Could an Orca Give a TED Talk?

Karen Bakker

Landscape structure and farming management interacts to modulate pollination supply and crop production in blueberries 

Ramírez-Mejía et al., 2023.

Deployment of beehives in blueberry fields can buffer, but not compensate for the negative effects on honeybee abundance produced by surrounding large scale none-flowering crops. Such compensation would require high-quality beehives by monitoring their health and strength. The contribution of honeybees to crop production is not equal across production metrics. That is, higher abundance of honeybees increases the number of berries produced but at the cost of smaller and more acidic fruits, potentially reducing their market value. Growers must consider this trade-off between fruit quantity and quality when actively managing honeybee abundance.

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14553

Inside Big Botany 

Timothy Morton

Power laws in species’ biotic interaction networks can be inferred from co-occurrence data

Galiana et al.,  2023

Inferring biotic interactions from species co-occurrence patterns has long intrigued ecologists. Yet recent research revealed that co-occurrences may not reliably represent pairwise biotic interactions. We propose that examining network-level co-occurrence patterns can provide valuable insights into community structure and assembly. Analysing ten bipartite networks of empirically sampled biotic interactions and associated species spatial distribution, we find that approximately 20% of co-occurrences correspond to actual interactions. Moreover, the degree distribution shifts from exponential in co-occurrence networks to power laws in networks of biotic interactions. This shift results from a strong interplay between species’ biotic (their interacting partners) and abiotic (their environmental requirements) niches, and is accurately predicted by considering co-occurrence frequencies. Our work offers a mechanistic understanding of the assembly of ecological communities and suggests simple ways to infer fundamental biotic interaction network characteristics from co-occurrence data.

https://n9.cl/ggtmr

 Nature Beyond the Limits of Human Perception | Doris Mitsch

Key tropical crops at risk from pollinator loss due to climate change and land use 

Millard et al., 2023.

Insect pollinator biodiversity is changing rapidly, with potential consequences for the provision of crop pollination. However, the role of land use–climate interactions in pollinator biodiversity changes, as well as consequent economic effects via changes in crop pollination, remains poorly understood. We present a global assessment of the interactive effects of climate change and land use on pollinator abundance and richness and predictions of the risk to crop pollination from the inferred changes. Using a dataset containing 2673 sites and 3080 insect pollinator species, we show that the interactive combination of agriculture and climate change is associated with large reductions in insect pollinators. As a result, it is expected that the tropics will experience the greatest risk to crop production from pollinator losses. Localized risk is highest and predicted to increase most rapidly, in regions of sub-Saharan Africa, northern South America, and Southeast Asia. Via pollinator loss alone, climate change and agricultural land use could be a risk to human well-being.

Response of pollinating and nonpollinating insect total abundance to the interactive effect of standardized temperature anomaly and land use.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh0756

LE SYSTÈME ALIMENTAIRE MONDIAL MENACE DE S’EFFONDRER 

George Monbiot

 

 Muerte masiva de insectos | DW Documental

 “I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.” 

I. Asimov 

Chaos and intermittent instability in ecological systems 

Tanya Rogers 

Fear of the human “super predator” pervades the South African savanna  

Zanette et al., 2023.

How do various animals react to a human voice?

Faced with recordings of human voices, 19 species fled instantly; the sound of humans triggered stronger flight responses than lions.

https://n9.cl/2hu8k  

A synergistic future for AI and ecology 

Han et al., 2023.

Research in both ecology and AI strives for predictive understanding of complex systems, where nonlinearities arise from multidimensional interactions and feedbacks across multiple scales. After a century of independent, asynchronous advances in computational and ecological research, we foresee a critical need for intentional synergy to meet current societal challenges against the backdrop of global change. These challenges include understanding the unpredictability of systems-level phenomena and resilience dynamics on a rapidly changing planet. Here, we spotlight both the promise and the urgency of a convergence research paradigm between ecology and AI. Ecological systems are a challenge to fully and holistically model, even using the most prominent AI technique today: deep neural networks. Moreover, ecological systems have emergent and resilient behaviors that may inspire new, robust AI architectures and methodologies. We share examples of how challenges in ecological systems modeling would benefit from advances in AI techniques that are themselves inspired by the systems they seek to model. Both fields have inspired each other, albeit indirectly, in an evolution toward this convergence. We emphasize the need for more purposeful synergy to accelerate the understanding of ecological resilience whilst building the resilience currently lacking in modern AI systems, which have been shown to fail at times because of poor generalization in different contexts. Persistent epistemic barriers would benefit from attention in both disciplines. The implications of a successful convergence go beyond advancing ecological disciplines or achieving an artificial general intelligence—they are critical for both persisting and thriving in an uncertain future.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220283120

Caminábamos con Borges por un barrio de quintas, en Mar del Plata, y de pronto sentí un olor que me conmovió. Borges me dijo que los recuerdos que más nos emocionan son los de olores y gustos, porque suelen estar rodeados de abismos de olvido: hay que oler el mismo olor para recordar un olor, hay que sentir el mismo gusto para recordar un gusto (no ocurre así con imágenes y sonidos). ¡Con qué emoción volvemos a oler el mismo olor que por última vez olimos en tiempos lejanos, en lugares a los que nunca volveremos! 

Sábado, 23 de julio, 1949.     

Adolfo Bioy Casares (2006) Borges. Ediciones Destino

The land use, trade, and global food security impacts of an agroecological transition in the EU  

Schiavo et al., 2023.

The need for an agroecological transition is regularly advocated by many actors and policymakers on the European scene, but many questions arise regarding the potential consequences that this transition may have on the rest of the world. Using a world biomass balance model, in this paper we show that a deep agroecological transition in the EU, if accompanied by a shift of EU food regimes towards more plant-based diets, is not detrimental to global food security. Without increasing its cropland areas, the EU can maintain the same level of exported calories as in a business-as-usual scenario while reducing its import needs. This result holds true also in an alternative scenario in which the other world regions adopt agroecological production methods and healthier diets. In contrast, an agricultural transition taking place in the EU without a change of EU food regimes, would drastically increase EU food dependence on global markets and contribute to the expansion of agricultural land in the rest of the world.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1189952/full

Soil microbiomes must be explicitly included in One Health policy 

Singh et al., 2023.

This paper highlights critical role of soil health& microbiome in One Health where human, animal& environmental health is linked by a microbial loop that mediates exchange of resources, chemicals, beneficial microbes & pathogens.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01386-y

May's Paradox 

Thilo Gross

Long-term increased grain yield and soil fertility from intercropping  

Li et al., 2023.

Population and income growth are increasing global food demand at a time when a third of the world’s agricultural soils are degraded and climate variability threatens the sustainability of food production. Intercropping, the practice of growing two or more spatially intermingled crops, often increases yields, but whether such yield increases, their stability and soil fertility can be sustained over time remains unclear. Using four long-term (10–16 years) experiments on soils of differing fertility, we found that grain yields in intercropped systems were on average 22% greater than in matched monocultures and had greater year-to-year stability. Moreover, relative to monocultures, yield benefits of intercropping increased through time, suggesting that intercropping may increase soil fertility via observed increases in soil organic matter, total nitrogen and macro-aggregates when comparing intercropped with monoculture soils. Our results suggest that wider adoption of intercropping could increase both crop production and its long-term sustainability.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00767-7

Can We Feed Ourselves without Devouring the Planet? 

George Monbiot 

 

 

 Permaculture The Documentary: How it started

Conservation agriculture affects multitrophic interactions driving the efficacy of weed biological control

Carbonne et al., 2023

1. Biological control is a key ecosystem service in arable lands, but its effectiveness varies according to environmental and biotic contexts. Cascading interactions between several trophic levels can affect natural enemies and their efficacy.
2. Here, we analysed how multitrophic interactions drive weed seed control under contrasting farming systems and landscapes. In particular, we analyse how the presence of higher-order predators and alternative prey affects the weed seed consumption by seed predators. We monitored 30 cereal fields organised into 15 pairs, each comprising one conventional and one conservation agriculture field, sampled along a gradient of proportion of conservation agriculture in the landscape.
3. We found that local and landscape management under conservation agriculture favours the presence of seed predators like carabids and rodents, higher-order predators like shrews and alternative animal prey. Weed seed predation is promoted by conservation agriculture through an increase in the number of seed predators. However, alternative animal prey reduces the efficacy of carabids to consume seeds, probably due to a prey-switching behaviour. Similarly, shrews negatively affect the activity-density of carabids, resulting in an indirect negative effect on seed predation.
4. Synthesis and applications: Our study highlights that the implementation of conservation agriculture can improve the provision of biological control but the resulting effect may be partially limited by the increased complexity of trophic interactions. The different trophic levels respond to local management and/or the surrounding landscape with cascading effects on the delivery of weed control. Our study highlights the importance of considering not only the direct effects of seed predators, but also the indirect effects of higher-order predators and alternative prey when predicting the level of weed biological control.

https://lc.cx/1ypf2Y

The Relationship Between Fungi, Endophytes, and Native Soil Biology 

Dr. Mary Lucero

Pesticide effects on soil fauna communities—A meta-analysis 

Beaumelle et al., 2013.

LINK GOES TO A ENGLISH

 LINK GOES TO A FRENCH SECTION

1. Soil invertebrate communities represent a significant fraction of global biodiversity and play crucial roles in ecosystems. A number of human activities threaten soil communities, in particular intensive agricultural practices such as pesticide use. However, there is currently no quantitative synthesis of the impacts of pesticides on soil fauna communities.
2. Here, using a meta-analysis of 54 studies and 294 observations, we quantify pesticide effects on the abundance, biomass, richness and diversity of natural soil fauna communities across a wide range of environmental contexts. We also identify scenarios with the most detrimental effects on soil fauna communities by analysing the effects of different pesticides (herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, broad-spectrum substances and multiple substances), different application rates and temporal extents (short- or long-term), as well as the response of different functional groups of soil animals (body size categories, presence of exoskeleton).
3. Pesticides overall decreased the abundance and diversity of soil fauna communities across studies (Grand mean effect size (Hedge's g) = −0.30 +/− 0.16) and had stronger effects on soil fauna diversity than abundance. The most detrimental scenarios involved multiple substances, broad-spectrum substances and insecticides, which significantly decreased soil fauna diversity even at recommended rates. We found no evidence that pesticide effects dampen over time, as short-term and long-term studies exhibited similar mean effect sizes.
4. Policy implications: Our study highlights that pesticide use has significant detrimental non-target effects on soil biodiversity, eroding a substantial part of global biodiversity and threatening ecosystem health. This provides crucial evidence supporting recent policies, such as the European Green Deal, that aim to reduce pesticide use in agriculture to conserve biodiversity. The detrimental effects of multiple substances revealed here are particularly concerning because realistic pesticide use often combines several substances targeting different pests and diseases over the crop season. We suggest that future guidelines for pesticide registration, restrictions and banning should rely on data able to fully capture the long-term consequences of multiple substances for multiple non-target species in realistic conditions.

https://n9.cl/m4yxx

.

La idea que plantea que la naturaleza se encuentra en un estado de balance tiene una historia antigua e importantes implicaciones en cómo nos relacionamos con nuestro entorno.

Este es el tema que se explora en estos videos: https://lc.cx/KIdCE2

.
 

Shifting microbial communities can enhance tree tolerance to changing climates 

Allsuo et al., 2023.  

Climate change is pushing species outside of their evolved tolerances. Plant populations must acclimate, adapt, or migrate to avoid extinction. However, because plants associate with diverse microbial communities that shape their phenotypes, shifts in microbial associations may provide an alternative source of climate tolerance. Here, we show that tree seedlings inoculated with microbial communities sourced from drier, warmer, or colder sites displayed higher survival when faced with drought, heat, or cold stress, respectively. Microbially mediated drought tolerance was associated with increased diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, whereas cold tolerance was associated with lower fungal richness, likely reflecting a reduced burden of nonadapted fungal taxa. Understanding microbially mediated climate tolerance may enhance our ability to predict and manage the adaptability of forest ecosystems to changing climates.

https://acortar.link/DT4r8q

Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems

Simon Levin  

Plant domestication and agricultural ecologies  

Fuller et al., 2023.

Plant life defines the environments to which animals adapt and provides the basis of food webs. This was equally true for hunter-gatherer economies of ancestral humans, yet through the domestication of plants and the creation of agricultural ecologies based around them, human societies transformed vegetation and transported plant taxa into new geographical regions. These human–plant interactions ultimately co-evolved, increasing human population densities, technologies of farming, and the diversification of landraces and crop complexes. Research in archaeology on preserved plant remains (archaeobotany) and on the genomes of crops, including ancient genomes, has transformed our scientific understanding of the complex relationships between humans and plants that are entailed by domestication. Key realizations of recent research include the recognition that: the co-evolution of domesticates and cultures was protracted, the adaptations of plant populations were unintended results of human economies rather than intentional breeding, domestication took place in dozens of world regions involving different crops and cultures, and convergent evolution can be recognized among cropping types — such as among seed crops, tuber crops, and fruit trees. Seven general domestication pathways can be defined for plants. Lessons for the present-day include: the importance of diversity in the past; genetic diversity within species has the potential to erode over time, but also to be rescued through processes of integration; similarly, diversification within agricultural ecosystems has undergone processes of decline, including marginalised, lost and ‘forgotten’ crops, as well as processes of renewal resulting from trade and human mobility that brought varied crops and varieties together.

https://n9.cl/a0q172

Mycorrhizal mycelium as a global carbon pool 

Hawkins et al., 2023.

For more than 400 million years, mycorrhizal fungi and plants have formed partnerships that are crucial to the emergence and functioning of global ecosystems. The importance of these symbiotic fungi for plant nutrition is well established. However, the role of mycorrhizal fungi in transporting carbon into soil systems on a global scale remains under-explored. This is surprising given that ∼75% of terrestrial carbon is stored belowground and mycorrhizal fungi are stationed at a key entry point of carbon into soil food webs. Here, we analyze nearly 200 datasets to provide the first global quantitative estimates of carbon allocation from plants to the mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi. We estimate that global plant communities allocate 3.93 Gt CO2e per year to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, 9.07 Gt CO2e per year to ectomycorrhizal fungi, and 0.12 Gt CO2e per year to ericoid mycorrhizal fungi. Based on this estimate, 13.12 Gt of CO2e fixed by terrestrial plants is, at least temporarily, allocated to the underground mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi per year, equating to ∼36% of current annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. We explore the mechanisms by which mycorrhizal fungi affect soil carbon pools and identify approaches to increase our understanding of global carbon fluxes via plant–fungal pathways. Our estimates, although based on the best available evidence, are imperfect and should be interpreted with caution. Nonetheless, our estimations are conservative, and we argue that this work confirms the significant contribution made by mycorrhizal associations to global carbon dynamics. Our findings should motivate their inclusion both within global climate and carbon cycling models, and within conservation policy and practice.

https://n9.cl/x0ofm

 

 

Influence of plant domestication on plant-pollinator interactions: Floral attributes and floral visitor communities in wild and cultivated squash plants 

Glasser et al., 2023

Premise

Domestication of plant species results in phenotypic modifications and changes in biotic interactions. Most studies have compared antagonistic plant-herbivore interactions of domesticated plants and their wild relatives, but little attention has been given to how domestication influences plant-pollinator interactions. Floral attributes and interactions of floral visitors were compared between sister taxa of the genus Cucurbita(Cucurbitaceae), the domesticated C. moschata, C. argyrosperma ssp. argyrosperma and its wild progenitor C. argyrosperma ssp. sororia in the place of origin.

Methods

We conducted univariate and multivariate analyses to compare floral morphological traits and analyzed floral reward (nectar and pollen) quantity and quality between flowers of wild and domesticated Cucurbita taxa. Staminate and pistillate flowers of all three taxa were video recorded, and visitation and behavior of floral visitors were registered and analyzed.

Results

Most floral morphological characteristics of flowers of domesticated taxa were larger in both staminate and pistillate flowers. Staminate and pistillate flowers presented distinct correlations between floral traits and integration indices between domesticated and wild species. Additionally, pollen quantity and protein to lipid ratio were greater in domesticated species. Cucurbit pollen specialists, Eucera spp., had the highest probability of visit for all Cucurbita taxa.

Conclusions

We provide evidence that floral traits of domesticated and wild Cucurbita species experienced different selection pressures. Domesticated Cucurbita species may have more resources invested towards floral traits, thereby increasing attractiveness to pollinators and potentially plant reproductive success. Wild ancestor plant populations should be conserved in their centers of origin to preserve plant-pollinator interactions.

https://n9.cl/33j0x

 

 

 

 

La filosofía natural [la Naturaleza] está escrita en ese libro enorme que tenemos continuamente abierto de­lante de nuestros ojos (hablo del universo), pero que no puede entenderse si no apren­demos primero a comprender la lengua y a conocer los caracteres con que se ha escrito. Está es­cri­to en lengua matemática, y los caracteres son triángulos, círculos y otras figuras geo­mé­tricas sin los cua­les es humanamente imposible entender una palabra; sin ellos se deam­bula en vano por un laberinto oscuro.

Natural philosophy [Nature] is written in this grand book — I mean the Universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.

Galileo Galilei. 1618. Il Saggiatore

This map shows the world's croplands. Turns out, a lot of food is produced in a small number of countries.   

https://twitter.com/PythonMaps

 

Charles Fréger collected folkloric monsters from Japan: 

Those who dance in hope of a bountiful harvest; those who come down from the mountains to encourage a productive new year; those who comfort the souls of children who have died in famines.

https://bit.ly/41zcq50

 

Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems

Carlos Gershenson

A soil-dwelling nematophagous (nematode-eating) fungus trapping and consuming a pathogenic nematode.

Via: https://twitter.com/samdknowlton

Why is There So Much Fine Scale Microbial Diversity? 

Ecology and Evolution in High Dimensions

Daniel Fisher

 On Blake and Timothy Morton's All Art is Ecological

Modern Non-Coexistence Theory: when invasion growth rates fail

Jürg Spaak

Bruno Latour 

Architecture, ecology and the innovations of the future

(the last lecture of Bruno Latour)

 

 

What is Complexity?

David Krakauer 

 

Earthrise 

by Amanda Gorman

Drivers and consequences of archetypical shifting cultivation transitions 

Martin et al., 2023.

1. Shifting cultivation remains an important land system in many tropical landscapes, but transitions away from shifting cultivation are increasingly common. So far, our knowledge on the social–economic and environmental drivers and consequences of such shifting cultivation transitions is incomplete, focusing on certain transitions, drivers, consequences or regions.
2. Here, we use an archetype approach, validated through systematically identified literature, to describe eight archetypes encompassing the transitions from shifting cultivation to (1) perennial plantation crops, (2) permanent agroforestry, (3) regrown secondary forest, (4) permanent non-perennial crops, (5) pasture, (6) wood plantation, (7) non-cultivated non-forested land and (8) restored secondary forest (ordered in decreasing prevalence).
3. We then discuss social–economic and environmental factors favouring and disfavouring each archetype. This reveals that higher expected land rents, resulting from increased market access, crop price surges, secure land tenure and state interventions, are the main drivers of archetypical transitions to perennial plantation crops, permanent agroforestry, permanent non-perennial crops and wood plantation. The prioritisation of other activities, both on- and off-farm, favours transitions to regrown secondary forest and non-cultivated non-forested land, depending on plot-level environmental conditions. Active forest restoration is typically implemented through state or NGO interventions.
4. Turning to the consequences of archetypical transitions for biodiversity, the environment and livelihoods, we find that positive environmental outcomes prevail for transitions to permanent agroforestry, regrown secondary forest and restored secondary forest. Negative environmental outcomes dominate for four typically economically profitable transitions to perennial plantation crops, permanent non-perennial crops, pasture and wood plantation. Non-income-related social–economic outcomes are heterogeneous within all archetypes and highly context-dependent.
5. Our archetype analysis shows that shifting cultivation transitions are diverse in themselves, in their drivers and their consequences. This calls for a critical and contextualised appraisal of the continuation of shifting cultivation, as well as the transition away from it, when designing land system policies that work for people and nature.

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10435

 RIVERCIDE 

 George Monbiot

 

https://bit.ly/3PXGthf

Trophic resources of the edaphic microarthropods: a worldwide review of the empirical evidence   

Velazco et al. preprint.

Ecosystem sustainable use requires reliable information about its biotic and abiotic structure and functioning. Accurate knowledge of trophic relations is central for the understanding of ecosystem dynamics, which in turn, is essential for food web stability analyzes and the development of sustainable practices. There is a rapid growth in the knowledge on how belowground biodiversity regulates the structure and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Although, the available information about trophic relationships is hard to find and fragmented. This gathering the information available worldwide about the food resources of soil mesofauna. From the 3105 hits of the initial search on food resources of soil microarthropods, only a total of 196 published works related particular species, genera, and families to particular trophic resources, the majority of them dealing with soils of the Palearctic region. From the 196 publications we extracted 3009 records relating specific taxonomic groups to their trophic resources, 20% mention saprophytic fungi as a food resource, 16% cite microfauna, 11% mention bacteria, 10% litter and 5% cite Mycorrhizal fungi. The available information was highly skewed, the 73.71% comes from Acari, and within these, 50.62% correspond just to Sarcoptiformes. For Collembola, the literature is scarce, the majority coming from Arthropleona. This review highlights the general lack of information relating species, genera, and families of the soil mesofauna to specific trophic resources. It also highlights that available research mostly comes from European sites, with the use of trophic resources by the mesofauna of the majority of the soils in other parts of the world still largely unknown.

https://bit.ly/3zs2YoV

 

Saturnia pyri

@sagaOptics