The Erotic Charge of Big Ecology

In reflecting back on the International Biological Program (IBP), one of the largest of the early attempts to co-ordinate ecological and environmental research on a global scale – Big Ecology, as Dave Coleman, Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia calls such projects – Coleman recalls how the months away in the field and at project meetings, led to certain temptations.  Temptations were succumbed to, liaisons formed,  divorces ensued, but the progress of the science marched on. 

Coleman in his latest book Big Ecology – the Emergence of Ecosystem Ecology, University of California Press (2010) (buy it here) provides a fascinating account of the background to large-scale ecosystem studies around the world, but especially in the United States. He points to the antecedent trends, provides rich insights into the contentious, but nonetheless highly productive IBP program, gives the ultimate insider’s guide to the National Science Foundation’s Long-term Ecological Research Program (LTER) and points to directions for newer programs like the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).

Perhaps this may sound a little dusty to you.  To look at, large-scale ecosystems experiments often have appearances that only a mother could love, and to scientists not directly engaged in them they may seem like an ungainly older sibling that their parents lavish too many resources on.  And indeed that may be so, but they are nevertheless fascinating human enterprises.  The social architecture is complex, the scope extensive, and the promise is very rich, if only because our environmental challenges are no longer just local (if ever they were).  No one is in a better position to provide a field-guide to the Daedalian labyrinth of Big Ecology than Coleman who lead the Coweeta Hydrologic Lab LTER efforts from 1996 – 2000 (which overlapped with my time at the University of Georgia).  However his research work in soil ecology stretched back IBP days.  I recall from Frank Golley’s book on the Ecosystem concept that Dave was the first researcher in the US Grassland Biome IBP to get independently funded by NSF as part of the IBP program.  He thus knows that of which he writes.

I worked as a post-doc for four years with Coleman and one of his primary collaborators Dac Crossley Jr between 1994-1998.  What strikes me in retrospect is that with these fellows I not only learned my ecosystems ecology (I was primarily a decomposition guy back then) but also learned the interdisciplinary ropes.  Dac, who is enjoying a flourishing post-retirement career as a writer of westerns, had at that time eclectic and entertaining interests, and Dave had keen insights into how a complex group of people can be brought together to undertaken a complex set of projects under the LTER.  This training has paid dividends to me in my subsequent career as an interdisciplinary researcher.

So, please, take a look at this book.  I think you will learn some things.  Things about ecology, things about collaboration, and things about people.  With many pleasing vignettes of the scientists involved in the work, and the administrators within NSF that tended to these program, the reader gets a change to poke their head behind the scenes in a way that historians of such topics may not always capture.

I guess that by the time I was doing Big Ecology, the erotic change, perhaps thankfully, had dissipated from the game.  Nevertheless, Coleman’s account manages not only to reflect upon past success and failings (both scientific and personal), and should be read as a scientific history but it should also be read by all those interested in the future of ecology and the environment; that is, frankly, it should be read by all of us.   It is a rich book.  

Interspersed Denuded Zones (IDZs): their ecology and conservation significance

This morning I got a chance to kick around ideas about Interspersed Denuded Zones (IDZs) with the Wise Lab in University of Illinois Chicago.  You may not have heard the term IDZs before.  The fact is I coined the term along with Vassia Pavlogianis very recently for a piece in 3quarksdaily. com entitled “A Tiny DyingSuch As This”. 

I wager the following: right now you doubt their existence, a year from now you’ll acknowledge them and perhaps recognize an IDZ when you see it, in five years you will argue with those that dismiss their ecological significance, and in ten years time you’ll vaguely recall having coined the term!  You may even be attending the first international meeting on IDZs by 2022.

An IDZ is one of a number of patches of exposed soil in a habitat which more typically has a well developed and contiguous leaf litter layer.  An IDZ can occur naturally where, for a variety of reasons, leaf litter decomposed more rapidly than it is replaced through leaf fall.  Alternatively IDZ can develop in response to a variety of anthropogenic disturbances.  If a non-native species with highly decomposable leaf litter replaces species with more recalcitrant litter then an IDZ can develop.  Similarly modification of the decomposer community (e.g. introduction of non-native earthworms) can accelerate the breakdown of litter.  Other factors may contribute – nitrogen deposition, elevated temperature etc can result in the altered dynamics of soil organic matter.

The ecological significance of IDZs have not to my knowledge been investigated (that is, under any name) though Kristen Ross from UIC, a post-doc with Chicago Wilderness, tells me that there is now some interest in looking at biodiversity of invaded patches in Eastern deciduous forest where invasive species have radically altered the litter layer.  However, in cases where the litter completely disappears the consequences will be quite different.

In A Tiny Dying I was primarily interested in the conservation implications – my suspicion is that with the intermittent loss of litter the effective habitat size for litter dwellers disappears and the populations crash.  As a result there may be a lot of local extinction as a result.  If I am correct this may be one of the most significant conservation crises of our times.  This is because there a huge proportion of the diversity of organisms of most terrestrial systems living in the litter layer. 

I appreciated getting great input on this idea from all my colleagues at David Wise’s lab at UIC this morning. Basil Iannone, Cristian Martínez, Dan Milz (especially for the hover-board suggestion!), Kristen Ross, Matthew McCary, Monica Farfan, Robin Mores, and Susan Kirt Alterio.

In The Kingdom of Decay: How a Motley Team of Subterranean Dwellers Ransacks the Dead and Liberates Nutrients for the Living

The recently dead rot much like money accumulates in banks (until recently, at least), only, of course, in reverse.  A sage great-great-ancestor who had, for instance, set aside a few shillings for a distant descendant would, through the plausible alchemy of compound interest, have made that great-great-offspring a wealthy person indeed.  In contrast, after death a body-heft of matter accumulated over the course of a lifetime is hustled away, rapidly at first, but leaving increasingly minute scraps of the carcass to linger on nature’s banquet table.  It is as if Zeno had not shot an arrow but instead had ghoulishly slobbered down upon the departed, progressively diminishing the cadavers but never quite finishing his noisome meal.  The soils of the world contain in tiny form, scraps of formerly living things going back many thousands of years.  Perhaps these are the ghosts we sense when we are alone in the woods.

Before you rake away the final leaves of the autumn season, hold one up to the early winter light.  Those patches where you see sky rather than leaf are the parts that had been consumed live, nibbled away by insects or occasionally browsed by mammals.  But you may have to pick up several leaves to see any consumption at all!  The eating of live plant material is rarer than one might suspect.  It is almost as if most creatures, unlike us of course, have the decency to wait for other beings to die before they consume them.  Ecologists have wondered why this is the case, asking in one formulation of the problem “why is the world green?”  At the peak of the summer season the world is mysteriously like a large bowl of uneaten salad.  The world it turns out is green for many reasons but a compelling one is that plants generally defend themselves quite resourcefully.  The thorn upon the rose provides more than a pretty metaphor – this shrub knows exactly what to do with its aggressive pricks.  And if one can neither run nor hide nor protrude a thorn, you might manufacture chemical weapons.  Crush a cherry laurel leaf in your hand, wait a moment or so, and then inhale that aroma like toasted almond.  It’s hydrogen cyanide, of course.  “Don’t fuck with me” is one of the shrubbery’s less lovely messages.


Read on at 3quarksdaily

Should We Care about the Conservation and Restoration of Decomposer Assemblages?

Soil organisms are phylogenetically diverse, trophically heterogeneous, highly variable in size, dissimilar in longevity, variegated in morphology, behaviorally divergent, adapted to different soil horizons, disparately pigmented, but united in their reliance on death.

By this, I mean to imply that an adequate study of soil ecology calls for interdisciplinarity on a scale that we are not especially good at.  That being said, the fact that dead things provide a foundation for these complex foodwebs has been enough for them to be functionally lumped together despite their multifarious attributes.  For the purpose of examining the fate of detritus this makes good sense.  Collectively the action of detrital-based foodwebs results in the breakdown of dead organic matter and the mineralization of organic compounds making them key nutrient available to the living. 

Restorationists need to pay attention to soil organisms both because they are a very large component of the diversity of most sites, and because the regulation of nutrient availability exerts a large influence on the diversity of plants and other components of the biotic community.  We all live in the shadow of the kingdom of decay.  Concern for the conservation of soil communities is made all the more urgent because soils are vastly affected by global change.  A warmer earth implies generally more rapid decomposition rates (when other factors such as moisture content of the soil remain constant).  Invasive species can also have dramatic implications for soils, either directly when soil animals (earthworms and isopods, for instance) are moved around, or indirectly when plants invade.

Don Quixote - Patron Saint of The Ecologically Naïve

In an especially marvelous episode in Don Quixote, the mad knight errant attacks Master Peter’s puppet show. He takes his sword to the puppets and the fittings and destroys the show. Confronted with the extent of the damage Don Quixote is unmoved, claiming that an enchanter had transformed the scene he had witnessed – in which Sir Gaiferos frees his wife Melisendra from the Moors – into the puppet show which he was then, naturally, compelled to reduce to wooden carnage. Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, might be a fitting patron of the ecologically naïve, failing as he does to perceive the realities of important connections, confusing what he sees with what fits the vision of his madness. The explicit role of ecology is to excavate these connections and to make transparent realities that might otherwise, to our cost, elude us.

In recent years ecological exploration has attended to the role of soil organisms and to the ecosystem processes occurring primarily belowground. This skein of research has resulted in a mild revolution (ecological revolutions tend to be bloodless and polite, but revolutions none the less) in our thinking. This reorientation in thinking is referred to as plant-soil feedback theory, the central claims of which are that the structure and functioning of ecosystems cannot be fully understood without appreciating the influence of the aboveground component of ecosystems on the soil and reciprocally of the influence of the soil on the communities above the soil surface. In effect the strings that run the Master Peter's ecological puppet show run not only from above, but emerge from the opaque but teeming world of the soil.