A Microcosm System for Looking at Decomposition of Horseshit

This work is being done to provide data towards the creation of the BioShaft, a project under development with designer Domenico D'Alessandro.  The BioShaft is a soils-based treatment system for the decomposition of human fecal waste.  The decomposition products will fertilize a green wall and other urban vegetated systems.  Our initial work at DePaul uses horse manure as a surrogate for human waste and is designed to examine to rate of decomposition and the efficacy of leachates as fertilizer.

For more on the BioShaft design see here

We set up the first of our experimental systems today:

Our horse manure.  Each student used approx 30 g of manure.

The manure is place into a microcosm (we are using a Nalgene filtration unit). 

A piece of manure is surrounded by one of three treatments: garden soil, mulch or perlite.  To these will be added a microbial treatment to accelerate microbial decomposition.

Each unit has approx 800 ml of substrate that surrounds the unit.

18 microcosms were prepared today!

Tree Architecture in Lincoln Park

The definition of "architecture" I am using here is from Halle, Oldman, and Tomlinson's classic Tropical Trees and Forests: An architectural analysis (1978) see here.  Architecture is "the visible, morphological, expression of the genetic blueprint of organic growth and development." 

A good place to start getting you eye trained to look at the architectural patterns of trees is the Lincoln Park Conservatory!

Notice below the way in which space is densely filled in the conservatory. This emerges for a variety of reasons, one of which is that there is a greater number of architectural models expressed in tropical vegetation.  This allows for a greater occupation of space for tropical vegetation.

Tropical forest hosts many palms which are characterized by their single trunk often with a single apical meristem.  Rare to find these in the temperate zone.

Contrast these conservatory pictures with tree vegetation in the park outside.  Architecturally there are fewer models represented.  As far as I can tell there has not been much done work done to assess the diversity of these forms in the urban environment.

Oz Park, where there is an attempt made to add a nice understory to the urban forest.

The model analysis can be applied to vegetation other than trees.  Here is a liverwort with some nice branching patterns.

Jack Kerouac's Pile of Shit, or St Jack in the Wilderness

Sixty-three days after his solitary stay on Desolation Peak, Jack Kerouac came down the mountain leaving behind him a “column of feces about the height and size of a baby.”  Though Kerouac may not be everyman – at times he’s jubilant, at times morose, verbose, braggardly, brilliant, invariably drunk, incessantly dissecting, sullen, always writing, experimenting, vagabonding, observing minutely, oedipally strange, holy, obnoxious, and not infrequently full of shit – nonetheless, Jack’s ordinary failure in the wilderness is perhaps a more honest reckoning on the meaning of wilderness for us everyfolk than all the successful accounts written by the hard men of the great American Wilderness tradition.

In the summer of 1956, at the suggestion of beat-poet and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac worked as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington State’s North Cascades.  It’s a story he tells inDesolation Angels, a “chapter” of The Duluoz Legend, his sequence of thinly veiled autobiographical novels.  Jack went to the mountain with big ambitions.  Coming out of the wilderness a couple of months later he left behind that great mound of shit, and the carcass of a murdered mouse, Kerouac’s first kill (“it looked at me with ‘human’ fearful eyes”[1]).  But what had Kerouac taken away with him; taken down from the solitude to the cites and to his now famously garrulous writer friends?  That is, what was the value of Jack’s time in the wilderness, to him or to us? 

Read on at 3quarksdaily

The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Restoration

Thoughts comments before I submit this abstract...

A central tenet of ecology is that each species has a unique niche.  Although we do not, of course, know precisely the number of species on earth – perhaps not even to the nearest order of magnitude – nevertheless, niche theory suggests that we have millions of species plying their independent ecological trades in local environments.  From the perspective of the “equilibrium paradigm” in ecology local assemblages are assumed to be regulated primarily by competition among organisms, and therefore a tight relationship between species composition and ecosystems processes might be expected to exist.  Under these assumptions restoration strategies that protect ecosystems processes and services will map quite nicely onto a more traditional focus of protecting species.  However, over the last generation of ecological thought the role of non-equilibrium forces, disturbance and so forth, are now appreciated as contributing to the structure of local assemblages. Species may be redundant with respect to their contributions to important ecosystems processes; therefore one might predict the recovery of these processes in degraded systems without a concomitant recovery in species.   Thus, although the structure and function of ecosystems are inextricably linked they are not necessarily tightly linked and consequently we can define two target poles for restoration.  Prioritize the saving all the pieces, oftentimes using the historical systems as a guide, or saving the function of systems, which may result in novel ecosystem.  I will discuss these tradeoffs from a variety of perspectives.  In my remarks I will draw upon the work of German philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche whose metric for evaluating the utility for history was the degree to which our historical sensibilities served the needs of “a mighty new current of life.” 

Springwatch Chicago, 2013...continues

Honey Locust getting ready... not quite there yet.

Linden delicately unfurls.... however....

Some Linden leaves have thrown caution to the wind and are out!

Magnolia pinkly heralds forth

Bradford pear blooming in strenght

Redbud clustering about the twig like pink soldier ready to deploy.

Redbud... flowers, as always, getting the jump on the leaves.

Remember your silver maple (shaggy barked)...

...slightly exhausted from the effort

Sliver maple flowering

Bradford pear (Pyrus calleryana) and the smell of semen

Bradford pears are about to bloom.  Tends to be a showy affair especially when they are in clusters (in Custer Av near Main St in Evanston, IL, for instance).  I can't say that I have noticed it, but to discerning nostrils apparently the early bloom smells like semen, which in turn some folks suggest smell like fish (see here).

Here's what to look for:

The bark is fairly distinctive so take a close look