Visualization

Jellyfish

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From Monterey Bay Aquarium a beautiful jellyfish video – there’s no such thing as a jellyfish.

By all accounts, jellyfish are creatures that kill people, eat microbes, grow to tens of meters, filter phytoplankton, take over ecosystems, and live forever. Because of the immense diversity of gelatinous plankton, jelly-like creatures can individually have each of these properties. However this way of looking at them both overstates and underestimates their true diversity. Taxonomically, they are far more varied than a handful of exemplars that are used to represent jellyfish or especially the so-called “true” jellyfish. Ecologically, they are even more adaptable than one would expect by looking only at the conspicuous bloom forming families and species that draw most of the attention. In reality, the most abundant and diverse gelatinous groups in the ocean are not the ones that anyone ever sees.

Visualization

Evoking Climate Change’s Systemic Risks

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Stephen Thomson of Plonomedia.com remixed 350.org climate activist Bill McKibben‘s popular sarcastic recent Washington Post op-ed “A link between climate change and Joplin Tornadoes? Never!” into a video that is more gripping than the article.

McKibben is being sarcastic for a reason, for as a recent Media Matters report showed that while a majority of the public supports regulation of greenhouse gases the media over represents anti-regulation groups:

Media Matters examined TV news coverage that included elected officials, members of advocacy groups, business leaders, pundits, and others discussing EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. Of these appearances, 152 out of 199 — over 76% — opposed regulation. The three outlets that hosted the greatest number of guests, Fox News (FNC), Fox Business (FBN), and CNBC, all featured opponents of GHG regulation at least four times more often than supporters.

General

Adaptive Agricultural and Environmental Decision-making Postdoc at UC Davis

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UC Davis Post-Doctoral Position in Adaptive Agricultural and Environmental Decision-making with Mark Lubell.

The UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy seeks to fill one post-doctoral position in Adaptive Agricultural and Environmental Decision-making. The post-doctoral position will be for two years residence with possible third year renewal, starting Fall 2011 or earlier. The post-doctoral fellow will support a USDA funded project analyzing local rangeland restoration programs and individual factors that encourage ranchers to engage in adaptive rangeland management. The project involves analyzing data from structured survey of California ranchers, with possible addition of comparative data from Wyoming. The project also involves designing and expert elicitation or mental models process to map the decision-making process of ranchers in conjunction with an agro-ecological field experiment in adaptive rangeland management. The study will advance basic science in adaptive decision-making and coupled social-ecological systems. The project is being conducted by an interdisciplinary team including natural and social scientists. More information about the rangeland management project can be found here: UC Davis Adaptive Rangeland Management Project.

The post-doctoral fellow will be a member of Dr. Mark Lubell’s Center for Environmental Policy and Behaviorand housed in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy. In addition to the rangeland restoration project, the post-doc will have opportunities to participate in other projects on sustainable agriculture, water management, and climate change; mentor graduate students, teach classes, develop new research funding; and generally support an active research group.

Applicants should be recent recipients of a doctoral degree, with demonstrated interest and publication ability in agricultural and environmental decision-making and policy. Applicants are required to have a background in survey design and analysis, social science theory, and strong skills in quantitative statistical and network analysis. Applicants should also be trained in the design and analysis of expert elicitation protocols such as semantic networks, multi-criteria decision making, mental models, learning models, decision-making under uncertainty, and risk perception. The project requires strong interpersonal and language skills to interact directly with agricultural communities and stakeholders. Experience with rangeland management is preferred but not required. The position is open with respect to academic discipline, and could include behavioral decision theory, economics, political science, sociology, or other appropriate social science training.

Please notify Dr. Mark Lubell (mnlubell@ucdavis.edu) as soon as possible if you intend to apply, and send full applications electronically by August 1, 2011. Applications received by this date will be given first consideration, although we will continue to accept applications after that date. Applications should include a CV, letter describing research interests and background as applied to this project, examples of any relevant publications, and three letters of reference. Top candidates will be screened by telephone with possibility of campus visit. The University of California, Davis, is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer with a strong institutional commitment to the development of a climate that supports equality of opportunity and respect for differences.

Ecosystem services, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Ecosystem services and poverty alleviation

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Ecosystem services for poverty alleviation (ESPA) is an exciting new research programme funded by a consortium of development and science agencies in the UK. I’m on ESPA’s international advisory board and they asked me for some thoughts on the ecosystem service science. Below is what I wrote:

The concept of “Ecosystem services” is a powerful idea that bridges the conceptual separation of the ecological and the social, to connect ecosystems to human well-being. The success of this idea has lead to many “payment for ecosystem service” schemes, which are now being implemented or are being discussed. These plans have the potential to channel substantial amounts of money into the enhancement of the natural capital, which produces ecosystem services, in ways that improve the livelihoods of the world’s poorest.

The challenge of ecosystem service research is that the policy success of the idea of ecosystem services has rapidly outstripped its scientific basis. This situation presents many risks that efforts may be wasted on activities that actively damage natural capital or reduce the livelihoods of the poor. More specifically in terms of poverty alleviation, ecosystem service research has sometimes merely  biological research coated with a veneer of social relevance, rather than using social needs to focus ecological research. Achieving positive outcomes, and avoiding negative ones requires a much richer understanding of ecosystem services than now exists. Below I suggest some ecosystem service research challenges that it would be useful for ESPA research to address.

Research Challenges
Effective ecosystem services assessment: Scientists and practitioners need to develop faster, cheaper ways of assessing the state of multiple ecosystem services, especially in data sparse regions. A better understanding of the following points would help design more effective assessments.
Bundles of ecosystem services: We need to better understand how multiple ecosystem services interact with one another over time. Are they tightly or weakly integrated? Over what scales? What are the social and ecological processes that connect them? In particular what are the trade-offs or synergisms between multiple ecosystem services? This issue is particularly import if we are to avoid situations where investment in specific ecosystem services (e.g. food production or carbon sequestration) results in reducing in other ecosystem services whose losses outweighs the benefits obtained for the increases. This is particularly important to ensure that increases in agricultural production actually increase human well-being.

Dynamics of ecosystem services: Most analyses of ecosystems services have been static, and there has been too much focus on species role in producing ecosystem services and too little on either social or spatial processes shape the supply of ecosystem services. We need to develop better ways to assess how multiple ecosystem services vary and change over time, and understand what are the key social, ecological and geographic factors that drive these changes. In particular it is important to understand what internal and external social and ecological dynamics can produce abrupt changes in ecosystem services (or alternatively what processes can produce resilience). Understanding these factors is important to know when are where abrupt changes are likely to occur, what can be done to avoid unwanted abrupt changes, or alternatively what can be done to promote desired abrupt changes.

Enhancing ecosystem services: Poverty reduction requires enhancing the supply of ecosystem services in degraded ecosystems, but other than agricultural research on provisioning services there has been relatively little work on how to effectively increase ecosystem services. Much environmental research assumes people have a negative impact on ecosystems, but people can improve ecosystem functioning (e.g. Terra Preta – the high productivity soil produced by pre-Columbian Amazonian civilizations). Social, ecological and technological processes can be used separately or in combination to improve ecosystem services, but while there has been a lot of research on the built environment, there has been little research on how ecological infrastructures can be built, enhanced and maintained. We need to better understand how to do enhance ecosystem services, especially how poor people can do it in degraded ecosystems, in wild and human dominated ecosystems, as well as in rural and urban locations.

Governing ecosystem services: It is currently unclear what are effective ways to govern ecosystem services. Today there is often a haphazard assignment of property rights to ecosystem services without analysis or research on the ecological and social consequences, or resilience of these strategies. Ecosystem services present multiple challenges in that their consumption, production and management occur at different scales making it difficult to connect ecosystem system services to existing property or land management. Furthermore, research has shown that not only can payment for ecosystem service schemes have negative impacts on other ecosystem services, but also that payments can erode the social norms and practices that are producing ecosystem services. These problems suggest that institutional innovation and experimentation is needed to develop effective institutions to govern ecosystem services – especially to enhance the wellbeing of the poor, and that the design of such programmes should not be done from a narrow economic perspective.

Human well-being and ecosystem services: How do changes in the supply of ecosystem services alter human wellbeing? People depend on ecosystem services, but we know little about how much benefit different people receive from different ecosystem services. What we do know is largely about either multiple benefits of food production or the economic benefits of tourism. We know little about how either regulating ecosystem services relate to human wellbeing, or how ecosystem services contribute to multiple aspects of human wellbeing. Addressing this issue in multiple ways is critical to understanding the connection between ecosystem services and poverty reduction. In particular better understanding how to develop agricultural landscapes that provide a diverse set of ecosystem services to the poor. Contributing to clarifying these relationships would be a major benefit of ESPA. In particular a richer understanding of how ecosystem services contribute to diverse aspects of human wellbeing, such as health, security, and good social relations, is important to be able to accurately value ecosystem services.

The above research challenges are written in a telegraphic form that is relatively unsupported. Some of these issues are raised and discussed in greater length in three recent papers I co-authored:

Links

Links: ECloud, wikipedia, housing bubble, Vaclav Smil, CO2, and ice

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Recent links that I liked.

1) Video of ECloud sculpture at San Jose airport.

2) Academics working with wikipedia from Chronicle of Higher Education.

3) Interactive graph of Case-Schiller house price index for 20 cities in USA, showing the continued deflation of the housing bubble from New York Times.

4) Andrew Revkin has an hourlong interview with Vaclav Smil about global sustainability on TV O.

5) Canada emits 3 times the CO2 per person as does Sweden.  Sweden has slightly lower emissions per person than China.  A visualization allows you to see global data and trends.

6) Mapping land ice loss in the Canadian arctic from NASA.

7) Mapping groundwater depletion with satellites from New York Times.

Cities, General, Links, Networks

Links: writing, activism, First Nations, Arctic, immigration, and walking

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A selection of links I found interesting from around the web

1)  How to write about your science from SciDev.Net

2) Rob Hopkins from Transition Towns writes about the tension between creating change and activism in Transition and activism: a response on Transition Culture.

3) How the distant and dispersed people of Canada’s First Nations are using Facebook from Vancouver’s the Tyee.

4) How climate change will increase coastal accessibility but decrease accessibility to the interior of the Arctic by cutting ice roads.  Toronto Globe and Mail reports on new research in Nature Climate Change (doi:10.1038/nclimate1120).

5) Why more immigration means less crime.  The Walrus reports on how immigration lowers crime rates in Canadian communities in an article Arrival of the Fittest.

6) The Globe and Mail reports on how in Toronto carless recent immigrants are producing a more walkable environment.

Cities

Bicycles and the city

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Many cities are investing in bicycle infrastructure such as expanded bike lanes or subsidized bicycle sharing programs, and this is increasing bicycle traffic. InfraNet Lab blog writes that in Montreal and New York City ridership has increase about 30% since 2008. London has more than doubled since 2000. London’s new large capacity bike lanes have lead to a 70% increase in cycle traffic into the city reports UK’s Bikehub in one year.

This big city provides a list of a few example cities, and Streetfilms, which is a NGO that creates short films on how transportation policy can improve city life,  has a number of films on urban bicycling and bicycle infrastructure.  For example,


Cycling Copenhagen, Through North American Eyes

There is lots of discussion over how to do incorporate bicycles in cities is intense and diverse. For example,

1) James Schwartz argues that it is good for urban businesses.

2) Canadian sustainability write Chris Turner on bike lanes (parts 1, 2, and 3)

3) Evan Osnos in his New York blog post Bicycle lanes of Beijing compares the history of bike lines in Beijing with recent debates over bike lanes in new york

But an article on Sustainable Cities Collective by Kasey Klimes The Real Reason Why Bicycles are the Key to Better Cities argues that urban cycling is important, not just because it’s healthier, uses less energy and pollutes less than other transport, but that they provide a means for becoming engaged in city life. Klimes writes:

Invite a motorist for a bike ride through your city and you’ll be cycling with an urbanist by the end of the day. Even the most eloquent of lectures about livable cities and sustainable design can’t compete with the experience from atop a bicycle saddle.

“These cars are going way too fast,” they may mutter beneath their breath.

“How are we supposed to get across the highway?”

“Wow, look at that cathedral! I didn’t know that was there.”

“I didn’t realize there were so many vacant lots in this part of town.”

“Hey, let’s stop at this cafe for a drink.”

Suddenly livability isn’t an abstract concept, it’s an experience. Human scale, connectivity, land use efficiency, urban fabric, complete streets… all the codewords, catchphrases, and academic jargon can be tossed out the window because now they are one synthesized moment of appreciation. Bicycles matter because they are a catalyst of understanding – become hooked on the thrill of cycling, and everything else follows. Now a new freeway isn’t a convenience but an impediment. Mixed-use development isn’t a threat to privacy but an opportunity for community. And maybe, just maybe, car-free living will eventually be seen not as restrictive, but as a door to newfound freedom. However, it’s essential to acknowledge that accidents can happen even in the pursuit of this newfound freedom. In such instances, having access to first aid supplies is paramount. You can find a wide range of essential first aid products at https://www.e-firstaidsupplies.com/, which can be invaluable for treating injuries and ensuring the safety of cyclists. Being prepared with first aid materials can make a significant difference in maintaining the well-being of cyclists and fostering a safer, more enjoyable cycling experience.

The real reason why bicycles are the key to better cities?

Some might call it enlightenment.

And BBC reports on research that suggests that cyclists are happier people.

Hopefully the indirect consequences of this regrowth of urban cycling will be positive. I know I’ll be looking at the city differently on my bike to work.

Visualization

Satellite archaeology uses changes in soil moisture to detect ruins

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ScienceNews reports on a research team lead by Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama, Birmingham that has used high-resolution satellite imagery covering all of Egypt to identify the potential sites of 17 lost pyramids, nearly 3000 ancient settlements, and 1000 tombs. They write:

Parcak began her study 11 years ago, searching for traces of ancient village walls buried under Egypt’s fields and desert sands. Obtaining images from both NASA and QuickBird satellites, she combined and analyzed data from the visible imagery as well as the infrared and thermal parts of the light spectrum. Through trial and error, she discovered that the most informative images were taken during the relatively wet weeks of late winter. During this period, buried mud-brick walls absorbed more moisture than usual, producing a subtle chemical signature in the overlying soil that showed up in high-resolution, infrared satellite images. These places became “our hot spots, the places that we could end up exploring on foot,” Parcak says.The team found 17 buried pyramid-shaped structures, including one at Saqqara, famed for its numerous pyramids. That sighting was confirmed by a team of Egyptian archaeologists who excavated part of what is now thought to be a late Middle Kingdom pyramid at the site. The other 16 structures look like pyramids from space but could be elite tombs, Parcak says. “Let’s be honest, we won’t know if those pyramids are pyramids until we excavate,” she says.

To further test some of the most recent satellite finds, Parcak enlisted the help of a French archaeological team already digging at a 3000-year-old site known as Tanis. The satellite data revealed a warren of mud-brick walls, mazelike streets, and large residences that may have housed the wealthy. So the French team chose a structure from the images and excavated there. Beneath about 30 centimeters of sediments, they discovered mud-brick walls. “They found an almost 100% correlation between what we see on the imagery and what we see on the ground,” Parcak says. “So this gives a significant amount of credence to what we see in the whole image.”

An article on BBC news about this work also features a video on their work, which is from a new BBC documentary.

Ecosystem services

A new global database of plant traits – TRY

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An ongoing research programme in ecology is to use species traits to model ecosystem dynamics and function.   Most of the effort on traits has focussed on plants.

Location of TRY sample sites

TRY is an exciting new global database of plant traits that has managed to combine many of these efforts – bring together 93 separate plant trait databases, and worked with 198 partners from 106 different scientific institutions, to produce a global database that contains 3 million trait records for about 69 000 plant species (of the world’s 3 00 000 plant species).  The database covers  about 1,500 different plant traits, including the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical, and phenological – and ranging from leaf area, to fire tolerance, and nitrogen fixation capacity.  The project’s objectives are:

(1) The construction of a global-scale database of vascular plant traits. This database should gather under a single, easily accessible format data available in different existing datasets that cover a variety of biomes, geographic areas, and traits. The database construction is under the technical responsibility of the Organismic Biogeochemistry Group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry.

(2) Make the trait data available for the ecological community. The TRY database is not public, but data are shared among participants of the TRY initiative upon request, respecting the intellectual property rights of data contributors.

(3) Support the design of a new generation of dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) which take into account the greater biological complexity, necessary for a more robust representation of ecosystem response to global environmental change.

A new paper from the project in Global Change Biology (DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02451.x) presents the TRY database and an initial analysis of traits that shows:

  • most plant traits are approximately log-normally distributed, with widely differing ranges of variation across traits.
  • most trait variation is between species (interspecific), but significant intraspecific variation is also documented, up to 40% of the overall variation.
  • Plant functional types (PFTs), as commonly used in vegetation models, capture a substantial fraction of the observed variation – but for several traits most variation occurs within PFTs, up to 75% of the overall variation.

Hopefully we can expect much more progress in understanding ecological dynamics, as well as ecosystem function and services based on the further development and analysis of this database.

General

A report from the Stockholm Dialogue on Global Sustainability

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Below is a guest post from Megan Meacham, a former Masters student at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, on the final day of the recent Stockholm Nobel laureate symposium.

The final day of the symposium, titled The Stockholm Dialogue on Global Sustainability – Seizing Planetary Opportunities, gathered some of the world’s leading scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs and representatives from civil society together with a broad audience to have a discussion of the solutions, actions and leadership necessary for global sustainability.

The event and venue itself aimed to represent the holistic multi-perspective approach needed for global sustainability. The dialogue was held in the Royal Dramatic Theatre, the most prestigious and opulent theater in Sweden. Marie-Louise Ekman, director of the theater, emphasized theater as an infrastructure in society, guiding and reflecting society and necessary for a secure and prosperous world. Ms. Ekman and Sten Nordin, mayor of Stockholm, both stressed the key relationship between art and science. Art is a way for society to reflect on itself, challenge itself and aspire. Art can activate peoples’ emotions. Science can use this to motivate action. A common theme of the dialogue was the question of communication.  How to translate scientific findings and knowns into societal understanding and action? Art is a powerful tool, exemplified on this occasion by the reading of poetry by the Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska.

General themes present throughout the day’s discussion were taken from “The Stockholm Memorandum: Tipping the Scales towards Sustainability,” the recommendations developed over the previous days of the Nobel Laureate Symposium. Questions of social equality, redefining growth and development, leadership, the need for a ‘mind-shift’ in society along with communication between science and society were discussed to varying degrees in all the talks and panel discussions.

Generally agreed upon, was the need for new metrics to gauge and discuss growth. Growth domestic product (GDP) is a narrow index that does not represent the wellbeing, social equality or trajectory of society. Trading easily quantifiable indexes for more representative ones will help to falsify the idea that quality of life is based on material aggregation.

Development was discussed as an opportunity for focusing societal aspirations toward more qualitative and long-term prosperity goals. According to Pavan Sukhdev from UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative, developing countries are leading the way in terms of experimentation, innovation and action when it comes to prevention and mitigation of climate change and its effects. Encouraging and rewarding this flexibility and creativity is one way to alter the trajectory of development.

Fostering a transition in society in a way that prioritizes global sustainability requires a mind-shift; focusing society towards understanding the risks facing humanity and creating conditions conducive to innovation and change. A general sense of urgency was express by all the speakers in regards to the need for this change. Considering how to facilitate this mind-shift, emphasis was put on strengthening communication and fostering leadership.

Peter Agre, Nobel Laureate for chemistry in 2003, argued that the accessibility of the science on global sustainability lies in the principals. It is the details that are complicated. Katherine Richardson, Professor of biological sciences at the University of Copenhagen, made a similar point calling for the communication of issues through headlines that people understand. American ambassador to Finland, Bruce Oreck, argued that the terminology used in the discussion of global sustainability can be discouraging action. Replacing the term ‘challenge’ with ‘opportunity’, for example, can alter how people perceive the issue.

Ultimately, the discussion ended on the role of leadership in times of rapid global change. Sunita Narain, director general of the Centre for Science and Environment, argued that at the international scale leadership was lacking from the developed nations. She suggests that they are not taking responsibly for their role in making structural changes for global sustainability and instead practicing, “creative carbon accounting.” On the national level, Will Steffen gave a positive example of leadership from the Australian cross-party panel on climate change. That have four sectors (science, economics, industry, and social equity rights) represented with equal voting rights to make the national decisions on climate change. On the individual level Frances Westley argued most adamantly for people to, “Start where you are and do what you are good at.” It is policy’s role to provide the incentives or sanctions that afford opportunities and an innovative environment. They ended by suggesting to everyone to take risks and not to be afraid, because guilt and fear will not help the transition to global sustainability.

The program and list of participants can be found at http://globalsymposium2011.org/ .