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Oekologie Blog Carnival

Jeremy at The Voltage Gate and Jen at The Infinite Sphere have just started the blogosphere’s first ecology and environmental science Blog Carnival – Oekologie.

Oekologie will be published on the 15th of every month, starting this month (Jan 2007), and aims to review the best ecology and environmental science posts of the month from across the blogosphere.

Submissions should be credible, science-centered posts discussing new research and ideas, reviews of the tenets of either field, or evidence-based personal opinions regarding ecology and environmental science. Specifically, they’re looking for posts describing biological interactions – human or nonhuman – with the environment. I’ll be submitting some of my musings from time-to-time I’m sure.

Direction not Destination will be hosting Oekologie in May 2007 but they’re still on the look-out for more hosts in the forthcoming months.

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country of citizenship?

What nationality do you say you are when you’re in a foreign country and people ask you where you’re from? Not such a straightforward question for people from the UK – for example, 48% of people living in England describe themselves as British versus 27% in Scotland and 35% in Wales. In the UK 50% of people regard themselves as as either English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish only, just less than a third as British only, and the remainder giving different combinations of British and other nationalities. (And this all disregards the tricky questions of ethnicity and religion)

Personally I’d say I would fall in this last category, I’m British-English. When in Britain I’m English. As I move further away I become less English and more British. I probably become more European the further I move away from Europe too. That’s understandable isn’t it? – as the spatial distance increases the spatial resolution of your answer increases. If pressed you can become more precise.

But why the two, British AND English? Well, I feel British, my culture and history are British, and I can move freely around these isles and feel at home. But I still recognise there are differences between the countries, culturally and socially. But also, I think (for me at least) sport is important. Sport is important to me in its own right but I think it also reflects quite well one of the reasons I would distinguish my Englishness from my Britishness. There are great rivalries between the Football and Rugby teams of England, Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland. Sport generates pride in your team, and when your team represents your ‘nation’ you have pride in that place. The Six Nations is a fantastic tournament and a prime example of this. When England are in the World Cup, England goes crazy. Whilst I’ve never been there during a World Cup I’m sure the fervour is less ardent in Scotland when England are competing but Scotland aren’t… At the Olympics we compete as Great Britain (that’s OK none of us would get very far individually!?) but we don’t enter a GB Soccer team. The individual Football Associations are worried that their status as footballing nations would be weakened if a GB team were ever fielded. It looks like there’s going to be a GB team for the 2012 Olympics in London, but I’d doubt many ‘real’ football fans will be too interested.

But what about where I’m from legally? I was filling out a form this week in which there were four boxes regarding the legal status of where I come from (this is what got me thinking about all this). Four boxes:

1. City of Birth:
2. Country of Birth:
3. Country of Citizenship:
4: Country of legal permanent residence:

The first was straightforward (Bristol), as was the second really (England). But the final two were a little more tricky. The immigration cards you get on an aeroplane usually ask for your nationality. But my country of citizenship? Is Britain a country? Isn’t the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” the official name of this country? Can I be UK-ish? And my country of legal permanent residence? England? Britain? UK? I found some help here and filled out the boxes.

So what is my “country of citizenship”? I don’t think I have one. It’s a question that doesn’t work if you’re a British citizen.

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Ironies of the Flat World

Something very ironic just happened in my email inbox, a symptom of the Flat World if you like.

___________________________
Date: 05 Jan 07
Time: 17.29
Sender: Snowmail – Channel 4 News
Subject: Air rage
Message:
Jon Snow here with the newsroom latest

Air rage
==========

The irresponsible face of capitalism? This damning indictment of the airline industry came from the normally exceptionally mild mannered Ian Pearson, an environment minister.

Something undoubtedly got into his tea because he didn’t give up at that, his target specifically was the short-haul cheap flight carrier Ryanair, though he wasn’t very complimentary about British Airways either.

It’s a rare glimpse of antagonism between government and big business, and suggests that despite the appearance of a cozy consensus over climate change, real tensions are starting to emerge over who should pay the price of carbon emissions.

Yes it’s true that carbon emissions from the airline industry are set to triple in the next 20 years, and for every two per cent of efficiency and saving they make through updating planes and engines, the sheer growth of the business is double that, so their carbon footprint is getting worse by the day.

On the other hand, the government is rushing ahead with plans to increase airport capacity so that all these flights can land and take off. If they didn’t build the airports, the flights wouldn’t be able to happen, and carbon emissions – well, Britain’s anyway — wouldn’t increase by as much.

Cathy Newman is on the case but the minister is strangely shy again tonight and his government very far from excited from saying anything at all. Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary is voluble, describing the minister as a dead sheep.

Next email
___________________________
Date: 05 Jan 07
Time: 17.31
Sender: easyJet Newsletter
Subject: New Year Sale on flights, hotels and car rental!
Message:
Over 500,000 seats at under £21.99

Thanks to easyJet’s New Year Sale, you can now do more for less in 2007! Why not treat yourself to some winter sun, some ski slope fun or visit a new city with all the family?

We’ve got over 500,000 seats for sale at under £21.99 – but you need to be quick! This fantastic offer must end at midnight on Wednesday 10 January 2007.

These amazing discounts are on flights for travel between 24 January and 24 March 2007.

So don’t delay, book now at…

I shouldn’t laugh but it’s a case in point. Globalization in action in a Flat World. Something that Thomas Friedman would laud – but he doesn’t spare much time in his book to discuss the impacts of globalization on the environment. He does briefly discuss how certain organisations such as Conservation International are beginning to work ‘in partner’ with companies such as McDonalds to reduce environmental impacts (in ways that don’t negatively impact profits), but otherwise there’s nothing. I like the book; its a good, motivating read. I like and agree with the message – get innovating in the developed world or lose out to those who will in the developing world. But it seems to assume that whatever environmental problems we encounter, our innate creativity will be able to solve.

Fair enough, Friedman does suggests at one point that “While many of the old corporate and government safety nets will vanish under global competition in the flat world, some fat still needs to be maintained, and even added. As everyone who worries about his or her health knows, there is “good fat” and “bad fat” – but everybody needs some fat. And that is true of every country in the flat world. Social security is good fat. We need to keep it. A welfare system that discourages people from working is bad fat.” What about the good fat of our valuable and vital environmental resources upon which we base our economies? Our Natural Environment Security? Does that get a look in? It should do but it at the moment when the points are raised we just end up with laughable ironies like that illustrated from my inbox above. Nowhere in his book does he explicitly address this issue.

In his summary, Friedman quotes a business consultant speaking of companies’ demise; “When memories exceed dreams, the end is near”. True maybe, but when all we have are memories of a life-supporting natural environment our end will be upon us. We need to dream and innovate in the flat world, but we also need to remember where we came from and the environment in which we live and require to survive.

________________________
Friedman, T.L. (2006) The World is Flat (2nd Ed.) London: Penguin ISBN: 0-141-02272-8

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Volcano Modelling with Google Earth

One of my former colleagues (and good mate) at King’s, Dr. Peter Webley, is now working at The University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Pete is a volcanologist, with a particular interest in the remote monitoring and modelling of volcanic phenomena. Recently, he’s been working on the integration of Puff, a computer model of ash cloud formations, with Google Earth to improve communication between scientists and the public at large. Pretty cool stuff – checkout videos and animations here or even run your own volcano model here.

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december 2006

So there’s hasn’t been much blogging going on round here this month eh? Well that was largely due to the fact that my December was busy with a combination of furious PhD-writing and intermittent (but no less furious) Christmas partying.

However, I did manage to set up the Favicons for this blog and my main website (check ’em out up there in the address bar), I’ve added a few more shots to the photos page, and modified the links page so that it automatically updates my most recent del.icio.us posts and displays a cloud of my most frequently used tags.

Hope your 2006 went well, best wishes for the new year!

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Ecosystems Paper

In an effort not to become one of the estimated 200 million blogs that have now been abandoned, I thought it about time I let the blogosphere know that the paper I submitted to Ecosystems with Dr. George Perry and Dr. Raul Romero-Calcerrada has been accepted for publication. The paper arose out of the initial statistical modelling of the SPA I did for my PhD thesis (also used in Millington 2005) and examines the use of statistical techniques for explaining causes of land use and cover changes versus techniques for projecting change.

Here’s the abstract:

In many areas of the northern Mediterranean Basin the abundance of forest and scrubland vegetation is increasing, commensurate with decreases in agricultural land use(s). Much of the land use/cover change (LUCC) in this region is associated with the marginalisation of traditional agricultural practices due to ongoing socioeconomic shifts and subsequent ecological change. Regression-based models of LUCC have two purposes: (i) to aid explanation of the processes driving change and/or (ii) spatial projection of the changes themselves. The independent variables contained in the single ‘best’ regression model (i.e. that which minimises variation in the dependent variable) cannot be inferred as providing the strongest causal relationship with the dependent variable. Here, we examine the utility of hierarchical partitioning and multinomial regression models for, respectively, explanation and prediction of LUCC in EU Special Protection Area 56, ‘Encinares del río Alberche y Cofio’ (SPA 56) near Madrid, Spain. Hierarchical partitioning estimates the contribution of regression model variables, both independently and in conjunction with other variables in a model, to the total variance explained by that model and is a tool to isolate important causal variables. By using hierarchical partitioning we find that the combined effects of factors driving land cover transitions varies with land cover classification, with a coarser classification reducing explained variance in LUCC. We use multinomial logistic regression models solely for projecting change, finding that accuracies of maps produced vary by land cover classification and are influenced by differing spatial resolutions of socioeconomic and biophysical data. When examining LUCC in human-dominated landscapes such as those of the Mediterranean Basin, the availability and analysis of spatial data at scales that match causal processes is vital to the performance of the statistical modelling techniques used here.

Look out for it during 2007:

MILLINGTON, J.D.A., Perry, G.L.W. and Romero-Calcerrada, R. (In Press) Regression techniques for explanation versus prediction: A case study of Mediterranean land use/cover change Ecosystems

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Critical Mass and Metaphor Models

Bruce Edmonds has reviewed Phillip Ball’s 2005 book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another for the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). Providing a popular science account of the history the development of sociophysics and abstract social simulation the book (apparently – I haven’t read it) makes the common mistake of conflating models and their results for the systems they have been built to represent. In Edmonds’ words:

In all of this the book is quite careful as to matters of fact – in detail all its statements are cautiously worded and filled with subtle caveats. However its broad message is very different, implying that abstract physics-style models have been successful at identifying some general laws and tendencies in social phenomena. It does this in two ways: firstly, by slipping between statements about the behaviour of the models and statements about the target social phenomena, so that it is able to make definite pronouncements and establish the success and relevance of its approach; and secondly, by implying that it is as well-validated as any established physics model but, in fact, only establishing that the models can be used as sophisticated analogies – ways of thinking about social phenomena. The book particularly makes play of analogies with the phase transitions observed in fluids since this was the author’s area of expertise.

This book is by no means unique in making these kinds of conflation – they are rife within the world of social simulation.

(from Edmonds 2006, JASSS)

And not only within social simulation. In a previous paper, I highlighted with some colleagues that the name given to the ‘Forest Fire Cellular Automata’ made famous by Per Bak and colleagues, is better treated as a metaphor than an accurate representation of the dynamics of a real world forest fire (Millington et al 2006). This may be a seemingly an obvious point to make, but simulation models can provide an unjustified sense of verisimilitude and the appearance of the reproduction of complex empirical systems’ behaviour by simple models can lead to the false conclusion that those simple mechanisms are the cause of the observed complexity.

In a forthcoming paper with Dr. George Perry in a special issue of Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, we discuss the lure of these ‘metaphor models’ and other issues regarding the approaches to spatial modelling of succession-disturbance dynamics in terrestrial ecological systems. I’ll keep you posted on the paper’s progress…

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Critical Realim in Environmental and Social Sciences

Richards (1990) initiated debate on the possibility of the adoption of a realist perspective toward research in the environmental sciences (specifically geomorphology) by criticising the then emphasis on rationalist (hypothetico-deductive) methods.

The ontology of Critical Realism (CR) theorises that reality exits independently of our knowledge of it or scientific research or theories about it, and that it is structured into three levels:

  1. ‘Real’ natural generating mechanisms
  2. actual events caused by the real mechanisms
  3. empirical observations of the actual events

The separation these three levels impose between real processes and human observation means that whilst reality exists objectively and independently, we cannot observe it. Therefore perception and cognition are important components of our knowledge about the real world. In this way, critical realism sits as an alternative between positivism and relativisms, between the nomothetic and the idiographic, and between determinist and stochastic perspectives (Sayer 2000).

Whilst mechanisms are time and space invariant, actual events are not because they are realisations of the generating mechanisms acting in particular conditions and contingent circumstances. The history and geography of events matters. Identical generating mechanisms will not produce identical events at different locations in space and time.

CR does not claim absolute truth; rather it understands science is a method to progress towards understanding true reality. A critical realist approach does not require falsification or predictive success – theories are proven through consistency of theory and explanation at multiple time and space scales. Thus, it emphasises looking at systems within their context and undertaking multidisciplinary scientific activity.

CR has been suggested as a useful perspective for examining environmental (and social) systems for several reaons;

  1. It addresses systems and their elements in context. This is very important given the complex (multiple interacting elements), ‘open’ (energy and mass able to flow across system boundaries) nature of many environmental systems (von Bertalanffy 1950).
  2. It does not attempt prediction of time and space dependent environmental events and phenomena, the accuracy of which is logically impossible to verify (Oreskes et al. 1994, Oreskes 2000).
  3. It provides a more holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to studying environmental systems. Such a perspective is consistent with other other theoretical frameworks (e.g. General Systems Theory, Gestalt Systems, Hierarchy Theory) and as advocated elsewhere in the environmental sciences (e.g. Naveh 2000).

As Sayer (2000) notes; “Realists expect concrete open systems and discourses to be much more messy an ambiguous than our theories”. That is, realists don’t expect their model results to match empirical observations. Rather, the key is to develop an understanding of the relevant causal structures and mechanisms. Characteristically realist questions are:

  • What does the existence of this object presuppose?
  • Could object/process A exist without object/process B?
  • What is it about the structure of this object which enables it to do certain things?

Many landscapes are characteristic of the open, complex systems Richards and Sayer are referring to. Multiple interacting actors and elements are combined with flows of energy and mass and, when humans are in the landscape, meaning and value into and out of them. At the human scale, observed and located in the real world, landscapes exist in a unique time and place – the non-ergodic nature of the universe makes individual events within them virtually unreproducible (Kauffman 2000). In these systems history and geography are important. Adopting a realist perspective toward modelling of these systems, whilst not offering predictions of their future states, offers an approach to better understand them and inform debate about their future.

References
von Bertalanffy, L. (1950) The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology Science 111 p.23 – 29

Kauffman, S. (2000) Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Naveh, Z. (2000) What is Holistic Landscape Ecology? A Conceptual Introduction. Landscape and Urban Planning 50 p.7 – 26.

Oreskes, N., Shrader-Frechette, K. and Belitz, K. (1994) Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences, Nature 263 p.641 – 646.

Oreskes, N. (2000) Why Predict? Historical Perspectives on Prediction in Earth Science In Sarewitz, D., Pielke Jr., R.A., and Byerly, Jr., R. (Eds) Prediction: Science, Decision Making and the Future of Nature. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Richards, K. (1990) ‘Real Geomorphology’. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 15 p.195 – 197.

Richards, K., Brooks, S., Clifford, N., Harris, T. and Lane, S. (1997) Theory, Measurement and Testing in ‘Real’ Geomorphology and Physical Geography In Stoddart, D. (Ed.) Process and Form in Geomorphology. London: Routledge.

Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and Social Science. London: Sage

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