journal Science by Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and colleagues reported on the discovery of a heretofore unknown voracious hydrocarbon-eating microbe.

Just last week came another paper in Science, this one by John Kessler of Texas A&M University and colleagues, which showed that other microbes had also made short work of most of the natural gas released from the blowout.

This is a great example of the natural system’s adaptability and ingenuity. Put a bunch of oil and gas in the ocean, and native bug populations swell to take advantage of it. I should note that we were somewhat lucky in this regard. The Gulf of Mexico was the beneficiary of an in situ population of bugs due to natural gas and oil seeps. Without these microbes the environmental consequences of the disaster (still the largest in marine history) would no doubt be worse.

General, Links

Short links: ecopyschology, ecodance, and urban innovation