ORCID

Hello again, kiddos.  Been a while, hasn't it?

I have been quite busy PhDing, and in particular working on an NSF grant.
Exciting times. I do have several blog posts I want to write, on the illusion of linearity in human systems, and other things.

Today, however, I created my ORCID account.
ORCID--no doubt intended to be read as "orchid", but seen by my brain as ORC ID--is a system for providing researchers with unique identifiers. Thus, if you are like me, and have an unbelievable common name (there are at least five researchers in the US and Canada with a name almost identical to mine, some of whom even work in similar fields), you can make sure that when someone is talking about your work, they mean YOUR work, and not someone who happens to have the same name.

The site also has a profile page for those who have ORCIDs where they will host a list of your works, and eventually things like grants, patents, and institutional affiliations.

My ORCID is below:
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8199-3328

Spittballing on Human Habitat

(Note, this post represents me kicking these ideas around, and beginning an initial exploration of them... as such, it will not be heavily cited beyond what I think readers may need to understand a given point)

Recently, some thoughts have arisen in the lab I belong to about a different way to think of cities: as human habitat, modified by humans through all our ecological behavior to suit us.

It's a given that all species alter their habitat.  They may do this through herbivory, nest building, tunneling, alteration of biogeochemical cycles, even by changing the local climate.  The impacts of many species are relatively minor compared on their own.  A handful of species directly produce large changes in their environment through their behavior that other organisms have to reckon with.  Beavers, elephants, and humans spring to mind.  For the bulk of our few million years on the planet hominins have been no more of a force to reckon with than most other species.

Even after the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens--possibly the most versatile and hardy animal to grace the face of the Earth--we didn't tend to have too outsize an impact.  We may have cleared some land, burned grasslands in a purposeful way, and eaten a number of species into extinction, but we have otherwise lived within our niche as omnivorous apex predators without massively disturbing the Earth at large.

This would largely seem to be because humans historically lived in a relatively integrated manner within other ecosystems, making both intensive and extensive use of resources as necessary, and often being highly mobile (whether residentially or logistically).  The high mobility and relatively small numbers of humans kept us from doing too much damage to the ecosystems we inhabited.  Our versatility and cleverness occasionally enabled us to abuse our surroundings in ways other species cannot.  After all, wolves can't switch to shellfish and tubers after all the giant flightless birds have been eaten.

The Future Sound of Puget

As I mentioned the other day on my plus account, last Thursday we held a small conference on the Future of Puget Sound. The guest panelists were Amy Snover and Howard Frumkin from the University of Washington, the chief analyst technical fellow at Boeing, Bob Peterson, and Diana Gale of the Puget Sound Leadership Council (though she is also a lecturer at the Evans School of Public Affairs at UW).  Larry Susskind closed out the day with a keynote on collaborative decision-making methods.

Marina opened up the day by presenting a short talk on how deeply uncertainty is intertwined with our decision making processes, and how we may be going about the question of how to deal with it the wrong way.  Her argument is pretty simple, at its core:  We cannot pretend that we can dismiss uncertainty and reach an 'optimum' solution; rather we need to explore and embrace the uncertainty that is a part of our knowledge processes and try to find solutions that are robust and adaptive.

One of the tools for tackling this problem is scenario analysis, and Michal gave a brief (but very informative) presentation on the Snohomish Basin 2060 Scenarios as an introduction to this way of analyzing uncertainty.  The thing that makes scenario development interesting is how it combines quantitative technical knowledge derived from research, qualitative and quantitative local knowledge, a fistful of models, and synthesizes them into a series of digestible, diverging narratives.  The importance of narrative in presenting information to the public cannot be underestimated, as I have said before.

This was followed by a discussion from the panelists, who each gave a short statement about dealing with uncertainty in decision making, and then took questions.  Each of the panelists had a very distinct view of the world, but all tended to mention a point that I've heard before:  genuine dialog between participants in decision-making processes is key.  All of them tended to emphasize this for different reasons.

A long absence

So I haven't posted in rather a long while.

Mostly because I graduated from my Master's program, got married, was busy working on research, crammed everything I owned into a remarkably small steel box, and then moved across the country with two cats.  Did I mention I don't drive?

I do have an amazing wife, and some really stupendous friends, though.  And so after driving 3600 kilometers and hauling all the possessions up three flights of stairs and into a remarkably small apartment, I am now in Seattle.

The first two quarters of my PhD have been strange, as I haven't really been working on anything other than classes.  Before I left, I was a Teacher's Assistant and working on two or three research projects.  It's been strange to not have so many responsibilities.  However, had I had so many responsibilities to juggle after arriving here, my head would likely have caught on fire.  Which is generally viewed as a bad thing to have happen.

It's strange being here, still.  I can't identify most of the plants, and the winter was basically a long, mild autumn.  Except it didn't rain nearly as hard as it does in Indiana in November. Now things here are exploding with flowers.  It will take time to get used to the climate here.  I have taken a few pictures here and there, and might post some up soon.

I have gotten myself involved here and there with the war on Ivy, which I may also post about in more detail.  There's some (remarkably successful) groups in Seattle with very long term ecological vision.  Restoring the temperate rainforest isn't a short term task, it turns out.

I'll try to follow this up soon with some posts about the city, some pictures, and my plans for the PhD.
I might also try to follow up a bit on the Fukushima issue, as a lot of data is surfacing, and it's always fun to attract angry comments.

Ecological Principles

While helping a faculty person do some pile sorting in her office, we unearthed this little gem.  Dan Willard was just a bit before my time at SPEA, and I feel like I've missed out not having met and worked with him.  He was well loved, and a pavilion in the research preserve was recently dedicated to him.  This is as  humorous, succinct and honestly useful a summation of ecological principles as I have ever seen.  I wish I'd had such a list available when I first started studying ecology.

Ecological Principles (a guide). Friedman and Willard, 1977-1999.

1. The Individual Perspective - Each organism can only perceive the environment from its own point of view.
2. The Individual Response Corollary - Each organism can only respond to what it perceives.
3. The Darwin Corollary - Each individual is a result of the summed pressures, as the species perceives those pressures, and stochastic events. 
4. Descarte’s Obvious - Organisms exist, therefore they are adapted to some set of conditions which occur.
5. The Evolutionary Crap-shoot. - Stochastic events occur.
6. Specialization Principle - Highest efficiency in use of a resource can be achieved by specialization.
7. Generalization Principle - Greatest chance of survival in variable and unpredictable environments can be achieved by generalization.
8. Conservation of Mass - Everything has to go somewhere; everything has to come from somewhere, therefore follow mass.
9. Second Law of Thermodynamics - Organized systems need energy to maintain their organization, therefore follow energy-flow (look for disruption).
10. Shelford's Law of Tolerance - Too much or too little is potentially troublesome.
11. Toxic Substances Qualitative Principle  - Substances with which organisms have had no previous experience are potentially troublesome.
12. Toxic Substances Quantitative Principle - Substances in concentrations an order of magnitude or more different from normal exposure are potentially troublesome.
13. Competition Principle - Components which are less fit for a given environment tend to be replaced by others which are more fit to that environment.
14. Law of Numbers - Plants and animals can't count; structural features (who connects to whom and how) are more important than numbers.
15. Life-cycle Principle - Babies and adults are intimately connected.
16. Stress Principle - Organizations tend to alter behavior when stress is encountered; disruption often comes from altered behavior rather than directly from the stress.
17. Resiliency Principle - Up to a point, ecosystems can absorb stress with little alteration in their behavior; however, past that point they may change suddenly, drastically, and irreversibly.
18. Principle of Emergency of Impacts - Effects are not necessarily immediate and gradual; they can appear sometime after the event and at distant places.
19. Connectivity Principle - Everything is not intimately connected with everything else; but lots of things are.
20. Variability Principle - Ecosystems are inherently variable.  Ecosystems do not tend towards stability, but do tend to change in a stable manner.
21. Safe-Fail Principle - For ecosystems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities and discrepancies with any theory will occur more or less regularly.  Plan for safe fail rather than fail safe approaches.
22. Everything Leaks Rule - There are few closed systems.  Some leak more slowly than others.
23. The Geographic Determinism Doctrine -  Everything happens someplace.  The outcome of events depends on the conditions where, and when, the event takes place.
24. The Principle of Localities - Organisms must live someplace.  Most populations occupy several disjunct, ecologically similar, but slightly different localities.  Population dynamics express themselves through the sum of changes on each locality.
25. Spreading-the-risk Corollary - Each locality differs and varies uniquely. Therefore each locality responds differently to external events.  Organisms spread the risk of extinction by inhabiting many localities.
26. The Perspective of Scale - A molehill is a mountain to a mite.  An Icelandic volcanic eruption is just news in Australia.  The importance of events depends on the size of the ecosystem one studies.
27. The Prolonged Engagement Principle - Time lends perspective to all things. A forest recovers from a fire in a few years and a lava flow in a few millennia. 
28. The Notion of Benevolent Catastrophes - Consistency and stability stagnate ecosystems. External, stochastic events destabilize ecosystems causing increased spatial heterogeneity, temporal diversity and generally enhance the adaptability and resiliency of a system.
29. The Notion of Malevolent Catastrophes - External events, induced either by human or natural actions, may cause the environment to change too quickly for the ecosystem to adapt, or to conditions beyond the adaptability of the organisms. Thus it becomes a new and different sort of ecosystem.
30. Can't-Step-in-the-Same-River-Twice Paradigm - Everything changes in time and space.  Learn the processes and rates that form and control the ecosystem.  Then lead the target.
31. Dynamic Disequilibrium Principle - Stability in one part of an ecosystem leads to instability in other parts. Hence the system if left alone is stably unstable.
32. Inexorability Principle - The ecosystem doesn't give a damn whether you study it or not.
33. The Non-intervention Option - Consider advantages of leaving ecosystems alone.  Then reconsider your management strategies.
34. Occam’s Simplification - All ecologists eventually come to similar conclusions about things.