Category Archives: General

General

Interesting New Professorship at McGill School of Environment

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The McGill School of Environment (MSE) (www.mcgill.ca/mse) invites applications for the Liber Ero1 Chair in Environment at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.  The appointment is expected to be at the rank of Full Professor.  The Chair holder will also be cross-appointed in department(s) in Faculties of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (www.mcgill.ca/macdonald), Arts (www.mcgill.ca/arts), Law (www.mcgill.ca/law) or Science (www.mcgill.ca/science), depending on areas of expertise.  This position is intended to have a transformative influence both on research and education within the MSE and McGill University, and on environmental challenges at the national and international levels.

The MSE was founded on the principle that the resolution of current and future environmental problems requires a highly integrated and interdisciplinary approach that is informed by both the natural and applied sciences and the social sciences and humanities.  The MSE uses this approach as we train the next generation of leaders through a set of novel, interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs, and through innovative interdisciplinary research in environment.

The Chair holder will have an internationally recognized record of environmental research at the intersection of the natural or applied sciences and the social sciences or humanities.  He/she will have demonstrated success in attracting research funding and strong graduate students as well as excellence in teaching at both the graduate and the undergraduate levels. In addition, the Chair holder should have experience in engaging colleagues across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines with those in the public and private sectors, in a research agenda that informs public policy responses to critical environmental problems such as biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services, climate and energy, disease and environment, environmental ethics, food security, and water.

Applicants shall provide a letter of intent, a summary of research interests (including proposed research program), a complete curriculum vitae, copies of three representative publications, and the names of at least three references by September 15, 2010 to the Director of the McGill School of Environment, Professor Marilyn E.  Scott.

The full job advertisement is here.

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Age of Wonder is a fascinating book

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I’m about halfway through Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.   Holmes uses the stories of an inter-related set of individual British scientists: the aristocratic botanist and administrator Joesph Banks, the German emigre astronomer William Hershel, and the romantic populist chemist and inventor Humphry Davy, and uses their stories to tie together social change, art, science and the personal lives of scientists in a vivid, rich way.  He writes that he is describing the ‘second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called romantic science.’   Its a fantastic book, which I highly recommend.

Below are some reviews

Continue reading →

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Ecological memory of Amazonian agriculture

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I just wrote this note on Faculty of 1000 on the paper (doi:10.1073/pnas.0908925107) I mentioned the other day:

Pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes, ecosystem engineers, and self-organized patchiness in Amazonia
McKey D, Rostain S, Iriarte J, Glaser B, Birk JJ, Holst I, Renard D
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2010 Apr 12  [related articles]

This fascinating study describes how ecological engineers (such as ants, termites, and earthworms) maintained a newly described pre-Columbian agricultural landscape. The authors describe sites along the Guianan coastal plain (in Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) where pre-Columbian farmers constructed raised fields in flat, marshy locations.

The paper is particularly interesting because it combines new archaeological evidence in favour of the relatively new, and somewhat controversial, idea of a fairly densely settled pre-Columbian Amazonia with an ecological analysis of i) how spatial self-organization of ecosystems was likely used by pre-Columbian agriculturalists to enhance the yield and resilience of their agriculture system and ii) how these same processes have preserved aspects of the agricultural system during about five centuries of abandonment. This study is also interesting for its demonstration of how ecological memory can maintain patterns produced by past disturbance (whether natural or human), and in its hints of how different types of agriculture that work with biodiversity could possibly be reinvented today.

Some photos from the supplementary info of the paper:


Pre-Columbian raised fields in the Guianas. (A–D) Pre-Columbian raised fields in coastal French Guiana are located in flooded depressions, in flat savannas, along sandy ridges, or in talwegs. (A) Piliwa, on the left bank of the Mana River in extreme western French Guiana. (B) Corossony, on the left bank of the Sinnamary River. (C) K-VIII, west of the city of Kourou, near the Bois Diable site. (D) Maillard, between the town of Macouria and Cayenne Island.


(E) Map of raised-field complexes along coastal Amazonia from eastern Guyana to near Cayenne in French Guiana.

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Volcano and global environmental surprise

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Volcano eruption is certainly one, but which are other possible global surprises? In 1994, the Aspen Global Change Institute organized a two week workshop on global environmental surprise. The results from this workshop can be found in Stephen H. Schneider and colleagues 1998 article “Imaginable surprise in global change science” (Journal of Risk Research, 1(2)). By “imaginable surprise”, they mean

The event, process, or outcome departs from the expectations of the observing community or those affected by the event or process. Seen from this point of view, surprise abou t one or another aspect of climate change is an after-the-fact reaction to an observation or new scientiŽfic fiŽnding that, in some sense, lies outside our range of expectations.

In the list of 40+ types of surprises, you find not only volcano eruption, but also, just to mention a few:

  • A reduction in ‘conveyor belt’ oceanic overturning leading to cooling at high latitudes occurs, despite general (but slower) global warming.
  • Heat stored in the ocean at intermediate depths is released to the atmosphere, leading to rapid warming.
  • Dimethyl sulŽfide emissions decline with reduced sea ice, causing cloud brightness to decrease and warming to accelerate.
  • Dimethyl sulŽfide emissions change with sea-surface temperature change.
  • Synergism of habitat fragmentation, artiŽficial chemicals, introduction of exotic species and anthropogenic climate change affect ecosystems in unforeseen ways that reduce biodiversity.
  • Geo-engineering is practised intermittently by only a few nations causing international political conflicts and greater environmental instability.

    Don’t say you weren’t warned….

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    Expansion of social-ecological systems science

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    The concept of social-ecological systems has been gaining increased interested in science. Below is a graph showing papers whose topic includes social-ecological systems. During the 1990s there were a few publications and then a rapid rise during the 2000s.  Two influential books articulated social-ecological ideas:

    Papers from ISI - social-ecological or social ecological and Systems

    The top five journals are dominated by Ecology and Society:

    1. Ecology and Society (78)
    2. Global Environmental Change (13)
    3. Ecosystems (13)
    4. Proc. of National Academy of Science (USA) (10)
    5. Ecological Economics (8)

    The most prolific authors are a group of people who are working to bridge the social and natural (with number of papers in brackets).  The top two authors, Carl and Fikret, were editors of the Linking and Navigating books.

    1. Carl Folke (26)
    2. Fikret Berkes (14)
    3. Steve Carpenter (14)
    4. Per Olsson (13)
    5. J. Marty Anderies (11)

    The universities with the most publications are:

    1. Stockholm University (41) (where Carl Folke is located)
    2. Arizona State University (27) (where Marty Anderies and a number of SES researchers are)
    3. University of Wisconsin (19) (Steve Carpenter)
    4. University of Manitoba (18) (Fikret Berkes)
    5. Indiana University (14) (Elinor Ostrom and formerly Marco Janssen, both of whom have frequently published on social-ecological systems)
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    More PhD positions in Stockholm

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    There are three new PhD positions in hydrology at the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, pertaining to the following projects:

    1. Nutrient sources, retention-attenuation and transport in hydrological catchments under climate change (Ref# 463-39-10)
    2. The role of permafrost, hydrological and ecosystem shifts for arctic hydro-climatic interactions and carbon fluxes (Ref# 463-40-10)
    3. Determining and mapping spatial distributions and thawing rates of inland permafrost under climatic change in the arctic/sub-arctic (Ref# 463-41-10)

    Click on the links for the complete announcements.  Deadlines for applications are May 23rd.

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    New PHD opportunities at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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    There are two new PhD positions at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.  The first is to work with me, Garry Peterson, and then second to work with Line Gordon.

    Position one: Mapping ecological regime shifts

    We are looking for a PhD student who is excited to devel-op innovative methods as part of an transdisciplinary research team at the Stockholm Re-silience Centre. This team includes several researchers, PhD students, and Masters students, as well as our international collaborators.

    Ecosystems can shift from being organized around one set of ecological processes and patterns to another. Research has identified an increasing number of such ecological re-gime shifts in systems as diverse as boreal forests, coral reef, shallow lakes, and rangel-ands.

    These ecological regime shifts are being documented by the regime shifts database project (www.regimeshifts.org).

    This project will work with the regime shift database project to build models of particular regime shifts that allow us to estimate the probability of regime shifts across landscapes.

    The research aims to directly address a key research gap identified by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and contribute to future ecologi-cal assessments.

    Read more here

    Position two: Adapting to climate change: the re-greening of the Sahel as a potential success case
    We seek to recruit 1-2 PhD candidate(s) for participation in a trans-disciplinary research project analyzing social-ecological systems in Niger and/or Burkina Faso in the Sahel.

    The project addresses the current trend of increasing biomass production (here referred to as the re-greening) in the Sahel, and aims to improve the understanding of how to adapt to, and cope with, climate variability and change in marginal environments.

    The student(s) will be involved in comparative analyses of different villages and/or landscape segments in the Sahel that have responded to climate variability in contrasting ways (e.g. situated at different places along a degraded re-greened continuum) to improve the understanding of why a positive change has taken place in some areas, while not in others.

    The work will include 1) analysis of the historical development that have led to the current re-greened/degraded state in respective area; 2) analysis of quantity and quality of ecosystem services currently generated in the landscape, including the influence of this on poverty dynamics; and 3) analysis of potential development trajectories in the future, through e.g. scenario planning.

    Read more here

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    Resilience Postdoc position at Cemagref, France

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    Olivier Barreteau is seeking a post doc candidate for 18 months starting as soon as possible to work with him at Cemagref in Montpellier, France.  Note: French is not compulsory for this position.

    The post doc will help initiate a project on Communities and Climate Change, which we are currently setting up with colleagues in the US and Netherlands.  Olivier is planning on focusing this postdoctoral work on defining the indicators of resilience of SES, at least on their social part.

    The process for a post-doc at Cemagref is that the candidate writes a proposal, with help from the team (ie Olivier), and the proposal is assessed (candidate + subject) by an internal commission.  There is one commission for evaluation each month. If the candidate and proposal are good, it will go through.

    If there is someone with a background in resilience who is interested they should contact Olivier Barreteau (olivier.barreteau at cemagref.fr).

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    Roving Bandits 2.0

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    twitter.com/vgalaz

    Red or precious coral Corallium rubrum, A proposal the regulate the trade, especially on the internet in this species was defeated at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Photograph: Giovanni Marola/AFP/Getty Images

    As a brief follow up to my previous post on Cyber-environmental politics, the Guardian and Techradar.com, both report on how the evolution of the Internet speeds up the extinction of endangered species, pretty much the same phenomena explored by Fikret Berkes and colleagues in Science in 2006 denoted “Roving Bandits”. The Guardian reports:

    The internet has emerged as one of the greatest threats to rare species, fuelling the illegal wildlife trade and making it easier to buy everything from live lion cubs to wine made from tiger bones, conservationists said today.

    The internet’s impact was made clear at the meeting of the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).

    Delegates voted overwhelmingly today to ban the trade of the Kaiser’s spotted newt, which the World Wildlife Fund says has been devastated by internet trade.

    A proposal from the US and Sweden to regulate the trade in red coral – which is crafted into expensive jewellery and sold extensively on the web – was defeated. Delegates voted the idea down mostly over concerns that increased regulations might damage poor fishing communities.

    Trade on the internet poses one of the biggest challenges facing Cites, said Paul Todd, a campaign manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

    “The internet is becoming the dominant factor overall in the global trade in protected species,” he said. “There will come a time when country to country trade of large shipments between big buyers and big sellers in different countries is a thing of the past.”