Category Archives: Ideas

Ecosystem services, Greenlash

More on bee declines

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There appears to have been a number surprising collapse of bee populations. These collapses are important because bees are key providers of pollination ecosystem services, which are important for agriculture. However, most of the suspected causes of this decline are due to agricultural practices. The Agricultural biodiversity weblog has been following this issue and have written a number of posts on the issue which they review in a recent post on the possible impact of GMO Bt Corn on bees:

… We pointed to a piece that said maybe the problems in the US weren’t any worse than they had been, just better reported. Maybe the problem is monoculture? Throughout the recent buzz of hive-related news, though, we’ve ignored a few items that laid the blame on GMO crops. Why? Because they seemed a bit shrill, maybe even a tad one-sided. But a long and apparently comprehensive piece in the German news magazine Der Spiegel is neither shrill nor one-sided. And it seems to adduce good evidence that bees who are suffering a parasite infestation are abnormally susceptible to pollen from maize engineered to express the Bt bacterial toxin from Bacillus thuringiensis.

The work Der Spiegel reports is a long way from conclusive. But it does give pause for thought, and it is causing huge excitement among opponents of GM in all its forms. At the very least, it deserves a closer look. But wouldn’t it be weird if it proved true? And how would industrial agriculture respond?

Ideas, Reflections

Where to go Now? : Reflections Pt 13

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I was surprised and delighted to learn during this year, 2006, that several organizations have recently been established with resilience as one of their primary themes. The most recent is a new Center on Resilience and Sustainability for Social/Ecological Systems in Sweden. It has just been formed by Stockholm University, the Beijer Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute. It joins three other centers that have been recently established with resilience as their focus– for Centre for Coral Reef Biodiversity in Australia, for Climate Change at the Tyndall Centre, UK and, more loosely, for Parks, Ecosystems and People in South Africa.

All have indicated programs for collaboration among the groups, and other members of the Resilience Alliance itself. That is all a very new acceleration of work on both the theories and practices of resilience. They are extraordinarily appropriate places for launching novel experiments, novel knowledge and novel actions at this time of international turmoil. They provide places that beautifully stimulate novelty and excellence across disciplines in a flexible atmosphere where discussion and debate periodically pace deep deliberative enquiry. The Internet can play a big role that creates an international place for such enquiries and debates. They are outstanding examples of the creation of integrative support for fundamental interdisciplinary study.

I started this paper with a good news report and a bad news one about events I now see locally, nationally and internationally.

Essentially I have learned that at such times I certainly do not try to solve the problems of the rigid or the collapsing system. Instead, I initiate a variety of experiments, mobilize my understanding, develop experiments, models and tests, and wait for an opportunity to emerge that might use the results. In our variety of regional studies that always happened. At that time a menu of possibilities then exist for renewing the system. And we hope that happens globally as well.

No one at this time of deep change should define the profile for the research that will grab the emerging systems in the world. Instead, it is precisely the time to ask what interests you? It is the time where individuals can have the greatest effect.

So, in closing, here is what interests me, one individual, now.

Social Traps: I’d sure like to learn more about different societal traps and why some are irreversible. We guessed at two in the Panarchy book’s third chapter. One was a “poverty trap” where a society flips out of an adaptive cycle at a large political scale in a way that progressively triggers similar collapses at ever-smaller scales. Structure (organizations and institutions) is destroyed in the process, leaving the society finally as independent families separately struggling for survival, having lost their portion of the society’s capital. Learning and self-help is minimal. We also posited a “rigidity trap”, where wealth was great, resilience high and internal connectedness strong. That is the kind of hierarchist trap that freezes the adaptive cycle by ejecting dissidents and minimizing learning. I think of the fundamentalist religions as examples- dangerous examples. I know the healthy state for a society is one where there is a nested set of adaptive cycles; continually testing changed circumstances and adapting to them. But they can slip out of that sustaining state, into traps. Some of those traps are essentially irreversible. We need to learn more about them. We need more examples that demonstrate them. And we need to learn ways that can lead to ways out of them.

Social Adaptive Cycles: I’d also like to discover where and why some social systems- public organizations, private firms, regions, nations, international consortia- are much slower than ecosystems to break creatively and seem so much slower to transform into new structures with new opportunities. That often seemed to be the case for our case studies of regional public and political organizations, at least, where a market does not force change. And for national and international assemblages, think of the anthropological and modern examples- anarchy and the first World War, the Marshall Plan and its incredible success in facilitating recovery in Europe, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had mixed results we are still living with. Panarchy, resilience and the connections of memory and revolt between scales provide a new focus for this old question.

Living on the Edge: I am very interested to see tests that show whether cities, organizations and economies on the edge of social/economic/ecological lumps, have the same features of living on the edge of crisis and opportunity as do animals living on the edge of their body mass lumps. That is where the dynamic nature of panarchies starts to provide insights into constraints and opportunities for changes and transformations that can ride the natural forces.

A Panarchy Game: I would love to see collaboration between those who have developed panarchy thinking and those who are developing certain kinds of games. Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and the Sims, was an early one, and now has efforts that capture abilities to zoom in to the small and out to the large or into the fast and out to the slow [Spore]. These are the games of the “Long Zoom and the Long Now” that are emerging independent of the kind or research that led to Panarchy. But it is driven by the same goals, the same fun, and the same intensity. The two need to be joined for a bump in innovation.

Globalizing Experiments: I’d also like to see more experiments on the Web and the internet, some in conjunction with occasional face to face meetings, some designing new ways to present educational programs, some using novel ways to display complex data or policies simply, some providing new ways to present and explore information, like Goggle Earth, some developing interactive games for regional and global social and ecosystemic designs, some presenting more Blogs, debates and discussions, some that use movies that express dynamic changes in an intelligible manner. We have done some of that- most notably by Garry Peterson for his Young Scholars Dialogues in Ecology and Society and this blog – Resilience Science. We need more.

Self-organization Combining with Evolution: I’d like to support studies that explore how the link between self-organization of entities at different scales in the Panarchy link with natural selection to affect the speed and scale of evolutionary change. I believe that self-organization and natural selection jointly flourish and interact as a new way to view evolution, opening up another fruitful landscape for enquiry and theoretical development. In the sciences of biological evolution, that combination can often be viewed as either an obscure or an excessive representation! But it is suggestive and provocative, and that has particular value at times of deep change. It again opens a new landscape of thought for investigation and action from local, to regional to global scales. That is a big journey from its start, over 40 years ago, when I was immersed in lovely experiments of deep enquiry about praying mantids!

To conclude, I argue that we preeminently need novel integrative work. Specifically, novel work that integrates the economic and social with ecosystemically driven understanding. Multi-scale, searching for the relatively simple features of complex systems. Fundamentally non-linear. A testing of a range of methods and a disbelief in any of them. A wedding of theory, empirical examples and application. An emphasis on a search for generality, which needs cooperative works with others expert in other fields, but ones who share the curiosity and fun of mutual discovery. That is much more valuable, now, in this time of political turbulence and transformation in the world, than new policies and new planning exercises. They are too early, and too dangerous in their reliance on successes that worked for past problems. We now live in too new a world.

Ideas, Reflections

Where Ideas Originate; What Makes Some Useful? : Reflections Pt 12

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I have been asked why I have so many novel, yet useful ideas, ones that eventually move to some kind of fruition, testing and, usually, after a very long time, acceptance.  I do not really know, so what I write here is a guess.

I am prodigiously curious about nature, and that triggers initial ideas.   I am also terribly persistent and stubborn about developing and testing an idea that grabs me; at those times I am totally and narrowly focused, driven by the potential. That is what eventually makes an idea useful.  So I conclude that nature creates the idea; stubbornness makes it useful!  But I have had to learn how to see nature.  It is curiosity, anecdote, funny correlations, jokes and metaphors that have done that.

I enjoy communicating the excitement and the evolving stages of these ideas to others.  And I like to discuss all this in classes with students, involving them directly in whatever research is most topical.   That leads me to careful mentoring of some younger colleagues whose talents stand out.  Earlier I mentioned a number of them.

I am delighted if others become interested and propose extensions or alternative explanations.  I get profoundly upset if, at such times, someone says these suites of nascent ideas, or any one idea is wrong and that projects based on them should stop. I have got into big arguments with distinguished scholars over that one!  In contrast, I see them as rich ways to explore the unknown; I see them as rich ways to develop friendships that endure.

Frances Westley once pointed out to me the three principal types of scientist she sees.  Those are consolidators, technical talents, and artists. Consolidators accumulate and solidify advances and are deeply skeptical of ill formed and initial, hesitant steps. That can have great value at stages in a scientific cycle when rigorous efforts to establish the strength and value of an idea is central.

In contrast, I love those initial hesitant steps and like to see clusters of them. That is the kind of thing needed at the beginning of a cycle of scientific enquiry or even just before that. Such nascent, partially stumbling ideas, are the largely hidden source for the engine that eventually generates change in science. So I am not a particularly good consolidator.

I also am not a preeminently good technical person, though I do have sufficient technical experience to have developed considerable, well-grounded skepticism of the biases existing in traditional methods.   I know some statistics, something about modeling, something about mathematics and a lot about biology. I enjoy integrating across all those talents.

But I love the nascent ideas, the sudden explosion of a new idea, the connections of the new idea with others.  And I love the development and testing of the idea till it gets to the point it is convincing. That needs persistence to the level of stubbornness and I happily invest in that persistence.   I guess I fit somewhat into the artist type, less the technical type and still less into an efficient consolidator.

As part of that kind of scientist, I have tried to develop senses that help me listen to intriguing voices that are hidden amongst the noise.  Owlish ways to hear the rustle of the mouse. The simplest example of what I mean is in sculpting, another pleasure I have.  I start with a number of hazy ideas, and then I discover the image caught and hidden in the swirls of the wood’s grain.  I listen to the voice of the wood.

My research has always been like that.  In the early days of investigating predator/prey functional responses, the device that helped retain generalization was components analysis.  It was a way to engage levels of complexity and maintain generality.  It required a beast-for-the-moment design- the beast most appropriate for the step in hand.  The result was many voices, each playing facets of one song.  Praying mantis, insect parasitoids, deer mice and shrews, barracuda and iao, salmon, the suite of insectivorous birds in the boreal forest.  Lions and gazelles.  It was a way to listen to the hidden voice of nature.  Those voices led to the discovery of resilience.  Not a song but a symphony!

More recently, at last I heard the “world is lumpy” music that emerges from patterns in ecosystems at scales from centimeters to hundreds of kilometers, from days to millennia.  And the approach used to examine the subtleties is a bit of strong inference, but more of adaptive inference and multiple lines of evidence- from every major biome in the world, from endangered and invasive species, from nomadic and sedentary organisms (Holling and Allen 2002).  And beyond that, similar rhythms, once heard, seem to be in economic systems, social and behavioral.

Adaptive ecosystem management has been the same process.  The workshops evolved to let human voices speak- scientist, scholar, and practitioner.  I learned who they were, in heart and spirit, and each had a different contribution.  The Peerless Leader learned the guiding melody.  The Blunt Scot was on percussion.  The Snively Whiplash provided the creative dissonance.  The Utopian dreamed the impossible dreams. And the Compleat Amanuensis recorded it all.  The Benevolent Despot hummed a lot.  All these folks and the revealing workshop process and models are described in Holling and Chambers (1973).

At this point, I am delighted with the results of some of my more recent inventions, which have been made with great help from colleagues of the international Resilience Alliance and the Internet journal Ecology and Society. I really do not know what the Alliance and its journal will become as they evolve.  But basically right now they provide a foundation to develop devices to listen to the quiet voices of people- scientists and scholars of many stripes, practitioners, and for them to listen to each other.  In universities, government, the public and the private sector.  I wish in business as well.  For the moment, it is people in the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, in Spain and Malaysia, South America and Madagascar, Canada and Australia.  In Africa.  And not just in the US.  We identify voices that have been masked by the noise, ones where novelty and experience combine.  We are finding ways to have deliberative conversations among listeners.

References
Holling, C.S. and A.D. Chambers.  1973.  Resource science:  the nurture of an infant.  Bioscience 23(1): 13-20.

Holling , C.S. and Craig Allen. 2002. Adaptive inference for distinguishing credible from incredible patterns in nature.  Ecosystems 5: 319-328.

Big Back Loop, Reflections, Reorganization

What is this Panarchy Thing? : Reflections Pt 11

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panarchy“Panarchy” is an odd name, but one that is meant to capture the way living systems both persist and yet innovate. It shows how fast and slow, small and big events and processes can transform ecosystems and organisms through evolution, or can transform humans and their societies through learning, or the chance for learning. The central question is what allows rare transformation, not simply change.

I have discovered people have two distinct ways of perceiving change. Some see the world evolving in a regular, continuous way. Others, like me, see the world evolving in a spasmodic way- sudden change and slow, sometimes erratic responses after such changes. Both viewpoints are, in some sense true. They each give a different perception of changes and its causes. But their differences generate arguments. The same arguments are seen in other issues. For example, some argue that biological evolutionary change is not gradual but is “punctuated”. There is lots of evidence supporting that view, but because the fossil record is incomplete, the evidence is incomplete. As a consequence, one’s philosophy dictates belief, so there is not a lot of consensus. There is a similar argument about the evolution of scientific knowledge between the gradualists like Popper, and the revolutionists like Thomas Kuhn. We saw the same difference in view among our good archaeologist friends.

Terrific to have these different views appearing in a way that permits some considered conversation. Now is the time!!!

The aspect of Panarchy that is most novel and significant concerns the phase when resisting institutions start to break down or transform, releasing the chance for a renewed system to emerge. At that moment, novelty that had been simmering in the background can emerge and be debated. And new associations begin to develop among previously separate innovations. The big influence comes from discoveries that, at that time, emerge from people’s local experiments at small scales, discoveries that can emerge at times of big change, to trigger bigger changes at large scales. That process highlights the keys for the future.

One key is maybe best captured by the word “hope”. I see hope might be emerging in the US from the results of the recent mid-term election in 2006. Certainly the results of that election have triggered a sudden storm of new and intelligent, but confused discussion. That is just what Panarchy predicts, and it certainly makes me suddenly a little more hopeful about our mid-term future.

The second key has to recognize that the small, that is the individual human, can at times transform the big, that is the politics and institutions of governance. But there are traps, and their potential needs some discussion.

The multi-authored book describing the integrative nature of Panarchy (Gunderson and Holling 2002) is partly a culmination of 50 years of my own research work, together with that of a fine group of friends and colleagues in the Resilience Project. During that project, my ideas expanded and grew as they interacted with the ideas of others- other ecologists, economists, social scientists and mathematicians – all co-authors of Panarchy. Some of those were senior and well established colleagues. Others were younger colleagues who became both the nurturers and nurtured in the work. It was a process of mutual, creative discovery that then turned personal for each of us.

For me, over those 50 years the old notion of stable ecological systems embedded in the equilibrium images of Lotka-Volterra equations, moved to that of resilience and multi-stable states (Holling 1973, Carpenter 2000), then to cycles of adaptive change where persistence and novelty entwined (Holling 1986), then to nested sets of such cycles in hierarchies of diversity covering centimeters to hundreds of kilometers, days to millennia (Holling 1992) and then to the transformations that can cascade up the scales with small fast events affecting big slow ones (Holling et al 2002) as acts of “revolution”.

Jargon, yeah. So, Lance Gunderson, Garry Peterson and I said, why not go “whole hog” and invent the term “Panarchy” for the ideas, by drawing on the mischievous Greek God Pan, the paradoxical Spirit of Nature. Join Pan, then, to the dynamic reality of hierarchies across scales, where nature self-organizes lumps of living stuff on a more continuous physical template described by power laws. Physics defines the attributes of the power law. Biology self-organizes concentrations of opportunity and of species along the power law relation. Social dynamics do the same for social structures and organizations.

Part of that organization is maintained by diversity within a scale and across scales (Peterson et al 1998 and Walker et al 1999), a uniquely panarchical representation of the role of diversity in maintaining a sustainable system. For ecosystems and landscapes, all this is arranged over an interactive scale from centimeters and days to hundreds of kilometers and millennia. Nothing static- all components flipping from quiet to noise, from collapse to renewal. Transformation is not easy and gradual. It is tough and abrupt.

It seemed to become clear why and how persistence and extinction, growth and constancy, evolution and collapse entwined to form a panarchy of adaptive cycles across scales. Hierarchy and adaptive cycles can combine to make healthy systems over scales from the individual to the planet. Over days to centuries. The panarchy shows that we benefit from local inventions that create larger opportunity while being kept safe from those that destabilize because of their nature or excessive exuberance. When innovation occurs we can sense its fate. When collapse looms we can judge its likelihood. And the timing and kind of responses to this swinging, turbulent process can be designed as an act of strategic decision. Sustainability both conserves and creates. So does biological evolution.

But it can also build dependencies, some of which become pathological blocks to constructive change. They create traps, and those require the most searching investigation now.

References

  • Gunderson, L.H and C.S. Holling (eds) 2002 Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press, Washington and London.
  • Holling, C.S. 1992. Cross-scale morphology, geometry and dynamics of ecosystems. Ecological Monographs. 62(4):447-502.
  • Holling, C. S., Lance G. Gunderson and Garry D. Peterson. 2002. Sustainability and Panarchies. In. Gunderson, L.H and Holling, C.S (eds) Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press, Washington and London, Chapter 3,, 63-102.
  • Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Ann. Rev. of Ecol. and Syst. 4: 1-23.
  • Peterson, G., C. R. Allen, C. S. Holling.  1998. Ecosystem Resilience, Biodiversity, and Scale. Ecosystems 1: 6-18.
  • Walker, B.H., Kinzig, A., and Langridge, J. 1999. Plant attribute diversity, resilience, and ecosystem function: The nature and significance of dominant and minor species. Ecosystems. 2: 1-20.
Greenlash

Air pollution and drought in China

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A recent paper in Science D. Rosenfeld et al suggests that particulate air pollution in the mountains of northern China is creating droughts in water scarce regions of western China. They write:

Particulate air pollution has been suggested as the cause of the recently observed decreasing trends of 10 to 25% in the ratio between hilly and upwind lowland precipitation, downwind of urban and industrial areas. We quantified the dependence of this ratio of the orographic-precipitation enhancement factor on the amounts of aerosols composed mostly of pollution in the free troposphere, based on measurements at Mt. Hua near Xi’an, in central China. The hilly precipitation can be decreased by 30 to 50% during hazy conditions, with visibility of less than 8 kilometers at the mountaintop. This trend shows the role of air pollution in the loss of significant water resources in hilly areas, which is a major problem in China and many other areas of the world.

SciDev.Net reports on their work:

In this kind of high-altitude rainfall, known as orographic precipitation, moist air is deflected upwards by the mountain. This cools the air and causes the moisture in clouds to condense and form droplets, which then merge to create raindrops.

Cloud droplets form around aerosols. According to Rosenfeld, the higher number of aerosols in polluted air divide cloud droplets into smaller ones, which slows the formation and fall of rain.

“This is the first time a direct link between increasing pollution and decreasing precipitation has been observed,” he said. “The finding is important since precipitation is one of the main sources of water in northern China.”

Yao Zhanyu, co-author of the paper, told SciDev.Net that of all the natural disasters in China, droughts are the most serious. “In the western region, the annual average precipitation is about a fourth that of the world’s average,” he said.

Big Back Loop, Reflections

From Ecosystems and Economics to Social Systems: Reflections Pt 6

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panarchyMy personal discovery that economists could be synthetic and insightful provided the spark for another series of studies that finally led to an effort to collaborate with economists, ecologists, social scientists and mathematicians to develop an integrative theory and examples of systems change and evolution. The rationale was that the theories developed in each of those disciplines were not wrong, just incomplete in different ways.

The integration of the results of the Resilience Project was presented in the book Panarchy: Understanding transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Gunderson and Holling 2002). In it I tried to summarize my present understanding of complex adaptive systems in the first three chapters, and in the conclusions in Chapter 15. Perhaps those chapters, and the book, will eventually have the citations and influence of the three papers that were highlighted by the student’s discovery of key Ecosystem references.

Writing the third, key chapter of theoretical synthesis, (Holling et al. 2002) was like a “mind dump”! I was happy with the content I wrote, but the style is very condensed, very dense. Some sentences could have been expanded to a few pages, some short paragraphs to a full chapter. But space was limiting.

As modest help, I also wrote an essential condensation of the book in Holling, 2001. And a more lightly written summary that expanded the work to its possible relevance to the big social and political changes that were set in motion after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (Holling 2004). I suggested it was the time for small scale abundant experiments in living, and working. It is a time when individuals have the greatest chances for influence, as resisting institutions weaken and fail. Do not develop an overall plan for those experiments, but set a tactical goal, which, in this case is novelty, safety and low cost. The invention of the internet offers explosive opportunity. Some fail, some succeed and that can provide seeds for subsequent healthy re-creation. That is a way for the trap, now global, to be transformed into something more positive for the future of people. There are ways out!

But maybe that alone is too naïve and hopeful. Consider the present moment.

I wrote the above paper one and a half years after 9/11. As I write these reflections it has been five years. What has been unrolling is the same pathology as described earlier for the resource management pathologies. So far, the responses to terrorism have been largely quick and expensive military fixes and security checks, followed by quick successes. But the result has led political leaders to ignore the slowly enrolling causes, and long-term failure.

Therefore, in addition to a plethora of experiments, now it is clear we also need to attend the slow variables as well. We need responses to the slow, deep changes that have caused the explosion. It is not just evil loose in the world. There is humiliation, inequality and ignorance, combined with an exaggerated fixation on a particular extreme identity found in the fundamentalism of the religions of Abraham- of Christians, Muslims and Jews. That is a slow process to create; a slow process to redress. And all is made more rigid by the dependence of developed countries and of powerful ones on the oil of the Middle East. People seem locked into their personal, fear-ridden regimes that are self re-enforcing, creating differences between them, not bridging them: a deep, deep trap. Panarchy perhaps helps in providing a theory and contexts.

References
Holling, C.S. 2001. Understanding the complexity of economic, social and ecological systems. Ecosystems 4: 390-405.

Holling, C. S. 2004. From complex regions to complex worlds. Ecology and Society 9(1): 11. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art11

Holling, C. S., L.H. Gunderson and G.D. Peterson. 2002. Sustainability and Panarchies. In. Gunderson, L.H and Holling, C.S (eds) Panarchy: Understanding transformations in Human and Natural Systems . Island Press, Washington and London, Chapter 3, 63-102.

Ecosystem services, Greenlash

A surprising decline of pollination services in USA

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nytimes graphicThe Feb 27 the New York Times article Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Crops and Keepers in Peril describes the recent poorly understood decline in US honeybee populations. While the causes of this decline are not understood, such a decline has been expected by scientists. For example, last year’s US National Research Council report on the Status of Pollinators in North America warned about the many threats facing pollinators and bees in particular.

The introduced European honeybees are the major source of pollination for many crops (See graph). These bees have displaced populations of native bees, reducing the diversity of pollinators.

The honeybee decline seems to match Holling’s pathology of natural resource management. Pollination services are increasingly provided by a single highly managed population. In the US many beekeepers make more money by providing pollination services than making honey. This population has become increasingly vulnerable to disturbance, while the intensive monocultures of industrial agriculture has become dependent on artificial pollination. The NYTimes article describes the situation:

Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.

Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.

“There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate,” Mr. Browning said. “While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling.”

…

A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. “Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food,” said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.

…

Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.

This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.

A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers’ costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.

The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.

To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.

Reflections, Regime Shifts

Resilience: Reflections part 3

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My bridge to studying ecosystems started once I shifted to combine the functional and numerical response equations with others concerning other processes in order to make a population model, of interacting predator and prey. That is when, suddenly and unexpectedly, multi-stable states appeared. Lovely indeed. Great fun and a big surprise to me! A new landscape for exploration opened.

Non-linear forms of the functional responses (e.g. the Type 3 S-shaped response) and of reproduction responses (e.g. the Allee effect) interacted to create two stable equilibria for interacting populations, with an enclosed stability domain around one of them. It was the responses at low densities that were critical- that is where vertebrate predators have yet to learn to locate the prey easily, and where mates are too scarce to find each other easily. Once discovered, it seemed obvious that conditions for multi-stable states were inevitable. And that, being inevitable, there were huge consequences for theory and for practice.

Up to that time, a concentration on a single equilibrium and assumptions of global stability had made ecology, as well as economics, focus on near equilibrium behavior, and on fixed carrying capacity with a goal of minimizing variability. Command and control was the policy for managing fish, fowl, trees, herds, and freedom was unlimited to provide opportunity for people.

The multi-stable state reality, in contrast, opened an entirely different direction that focused on behavior far from equilibrium and on stability boundaries. High variability, not low variability, became an attribute necessary to maintain existence and learning. Surprise and inherent unpredictability was the inevitable consequence for ecological systems. Data and understanding at low densities, rare because they are all the more difficult to obtain, were more important than those at high-density. I used the word resilience to represent this latter kind of stability

Hence the useful measure of resilience was the size of stability domains, or, more meaningfully, the amount of disturbance a system can take before its controls shift to another set of variables and relationships that dominate another stability region. And the relevant focus is not on constancy but on variability. Not on statistically easy collection and analysis of data but statistically difficult and unfamiliar ones. That needs a different eye to see and a different theory to perceive consequences.

About that time, I was invited to write a 1973 review article for the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. I therefore decided to turn it into a review of the two different ways of perceiving stability and in so doing highlight the significance for theory and for practice. That required finding additional rare field data in the literature that demonstrated flips of populations from one level or state to another, as well as describing the recently discovered known non-linearities in the processes that caused or inhibited the phenomenon. That was a big job and I recall days when I thought it was all bunk, and days when I believed it was all real. I finished the paper on a “good” day, when all seemed pretty clear. By then I guess I was convinced. The causal, process evidence was excellent, though the field evidence concerning population flips, was only suggestive. Nevertheless the consequences for theory and management were enormous. It implied that uncertainty was inevitable. And that ecosystems, in an evolutionary time span, were momentary entities pausing in a flip to different states. As I’ll describe, it took about 30 years to confirm those conclusions for others.

This paper began to influence fields outside population/community ecology a bit – anthropology, political science, systems science first, then, later, ecosystem science. It became the theoretical foundation for active adaptive ecosystem management. But it was largely ignored or opposed by practitioners in the central body of ecology. What followed was the typical and necessary skepticism released by new ideas, that I’ll describe briefly here because it is such a common foundation for developing science.

One early ecological response to the paper was by Sousa and Connell (1985). They asked the good question “was there empirical evidence for multi-stable states?”. They attempted to answer by analyzing published data on time series of population changes of organisms to see if the variance suggested multi-stable behavior. They found no such evidence. This so reinforced the dominant population ecology single equilibrium paradigm, that the resilience concept was stopped dead, in that area of science.

It seemed to be an example of evidence that refuted this new theory. But their evidence was inappropriate and the theory was not! In fact, their evidence, as is often the case, was really a model, incomplete because the collators unconsciously used an inappropriate model for choosing data that were incomplete.

There are two problems with their analysis:

  1. They did not ask any process question (are there common non-linear mechanisms that can produce the behavior?). That is where the good new hard evidence that I had discovered lay.
  2. They rightly saw the need for long time series data on populations that had high resolution. As population/community ecologists of tradition, however, their view of time was a human view- decades were seen as being long. That view is reinforced by a “quadrat” mentality. Not only small in time, but small in spatial scale; and a theory limited to linear interactions between individuals in single species populations or between two species populations, all functioning at the same speed (e.g. predator/prey, competitors). It represents the dangers caused by inferring that “microcosm” thought and experiments have anything to contribute to the multiscale functioning of ecosystems. Steve Carpenter has a perceptive critique of that tendency (Carpenter, 1996).

The multi-stable behavior can only be interpreted within the context of at least three but, as suggested in the Panarchy paper/chapter, probably not more than five variables. These variables need to differ qualitatively in speed from each other. It is therefore inherently ecosystemic. It is the slow variables that determine how many years of data are needed for their kind of test. None of their examples had anywhere near the duration of temporal data needed.

As an example: The available 45 years of budworm population changes they analyzed seemed long to Sousa and Connell and to all those conditioned by single variable behavior and linear thinking of the times. But the relevant time scale for the multi-equilibrium behavior of budworm is set by their hosts, the trees or the slow variable. What is needed for their tests was yearly budworm data (the fast variable) over several generations of trees (the slow variable), i.e. perhaps one and a half centuries – not 45 years. The normal boom and bust cycle is 40-60 years

It has since taken 25 years of study of different ecosystems to develop data for appropriate tests. Examples include those using paleo-ecological data covering centuries at high resolution, the deep and shallow lake studies and experiments of Carpenter (Carpenter 2000) in the United States and of Marten Scheffer, in Europe (Scheffer et al. 1993), the experimental manipulations of mammalian predator and prey systems in Australia and Africa by Tony Sinclair (Sinclair et al. 1990), and a variety of studies of specific ecosystems- sea urchin, coral reef etc. Terry Hughes and his colleagues’ works on coral reefs stand out as examples. Carpenter’s important summary paper makes the point (Carpenter, 2000). Multi-stable states are real and of great importance, although they are difficult to demonstrate. Surprise, uncertainty and unpredictability are the inevitable result. Command and control management temporarily hides the costs, but the ultimate cost of surprises produced by managing systems that ignore multi-stable properties is too great. Active adaptive management is the only alternative management response possible. Steve Carpenter and Buz (W.A.) Brock – a great ecosystems scientist together with a wonderful ”non-linear” economist- show why in a classic paper where a minimal model of a watershed, farming styles, of regional monitoring and regional decision regarding phosphate control, encounter the surprises created as a consequence of a multi-stable state (Carpenter, Brock, and Hanson, 1999).

References:

Carpenter, Stephen R. 1996. Microcosm experiments have limited relevance for community and ecosystem ecology. Ecology 77 (3) : 677-690.

Carpenter, S.R. 2000. Alternate states of ecosystems. Evidence and its implications for environmental decisions. In, M.C.Press, N.Huntley and S. Levin. (eds). Ecology: Achievement and Challenge, Blackwell, London.

Carpenter, S.R., Brock, W.A., Hanson, P.C., 1999. Ecological and social dynamics in simple models of ecosystem management. Conservation Ecology 3(2), 4. URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol3/iss2/art4

Scheffer, M., S.H. Hopsper, M-L. Meijer, B.Moss and E. Jeppesen. 1993. Alternative equilibria in shallow lakes. Trends in Ecol. & Evol. 8 (8): 275- 279.

Sinclair, A.R.E. , P.D. Olsen, and T.D. Redhead. Can predators regulate small mammal populations? Evidence from mouse outbreaks in Australia. Oikos 59: 382-392.

Sousa, W.P. and J.H. Connell. 1985. Further comments on the evidence for multiple stable points in natural communities. American Naturalist 125, 612-615.

      Ideas, Networks

      Building Interdisciplinarity

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      An article in Harvard Magazine (January-February 2007) describes The Janelia Experiment, an new biomedical research facility designed to foster great inter-discplinary research. Fostering interdisciplinary research is topic the Stockholm Resilience Center is grapling with as it organizes itself (but without the problems a $16 billion endowment brings).

      Great scientific research organizations, of the rare variety that produce multiple Nobel Prize-caliber breakthroughs, share common traits that can be imitated. This is the precept behind the creation of Janelia Farm, the new biological-research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In November, scientists from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute visited the new campus, where everything from architecture to organization to social culture has been planned to nurture an optimal environment for scientific discovery. What the visitors saw may offer ideas for Harvard, which is planning an ambitious science-research campus in Allston and working to ensure that the organizational structure of the sciences, as well as the architecture of new buildings, will promote a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration.
      …
      Such places did exist in the past. Both Bell Labs and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England, took a long-term approach to problem-solving, one in the physical sciences, the other in biology. Both produced results that were “offscale,” Rubin says, “even compared to the best private institutions.” Both were used as models for Janelia Farm.

      Common to Bell Labs and the LMB were small research groups, leaders who were active bench scientists, internal funding for research, outstanding shared support and infrastructure, limited tenure, and a culture that rewarded collegiality and cooperation.

      Sociological research, Rubin says, has shown that humans don’t have meaningful interactions with more than about 20 people. “If you want to have interactions between groups and every group is 20 people, well, it’s just not going to happen,” says Rubin. “It’s fundamental human nature.” Thus groups at Janelia Farm, with its goal of increasing interdisciplinary cooperation between labs, are limited to no more than six members.
      …
      Yet even if the opportunities to create an organizational structure that promotes interdisciplinary collaboration are somewhat limited within the university environment, there is no such limitation on design and architecture that promotes collaboration. In this sense, Janelia Farm is also a model that blends lessons of the past with the most contemporary thinking in lab design. There are spaces that promote interaction: a cafeteria with good, inexpensive food, and a pub that serves coffee and tea during the day and cheeseburgers and beer after work. Forcing people out of their normal environments is a good thing, says Rubin. The LMB had a canteen and the culture there, he says, was that you were free to sit down with people you didn’t know. (A 2004 study by the National Academy of Sciences asked research administrators what they would cut last in a hypothetical budget crunch. They overwhelmingly named their cafeteria.)

      General, Reorganization

      Water Hyacinth Re-invades Lake Victoria

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      From NASA’s Earth Observatory, images showing the speed with which the rapidly spreading S American water hyacinth has reinvaded Lake Victoria. Water hyacinth was introduced to Africa over a century ago, but it did not become a problem in Lake Victoria until the early 1990s. It covered substantial areas of the coastline, particularly in Uganda, blocking waterways, disrupting hydropower, and decreasing the profitability of fishing. Hyacinth also provided refugia for some species from the introduced Nile Perch. It largely disappeared from the Lake in the late 90s, perhaps, but not clearly, due to the introduction of a weevil used for biological control. It experienced a resurgence in the early 2000s. Now following a wet year, which increased nutrient runoff into the lake, water hyancinth has returned.

      water hyacinth

      These images show the Winam Gulf, in the northeast corner of Lake Victoria in Kenya. The gulf was the most severely affected region during the first hyacinth outbreak in 1998, with as much as 17,231 hectares (67 square miles) of the plant growing on its surface. By 2000, the area covered by water hyacinth was down to about 500 hectares (2 square miles), and in December 2005, when the right image was taken, the lake appeared to be clear. In November and December 2006, however, unusually heavy rains flooded the rivers that feed into the Winam Gulf. The rain and floods raised water levels on the lake and swept agricultural run-off and nutrient-rich sediment into the water. As a result, the Winam Gulf was brown when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took the top left photo-like image on December 18, 2006. Vegetation around the lake was dramatically greener due to the rains.

      The influx of fertilizer and sediments not only turned the water brown, but it also fed a fresh outbreak of water hyacinth. Bright green plants cover much of the Winam Gulf in the top left image. Though other plants such as algae may be contributing, water hyacinth is almost certainly one component of the soupy mass. As the photo shows, water hyacinth was growing along the shoreline, particularly in Kisumu Bay and Nyakach Bay. A comparison between December 2005 and December 2006 shows that Kisumu Bay was entirely covered by water hyacinth in 2006, and the shoreline of Nyakach Bay also appeared to change shape as the plant grew out from the shore.

      The photo was taken on December 17, 2006, looking north across Kisumu Bay. The photographer stands on the shoreline and should be looking out over water, but only a field of green water hyacinth can be seen. The photo illustrates the problems the plant poses to the lake. The mat of vegetation is so thick that fishermen cannot launch their boats or bring fish to market on the shore. Sunlight does not filter through the plants, so native plants in the lake don’t get the light they need. The die-off of native plants affects fish and other aquatic animals. Water hyacinth clogs irrigation canals and pipes used to draw water from the lake for cities and villages on its shore. The plants impede water flow, creating abundant habitat for disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes. Water hyacinth can also sap oxygen from the water until it creates a ”dead zone” where plants and animals can no longer survive. Typically, only aggressive measures can control the fast-growing plant.