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https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-nightingales-song/

In this interview, which weaves conversation, song, and the music of nightingales, folk singer Sam Lee speaks about the transformative experience of collaborating with nightingales, the stories of ancestors passed through folk music, and the space for communion that is opened with silence.

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Sam will be joining us as our special musical guest at our upcoming in person August retreat in Kent, England. You can learn more about the retreat and register .

EMSo I spent, you know, the last week or so kind of immersed in your work, reading your new book, The Nightingale, listening to your albums and some of the remarkable recordings you've done singing with nightingales. And I was really struck by the relationship and parallels between folk music and birdsong, both in your work but also more broadly in the deep connection to place and landscapes they both embody. And this is something you write about. So I was curious to start our conversation today by asking how you first came to experience this relationship between folk music and birdsong, one that ultimately led you into such a unique relationship with the nightingale.

SL<laughs> I think maybe some context is really important here, because the bird doesn't exist in America. There are birds called nightingales, but it's very much a European and Eurasian bird. And he sings his courtship song-it's a night song, you know, as the nachtigallen, "the night wind," "the night voice." And he'll sing in that silence all night from 11 p.m. through till dawn at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, unrelenting. It's a persistent, extraordinary, improvised, constantly new but constantly taking from his 1500 different sounds and 250 repertoire of phrases, but always cycling a new combination. And within that musicality and ecstaticness and energetic explosions, often in the coldness of the night and in the stillness of the night, I recognized another artist, who dared into this space in a way that the loneliness of an unaccompanied folk singer-or as I was before I did music, as a dancer-I was so energized and, like, I had permission to be an expressive person. Because if a nightingale could do it out of a pure innate call, the call of nature, for that nightingale to sing, it called in me the opportunity to express. <laughter>

EM Well, let's take a listen to that recording of you singing with nightingales. This is "The Tan Yard Side." <plays recording>

I just find that recording very remarkable, Sam. I mean, I've listened to it several times now and it-and it really hits me very deeply each time. In fact, I think more so each time. You know, and it just feels very clear that there's a relationship that you and the other musicians that you're there with stepped into with the nightingale. And one thing that really struck me that you wrote about in your book was that you feel that nightingales have sung with humans for millennia and that you're convinced that this ability for musical kinship that was so beautifully just displayed in that recording, you know, evolved side by side-the nightingale and the human-and that there is an epigenetic imprint of their song upon our ancestors that is undeniable.

SLI wanted to respond to that, actually, because there is a word for this that Stanley-Stanley's family, the Robertson clan-had for that quality of singing, the thing they were all trying to achieve, and he inherited it from his aunt, the legendary Jeannie Robertson. Alan Lomax recorded and released a wonderful album of her songs. And Jeannie and the Robertsons called it the maizie. It's also the coniach in other traveler tongues, in the Irish, and duende, you know, Lorca's In Search of Duende. And Stanley would always speak that when you sang you called in the maizie, you called in the maizie. You called-The songs didn't exist inside you. They were outside you, and you breathe them in. You activated them. And when you had the maizie inside you, the ancestors would appear. And when Stanley sung and his family sung, you knew that the ghosts of his ancestors, they were all there sitting next to him judging him, you know, poking fun, laughing, playfully and seriously and holding him to account of the integrity of that singing. But it's also that that was their way of infiltrating and bleeding into the listener and casting that spell. <play section of recording>

SLThis is in our hands. One can be scientific about this and look at models of decline. And okay, so when I say next generation, I'm speaking specifically for people in England, because they only live in the very southeast part of England. And they're declining at a rate of, like, 87 percent a year. So we're expecting in thirty-five years they might be gone. They may not, because maybe they'll cling on, but, actually, the wider issue for them, which concerns me more than anything, is that although we have the highest rate of nature depletion in the UK, in Europe, we're one of the worst countries in the world for deforestation relative to the amount of ancient woodland we have; we are criminal in what we're doing to our land. We have so little left, yet we're destroying it so viciously and uncaringly. And that's a big problem for the birds; but actually, I think where the greatest issue is coming from is their wintering grounds in Sub-Saharan Africa, the intensification of agriculture and also the heating up there and what that's going to do to their winter life. And actually, if they don't fatten up to make that journey back, they can't return; and that worries me more than anything, because that's the global issue. It's not just about, you know, being more messy and allowing more scrub to develop and creating nightingale habitats, you know-which is a wonderful thing, because it's good for all birds. But actually, what we're looking at for our migrant species is a situation where they simply don't have a home. It's a migrant crisis. It's going to be replicated in the human existence. So in some ways, of course, I'm devastated at the prospect that my, you know, my children and my children's children won't get to experience what I have. But I also know the other side of that: there's worse things they're going to face. The art that can emerge and the ways that we practice in our adoration of this bird today will be held on as available for that generation to experience as much as is possible in what the power of the nightingale was, if there ever becomes a "was."

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The Nightingale's Song - An interview with Sam Lee

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Sam will be joining us as our special musical guest at our upcoming in person August retreat in Kent, England. You can learn more about the retreat and register . EMSo I spent, you know, the last week or so kind of immersed in your work, reading your new book, The Nightingale, listening to your albums and some of the remarkable recordings you've done singing with nightingales.

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A game where time flows as far as you move

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A game where time flows as far as you move

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SUPERHOT - The FPS where time moves only when you move

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SUPERHOT - The FPS where time moves only when you move

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The most original shooter I've played in years. No regenerating health bars. No conveniently placed ammo drops. It's just you, outnumbered and outgunned, No regenerating health bars. No conveniently placed ammo drops. It's just you, outnumbered and outgunned, ... learn more grabbing weapons off fallen enemies to shoot, slice, and maneuver through a hurricane of slow-motion bullets.

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Urban Ecologies rethinks the material, metabolic and political life of cities. It develops new perspectives and methods to understand how the urban is composed and governed by regulating non-human life.

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Urban Ecologies rethinks the material, metabolic and political life of cities. It develops new perspectives and methods to understand how the urban is composed and governed by regulating non-human life.

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urbanecologies.org - Ecologizing cities: material, metabolic and political life

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Urban Ecologies rethinks the material, metabolic and political life of cities. It develops new perspectives and methods to understand how the urban is composed and governed by regulating non-human life.

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Rack of squirrel, anyone? The chefs putting invasive species on the menu

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Rack of squirrel, anyone? The chefs putting invasive species on the menu

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On invasive species and borders

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rom oral contraceptives to proposals to edit their DNA, efforts to control the UK's invasive grey squirrel population have become increasingly elaborate. But a growing number of chefs and conservationists have a far simpler idea, which they see as part of the trend in ethical dining: eat them.

"My original starting point with grey squirrel was taste. But it's also great for the environment," says Paul Wedgwood, one of Scotland's leading chefs, whose restaurant on Edinburgh's Royal Mile has had grey squirrel on the menu since 2008. Wedgwood has even made haggis from the North American rodent that has driven the local extinction of the native red across much of England and Wales.

"It's mellow, nutty and a bit gamey. It's just a really nice flavour, and it's easy to match. Anyone who's doing rabbit could just easily swap in squirrel," he says.

Wedgwood is not alone among chefs putting invasive species on the menu. At Dai Due restaurant in Austin, Texas, owner and chef Jesse Griffiths is encouraging Americans to hunt and eat more of the millions of feral hogs that cause billions of dollars of damage to farmland. In the Bahamas, Michelin-starred chef José Andrés is serving up invasive lionfish to help protect reefs in the Caribbean. At Fallow in London, chefs are planning to cook king crab, the latest arrival on British shores that has sparked fears for native brown crab and scallop populations.

Grey squirrels have driven the local extinction of the native red across much of England and Wales. Photograph: Paul Broadbent/Alamy

The concept of "invasivorism" was developed more than two decades ago by Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont. "With this idea, humans are a form of biological control. Humans are amazing predators: whether it's eating the grey squirrel in Britain or the European green crab in the US, we know eating them can have an impact on populations," he says.

The spread of invasive species counts among the major drivers of extinctions and biodiversity loss on Earth, according to leading scientists. Not all non-native organisms become invasive, but those that do spread rapidly and outcompete native wildlife, often due to the absence of predators, causing financial and ecological damage. Examples include mice on Gough Island in the south Atlantic where the rodents eat albatross chicks in their nests, and the Burmese python in Florida's Everglades, which has devastated mammal populations. Invasive species are also expensive: a Queen's University Belfast study revealed this week that they have caused £878bn of damage worldwide since the 1960s, a bill set to spiral this century.

Whether it's eating the grey squirrel in Britain or the European green crab in the US, we know eating them can have an impact

Joe Roman, conservation biologist

Roman runs the website EatTheInvaders.org, hosting recipes for invasive species in the US that include the green iguana, wakame seaweed and nutria or coypu - a river rat.

"We need to say from the beginning that the goal is to reduce these populations - not to create a market for them. We don't want people to say 'wow, this crayfish is really good. I wish we had it in this river system' or something like that," Roman says. "In this time of globalisation, we're moving animals, plants and fungi around all the time that have ecological impacts. We are trying to work against that."

Critics are wary of how effective invasivorism can be at achieving its aims, with evidence the "eat them to beat them" approach can have the opposite effect for some species. A 2020 paper on catching invasive signal crayfish populations in North Yorkshire, where Britain's only native crayfish is being driven out, found that traps were likely ineffective and helped spread the crayfish. Despite the crayfish being promoted by chefs including Gordon Ramsay, the report found that less than 2.5% of invasive crayfish were large enough to be caught in traditional traps, which could harm other creatures.

Then there is the question of scale. The Wild Meat Company, which sells game from Suffolk, England, sold about 10,000 grey squirrels last year, hardly enough to dent the population of 2.7 million in the UK.

In the US, a 2014 review found that while eating invasive species can reduce populations and raise public awareness, it might inadvertently provide disincentives to their eradication. It offered an 11-point strategy for using invasivorism effectively, along with following local laws on harvesting species, which differ around the world.

Kanibaba, a dish made with invasive Asian shore crabs served up by Miya chef Bun Lai. Photograph: Bun Lai

While proponents acknowledge it is not possible to turn all invasive flora and fauna into gourmet food, they say that taste is key to success.

At Miya's, a sustainable sushi restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut, head chef Bun Lai developed a dedicated invasive species menu and won the White House champions of change award in 2016 for his sustainable food.

"If we ate invasive animals such as boar and nutria instead of cows, we would have a significant impact on climate change because of their greenhouse gas emissions," says Lai, who now runs sustainable sushi pop-ups after the closure of the restaurant in 2021.

"From a swamp rodent called nutria to python, poisonous cane toad and a plethora of invasive plants, I have hunted, fished and foraged many invasive species. People's tastes are constantly changing," he says. "In my sushi platters for decades, I'd include non-conventional ingredients. Rather than tuna, farmed salmon, eel, and yellowtail, I'd use invasive carp with black soldier fly larvae, invasive blue catfish, invasive lionfish, edible weeds, invasive plants, and organic vegetables and fruit. For years, people would tell me every day that the sushi I was making wasn't sushi, but over time it became more accepted."

In the UK, time will tell whether Japanese knotweed vodka and muntjac deer burgers become part of the measures to limit invasive species. Not all invasive animals are classed as game, and therefore the public is not free to shoot, trap and consume every invasive species. But for fine diners in Scotland, grey squirrel, which it is legal to kill humanely, is already a firm favourite.

"The demand is there from customers," says Wedgwood. "I had a guy fly in from Switzerland who ordered a squirrel tasting menu. A six-course menu ... just with squirrel!"

Squirrel rack, confit jersey royal potatoes, carrot puree, wild garlic

Recipe by Paul Wedgwood. Serves 2
2 squirrel racks - room temperature
2 jersey royal potatoes
1 clove garlic
1 sprig rosemary
500ml goose fat
1 large carrot
50g butter, diced in small pieces
2 wild garlic leaves
50ml oil
Salt and pepper
Peel the potatoes and gently fry in a little goose fat to add colour. Transfer to a small saucepan, add the garlic and rosemary and enough goose fat to cover the potatoes. Place on a medium heat. Bring the fat to a simmer, reduce the heat and gently simmer for about 30 minutes or until the potatoes are soft and cooked through.

Peel the carrot and slice. Place in a small pan with a little salt and cover with water. Bring to the boil and cook until the carrot is soft. Drain and reserve the cooking liquor. Using a hand blender, blitz the carrot with the diced butter and season with salt and white pepper. Adjust the consistency if required with the cooking liquor and leave somewhere warm.

Blitz the wild garlic with the oil and pass through a fine sieve.

In a small frying pan, take two spoonfuls of the potato confit fat and heat until it is just beginning to smoke. Turn the heat down slightly and carefully add the squirrel racks and baste for about two minutes. Remove the racks from the pan, season with salt and pepper, and leave somewhere warm.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features
Add a spoonful of the carrot puree to a plate, remove the potatoes from the fat and place on an absorbent cloth for a few seconds. Season with salt, then add to the plate. Place the squirrel rack on top and drizzle with wild garlic oil.

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Rack of squirrel, anyone? The chefs putting invasive species on the menu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
rom oral contraceptives to proposals to edit their DNA, efforts to control the UK's invasive grey squirrel population have become increasingly elaborate. But a growing number of chefs and conservationists have a far simpler idea, which they see as part of the trend in ethical dining: eat them.

# data[].attributes.body
The difference in our perceptions illustrates a phenomenon called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. Shifting environmental baselines are intergenerational changes in how we perceive our world. Each generation sets its mental benchmark of normality by how the world looked when first encountered, often in youth, and sees change relative to this. Younger generations accept as normal a world that seems tainted and degraded to older people.

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It is extremely difficult to divine what is happening below the water from what is visible at the surface. Ghost crab volcanoes rise from the sand beside a lagoon of duck-egg blue. The air is clear and still cool as the first sun touches the palm crowns. Noisy mynahs argue over the contents of a plastic bag stranded on a beach that is smoothed to perfection by the falling tide. Below the glassy surface, stingrays pass like shadows with movements so subtle they seem to glide without propulsion. A little offshore, sudden splashes and arcing cascades of silvered fish give away the primordial interplay of hunters and those hunted.

This coral reef in the Maldives lies at the heart of the Indian Ocean, where the fight for life goes on daily, as it has for countless millennia. But a new struggle is under way against an invisible force that has not been felt for millions of years, upending the relationship that built these reefs, a partnership first formed during the age of the dinosaurs between coral and a microbial seaweed. These seaweeds, called zooxanthellae, somehow evolved to live within the coral animal's tissues. As plants, they gifted corals with abundant food produced by photosynthesis, enabling the corals to grow more rapidly than their predecessors, whose only source of food was passing plankton. In return, living deep within coral tissues cupped inside hard limestone skeletons, zooxanthellae gained protection and used exhaled carbon dioxide to make food. Photosynthetic calories fortified the corals as protein supplements do bodybuilders. Thus endowed, corals could lay down limestone fast enough to outpace the forces of destruction: rasping grazers, burrowing worms, snails and sponges, chemical dissolution and storm waves.

Over tens of thousands of years, corals built structures that criss-cross thousands of kilometres of ocean and descend hundreds of metres into the abyss. It is hard to reconcile the immense geological antiquity of the coral-seaweed partnership with its present susceptibility to disruption. Corals love warmth, basking in tropical seas that rarely dip below swimming-pool temperatures, but equally, they wilt under unusual heat. Although we rarely think of them this way, the oceans are afflicted by heatwaves too, and, just as on land, the frequency and duration of these are on the rise due to global warming. When oceanic temperatures increase just a degree or two above the typical maximum for a region, and stay there for a month or more, the relationship between coral animal and internal zooxanthellae turns nasty, swinging from benefit to cost. In this fevered state, for reasons that are still unclear, the corals must rid themselves of the zooxanthellae quickly or they will die. Because the seaweeds produce most of the colour in coral, when they are expelled the corals turn a deathly bone white in a phenomenon known as mass bleaching. A bleached coral is a starving coral, and since corals store little fat, unless temperatures fall quickly and they can regain more zooxanthellae, they perish.

The Maldives is a nation wholly dependent on coral. It consists of twenty-six atolls built upwards by coral growth over thousands of years as sea levels rose after the last ice age. The reefs are topped by 1,100 islands created from dead coral fragments and sand swept up by Indian Ocean waves and bound together by shrubs and palm trees. From space, the country appears as a double string of bright emerald rings that runs north to south across a thousand kilometres of dark sea. Zoom in closer and, inside the giant circles of reef that make up the main atolls, dozens of ring reefs rise from the bottoms of pale lagoons. This is one of the major coral provinces of the world, comparable to Australia's Great Barrier Reef in size and complexity. The Maldives' profusion of reefs, developed over a period that we know from the geological record, has been one of the most prolific eras of reef construction in planetary history. But in 1998, tragedy struck.

In December 1997, far away from the Maldives, an El Niño - a large-scale disturbance of oceanic and atmospheric circulation - began to spread a pool of warm water across the eastern Pacific. First it scorched the Galapagos Islands, then in early 1998 it spread like a hot tongue along the equator, wrapping around Australia and Indonesia before slipping into the Indian Ocean. By May the hot pool had crossed to the coast of East Africa and entered the southern Red Sea. As the heat engulfed reefs along its journey, the corals bleached before dying en masse. Indian Ocean reefs were devastated, losing between 70 and 95 per cent of their coral. In the Maldives, living coral plunged from covering between half and two-thirds of the reef to less than a twentieth.

With hindsight, we realise that this global mass mortality of coral was an early example of the immense planetary upheaval that is visible everywhere today. The world is changing in ways beyond experience. Places where benign climates have nurtured civilisations into life now see wildfire, drought or tempest in their midst; seas that have lapped the same shores since the end of the last ice age are rising again as glaciers are burned off mountainsides or surge into the ocean, unmoored from their rocky seabed anchors by probing warm water. There is a febrile atmosphere about these times, as the earth's thermostat drifts upwards. Each broken record - each new disaster - is like a gasping whitecap on a steepening wave, the harbinger of a coming crash.

Climate sceptics (and there are still a few weaving fairy tales to explain away the implacable mountain of evidence) love to remind us that the planet has often changed throughout its history. During the early Eocene epoch, 50 million years ago, the climate was over 10°C hotter than now, there was no ice at the poles and the sea above the Arctic Circle was an improbable 20°C. The sceptics' argument implies that today's changing climate is somehow less serious because changes have occurred previously, but there are two crucial differences between past and present. The first is that changes today are happening faster than previously. Four of the past five mass extinction events were marked by a tremendous release of greenhouse gases leading to global warming and ocean acidification (from carbon dioxide dissolved into the sea). The mother of mass extinctions was the end-Permian collapse, brought on by vast reservoirs of lava bubbling up through today's Siberia, vaporising coal measures and carbonate rocks into carbon emissions at a rate of a fifth to a third of a gigaton per year. Today's emissions blow into the atmosphere thirty to forty times more rapidly.

The second vital difference between past and present is us. Past changes had natural causes, like volcanoes or orbital wiggles, but present warming is unequivocally our fault: you can't release aeons of solar energy stored in fossil fuels without disruption. But the heat produced by these fuels is only a tiny part of the warming; it is the greenhouse effect, by which released carbon dioxide and gases like methane trap incoming solar energy, that makes the greatest difference. In the time that it takes you to read this sentence, the world will have trapped additional heat that is equivalent to the explosion of thirty Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Read that again, it wasn't a misprint. By the time you have, the total will be sixty atomic bombs.

I first began to take my master's students to the Maldives to experience its marvellous coral reefs in 2014. Sixteen years had passed since the El Niño warming had shrivelled its corals and their renewal was nearly complete. Just as a tree which falls in the forest can offer opportunities to others, space freed up on a reef is soon colonised by seaweeds and a riot of invertebrate life, including new corals. Coral growth is slow, typically ranging from about a centimetre a year for colonies with rounded stony shapes to twenty centimetres for the most vigorous arborescent species. Although visible scars remained, the wounds had more or less healed. Corals tumbled into the depths down slopes half obscured by moving clouds of fish. Table corals spread seaward from the reef front like stepped ledges, around which schools of snapper fish flowed in braided streams, their bodies lined with gold, dark eyes circled in glowing daffodil yellow. Such resilience was uplifting. I began to believe again that coral reefs might outlive today's relentless human destruction.

Then in 2015, history repeated itself. A giant El Niño disturbance erupted in the eastern Pacific and spread towards Australia. By March 2016, the northern Great Barrier Reef had lost 60 per cent of its coral. By May, corals throughout the Maldives had bleached and, by July, 50 to 70 per cent were dead. One particularly exquisite reef near the island my students and I use as a base, a showpiece gem in a richly decorated crown, lost 99 per cent of its coral.

Three years on from this catastrophe, I am back with another class. We slip underwater with our scuba tanks and glide gently down to the reef. It is beginning to look healthier, less damaged. Fish that depend on coral for food or shelter suffered greatly when the corals died, but are coming back. Tiny Chromis, newly arrived from their drifting planktonic larval stage, fill the water like emeralds, their scales glinting and sparkling above their coral shelters. Black-and-white humbug fish, neat and rounded like the boiled sweets after which they are named, retreat among the branches of a coral head at our approach, then blossom outward again after we pass. Newly settled corals speckle the bottom, like young plants pushing up from recently thawed soil.

But despite the exuberant colours, the play of light and wondrous forms, I see the absences: animals that should be there but are not. These ghosts haunt me as I pass by towering columns that should be half-living coral but instead are rock spattered by sponges and tufted with hydroids or weed. Within their clefts, giant groupers and spangled emperor fish should be hiding. The occasional encounter with a hulking fish, round-bellied and scarred by age, only serves to remind that there should be more. Most of my students are fresh to the scene and revel in the immediacy of the experience. To them, the blanks are invisible.

I also see things that should not be there. The sponge that covers the bottom like fungus is a pretty turquoise patch to my students. To them, the matted algae that stain the seabed rust brown shiver in the current like waterweed in a summer river. For me, they are a cloak that chokes off recovery, snuffing out tiny corals before their lives have really begun.

The difference in our perceptions illustrates a phenomenon called 'shifting baseline syndrome'. Shifting environmental baselines are intergenerational changes in how we perceive our world. Each generation sets its mental benchmark of normality by how the world looked when first encountered, often in youth, and sees change relative to this. Younger generations accept as normal a world that seems tainted and degraded to older people.

Shifting baselines weave through many aspects of life, usually unnoticed, since that is their power. In 1871, John Ruskin, the English critic and artist, railed in 'The White-Thorn Blossom' against what he saw as the desecration of a small piece of heaven in the Derbyshire hills by a railway viaduct:

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening - Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light - walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get). You thought you could get it by what the Times calls 'Railroad Enterprise'. You enterprised a railroad through the valley, you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange, you Fools everywhere!

The twist in this tale is not Ruskin's rage, which many of us feel daily at the destruction by commerce of natural wonders and beauty, but what happened a century later. By the 1960s, the railway had become uneconomical and the line was closed. Instead of taking swift advantage to remove the blight, the Headstone Viaduct was Grade II listed and preserved for its grandeur. Looking at photographs of this softly wooded valley, spanned by five elegant arches of moss-covered stone, I find it hard to agree with Ruskin: my baseline was set in a world where viaducts were admired, not castigated.

Shifting baselines have a darker side. The recent resurgence of right-wing ideology has been blamed on many things, with one view being that immigration and globalisation have placed immense strain on feelings of cultural and national identity, leading to a backlash. Another is that growing inequality breeds resentment and despair that usher the dispossessed into the arms of populist leaders. Such leaders are again spouting the fascist and authoritarian tropes used by Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler. Their words were taboo and almost unspoken by generations of people who lived through the horrors of two world wars or grew up in their aftermath, but younger people today are falling for the rhetoric in part because their personal experiences of peace and stability tell them little, or nothing, of its danger.

These are extraordinary times. The Renaissance heralded in a resurgence of art, literature and technology, expressions of the period's renewed curiosity about how the world worked and our place in the universe. Not even the greatest minds of the day, however, predicted that within a few centuries we would transition from being at the mercy of nature to reshaping it. That headlong growth in understanding and influence - that fevered rebirth of culture between the Middle Ages and modern times - is itself a wonder of nature, but it far outstrips growth in our common sense. We know what we are doing to the world, we know how to stop the harm, but again and again we fall short when it comes to action. Like a teenager, our capacity for calamity has grown faster than our self-restraint, a mismatch that leaves us dangerously exposed.

The question of the age is whether we can adapt from fulfilling our own selfish interests to fulfilling the self-interest of humanity before it is too late. If we let the growing flood of human impact run its course, nature's beauty and abundance will be pruned so savagely that there will be only remnants left. They will hint at past majesty, as a marble torso or shattered face pulled from the earth lets us glimpse the nobility of ancient Greece. Those of us who document nature's struggle, as the boot of human progress presses ever harder upon the earth, look on with feelings of helplessness as the world did when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, or when ISIS sacked Palmyra. Each forest cleared is another assault; every coral bleaching, a silent tragedy.

Scientists are trained to record and report dispassionately, distancing themselves from the phenomena observed. But sometimes it is hard not to get caught up by emotion. I once dived off an island in the Arabian Gulf and found the reef pulverised to rubble by anchors thrown from fishing vessels. The anchor of a neighbouring boat had smashed a hole amid the delicate fawn branches of an Acropora thicket, lying within the hollow like an iron claw. A fragment-strewn path passed through the coral to the anchor, cut by dragging chain. The loss felt all the more heartbreaking because the destruction was not yet complete. Here and there turrets of living coral emblazoned with the liveries of a hundred species of invertebrates hinted at
past glories.

If humanity were to feel the cumulative burden of loss and damage over millennia, it would already be unbearable, but shifting baselines have a protective influence. The patch of bluebell woodland hemmed in by housing can bring as much pleasure as the heavy-timbered wildwood that was once there, perhaps more. Young Singaporeans grow up surrounded by skyscrapers and hanging gardens, and many prefer them to the 'green hell' of jungle they have replaced. For those who have seen pages torn from the book of their experience, or badly overprinted with vulgar development, the story is jarring and incomplete. But for those new to the scene, it's a different tale.

You cannot regret the loss of something you never knew existed, but shifting baselines, while soothing the sting of loss, do not fully protect us from the consequences of today's recklessness. We know what we have done. Unlike the dinosaurs, whose demise was no fault of ours, we rue the loss of the dodo, or great auk, or Atlantic grey whale, because we killed them all. Some of the most threatened species today are among the most iconic: Siberian tigers, Javan rhinoceros, vaquita porpoises, Amsterdam Island albatrosses and a menagerie of others. Imagine a future in which these animals exist only as virtual- reality holograms recreated from old television documentaries.

Losses to nature risk far worse than the impoverishment of human experience; they also threaten our well-being. As ecosystems disintegrate, we are seeing losses of critical functioning upon which life depends. For example, in degraded habitats plants and ocean phytoplankton produce oxygen and extract carbon dioxide less quickly from the atmosphere than in healthy intact habitats, accelerating greenhouse warming. Coastal habitats like coral reefs or mangrove forests, under assault from growing human pressures, protect coasts less strongly, just when rising sea levels mean we need their protection more. In September 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported on risks to the oceans and frozen parts of the planet. There is no scenario of greenhouse gas reduction that will stop sea level rise, they concluded. If the world were to shift to carbon-neutral energy production tomorrow, sea levels will carry on rising between one and three metres in the next 200 years. That is bad news for the 880 million people who live on very low-lying coasts. It is terrible news for global food production, which is disproportionately concentrated on fertile, low-lying river deltas and flood plains.

Here shifting baselines represent a clear danger, suppressing perceptions of harm and lowering ambition to reverse human impacts. A good example can be found in European marine protected areas. Many permit the continuation of extractive and damaging activities, like bottom-trawling for fish, dredging or mining for aggregate. The logic applied is that the wildlife present is resilient to these activities because they survive them today. This is often true, but it is because the habitats are a product of the activities, not because the activities are benign. We have mistaken altered and often heavily damaged habitats for the norm. That error seems improbable, but was easily made. Much of the damage occurred long before marine scientists began to look underwater in the second half of the twentieth century, so they assumed the habitats they found were natural and subject primarily to environmental forces. I was hoodwinked myself as a student taking my first, hesitant dives into the North Sea in the 1980s. I thought the monotonous backdrop of shifting sand, gravel and mud I encountered was the outcome of powerful waves and currents that prevented animals and plants from gaining a foothold. It was only decades later that I discovered the richness of life that carpeted the seabed where there was protection from trawling and dredging: moss-like bryozoans, feathery hydroids, lace nets of coralline algae, sponges of gaudy orange, purple and yellow, and the waving tentacles of burrowing anemones covered the bottom, while shoals of juvenile fish sheltered among dark thickets of seaweed.

The premise of present-day naturalness is almost always undone by reference to the past. For example, a report on Irish Sea fisheries from 1836 includes the following descriptions, among many similar, depicting a world in which marine life was far more abundant than today:

Turbot are so abundant in Dundrum Bay, that they are speared close to the dry strand.

The middle of [Carlingford] Loch is deep . . . and the bottom occupied by an immense bed of oysters, of which vast quantities are taken to Dublin and other towns.

[In a season] a Skerries boat may catch Ling to the extent of thirty or forty hundred weight, dried; twelve or fourteen hundred [weight] of Cod, of five score to the hundred [weight]; and thirty hundred [weight] of Skate.

The dense cod shoals, skate the size of tables and rugged oyster beds are all gone from the Irish Sea today.

It is salient also to examine fish catches from when records first began in 1889, as Ruth Thurstan, one of my former students, did. She looked at the productivity of bottom-trawl fisheries in England and Wales and was astonished to find that a fleet powered mainly by wind landed five times more fish annually in the late nineteeth century than the sophisticated modern vessels one hundred years later. When she accounted for the technological advances that made the modern fleets more powerful and efficient, the gulf was even greater: nineteenth-century boats landed seventeen times more fish per unit of fishing power expended than those of the twenty-first century. If a nineteenth-century fisherman could somehow be transported to the present, they would conclude that the sea had been emptied of fish and the bottom left barren.

Some fish have been almost eliminated from their former haunts. Thurstan's figures suggest that halibut, a large and succulent flatfish, have undergone a greater than 99 per cent decline in the southern North Sea since 1889. Historical records from the 1830s show that sailing vessels deploying hook and line often caught a ton of halibut per day on the Dogger Bank alone, a sprawling underwater hill between England and the Continent, while today's entire fishing fleet lands less than two tonnes of halibut in a full year of fishing the Dogger. Yet the conservation objective set for a recently established English marine protected area on the Dogger Bank was to maintain the habitat as it is today. Not only does such low ambition hold back the recovery of nature, it mandates that it should not happen.

As baselines shift across generations, we have forgotten the past so completely that few people question whether a different world is even possible, or desirable, today. There are two antidotes to this complacency. History supplies the first: more and more scientists and historians are disentangling the roles of human and natural causes in long-term environmental change. Their research tells us that the world was generally richer, ecosystems more complex and vibrant, and animals bigger and more abundant in the distant past. The second antidote is provided by protected areas. When areas are fully protected from extractive and damaging uses, remarkable transformations unfold. Fish and shellfish become more prolific, much bigger and more productive. Different habitats emerge, like kelp forests re-establishing on naked reefs, oyster beds scrambling upwards from the bottom, or the seabed blossoming again with the rich crusts of invertebrates that historical accounts describe. Nature has great resilience, and when given respite from human damage, it soon flourishes once more.

Rapid global change supplies an urgent imperative for a rethink of conservation practice. For the last several decades we have been losing on two fronts: as the planet heats up and the human imprint grows, the natural world is on the move and in retreat. Likewise, our efforts to save species and habitats are failing even to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss, let alone reverse it, while greenhouse gas emissions still rise long after we know they should have begun to fall. Like Nero, we fiddle as Rome burns.

What we are beginning to appreciate, belatedly, is that we cannot solve our problems by technology alone or live without nature. Saving biodiversity cannot be achieved by tokenism. At present, the international community has agreed to protect just 10 per cent of the sea and 17 per cent of land for nature. Wildlife needs far more space if it is to keep the planet habitable, and if we give it that space, it can help us out of our present troubles. In photosynthesis, evolution has produced the best means of extracting the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air, releasing at the same time the essential by-product of oxygen. While we wrestle to bring down emissions, nature can slow the speed of warming and adapt to the consequences of climate change.

Again and again I have watched and carefully documented the vigorous resurgence of life given protection from hooks, nets, traps or dredges. Most of the protected areas I have studied are little more than hectares to a few square kilometres in size, like the coral reefs of St Lucia in the Caribbean. But they prove that nature is buoyant and prolific given a chance. These findings, now replicated in hundreds of protected areas scattered across almost all seas and oceans, make a compelling case for greater effort. A large-scale programme of protection, rewilding and habitat restoration is called for, more ambitious than anything attempted so far. Many of the world's foremost scientists are calling for the safeguarding of a third to half the planet, and greatly improved management of the rest. This is not utopian fantasy. The fantasists are those who think we can somehow engineer a replacement environment, or believe we can thrive in a world of megacities and industrial agriculture alone. Our approach must shift rapidly from trying to save nature from ourselves to giving nature the space and freedom from human impact to save us. The draft text of a possible new international agreement for the next ten years of nature conservation sets out a vision for 30 per cent of land and sea to be protected by 2030. If adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity, it would represent a major advance. But protected areas will need strong protection from extractive and destructive uses to make the difference we need.

I am an optimist at heart - how else could I be an environmentalist if I did not see hope as better than despair? But at some point, optimists must be pragmatists. Global change is racing away from us as the gulf widens between what we should do and what we are doing. The discomforting truth is that regardless of what we do, many of the changes under way today are unstoppable and accelerating, at least for the immediate future. That doesn't mean we should give up. On the contrary, we must redouble our efforts to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, because how fast we do this will dictate how long the damage will endure. If we act decisively, there will be a few centuries of strife before more settled times return. We might even prevent the complete loss of coral reefs, if we're lucky, but if we drag our feet, we condemn our descendants to thousands or tens of thousands of years of loss and turmoil.
Photograph © European Space Agency / Copernicus Sentinel / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO, Ari Atoll, The Maldives, 2019

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Shifting Baselines | Callum Roberts | Granta

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It is extremely difficult to divine what is happening below the water from what is visible at the surface. Ghost crab volcanoes rise from the sand beside a lagoon of duck-egg blue. The air is clear and still cool as the first sun touches the palm crowns.

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theme 1 multi-species collaboration, build adaptive structure with termites 

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theme 1 multi-species collaboration, build adaptive structure with termites 

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A Moment of Convergence: how nature innovates through agents, swarms and algorithms

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What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with.

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We are all lichens.
- Scott Gilbert, "We Are All Lichens Now"

Think we must. We must think.
-Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Biological sciences have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of the Earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo sapiens  - the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species,Modern Man - was a chief product of these knowledge practices. What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on Earth must not be named the Anthropocene!

With all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my littermates who find a rich wallow in multispecies muddles, I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.

My first demon familiar in this task will be a spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, near where I live in North Central California. Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something. This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. This spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes. The eight-legged tentacular arachnid that I appeal to gets her generic name from the language of the Goshute people of Utah and her specific name from denizens of the depths, from the abyssal and elemental entities, called chthonic. The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many. Making a small change in the biologist's taxonomic spelling, from cthulhu to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa chthulu I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is,and might yet be: the Chthulucene. I remember that tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning "feeler," and tentare, meaning "to feel" and "to try"; and I know that my leggy spider has many-armed allies. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene.

The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines - and such a wealth of lines - not at points, not in spheres. "The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers"; generations are like "a series of interlaced trails."

All the tentacular stringy ones have made me unhappy with posthumanism, even as I am nourished by much generative work done under that sign. My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile. Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle! Ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle made a bumper sticker for me, for us, for SF: "Composting is so hot!"

Shaping her thinking about the times called Anthropocene and "multi-faced Gaïa" (Stengers's term) in companionable friction with Latour, Isabelle Stengers does not ask that we recompose ourselves to become able, perhaps, to "face Gaïa." But like Latour and even more like Le Guin, one of her most generative SF writers, Stengers is adamant about changing the story. Focusing on intrusion rather than composition, Stengers calls Gaia a fearful and devastating power that intrudes on our categories of thought, that intrudes on thinking itself. Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet. Gaia's intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects up multitudes. This intrusion threatens not life on Earth itself - microbes will adapt, to put it mildly - but threatens the livability of Earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an "event" already under way called the Sixth Great Extinction.

Stengers, like Bruno Latour, evokes the name of Gaia in the way James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis did, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole. In this hypothesis, Gaia is autopoietic - self-forming, boundary maintaining, contingent, dynamic, and stable under some conditions but not others. Gaia is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but achieves finite systemic coherence in the face of perturbations within parameters that are themselves responsive to dynamic systemic processes. Gaia does not and could not care about human or other biological beings' intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman livable presents and futures. Gaia is not about a list of questions waiting for rational policies; Gaia is an intrusive event that undoes thinking as usual. "She is what specifically questions the tales and refrains of modern history. There is only one real mystery at stake, here: it is the answer we, meaning those who belong to this history, may be able to create as we face the consequences of what we have provoked."

Anthropocene

So, what have we provoked? Writing in the midst of California's historic multiyear drought and the explosive fire season of 2015, I need the photograph of a fire set deliberately in June 2009 by Sustainable Resource Alberta near the Saskatchewan River Crossing on the Icefields Parkway in order to stem the spread of mountain pine beetles, to create a fire barrier to future fires, and to enhance biodiversity. The hope is that this fire acts as an ally for resurgence. The devastating spread of the pine beetle across the North American West is a major chapter of climate change in the Anthropocene. So too are the predicted megadroughts and the extreme and extended fire seasons. Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire in our times are at stake.

Thus it is past time to turn directly to the time-space-global thing called Anthropocene. The term seems to have been coined in the early 1980s by University of Michigan ecologist Eugene Stoermer (d. 2012), an expert in freshwater diatoms. He introduced the term to refer to growing evidence for the transformative effects of human activities on the Earth. The name Anthropocene made a dramatic star appearance in globalizing discourses in 2000 when the Dutch Nobel Prize - winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen joined Stoermer to propose that human activities had been of such a kind and magnitude as to merit the use of a new geological term for a new epoch, superseding the Holocene, which dated from the end of the last ice age, or the end of the Pleistocene, about twelve thousand years ago. Anthropogenic changes signaled by the mid-eighteenth-century steam engine and the planet-changing exploding use of coal were evident in the airs, waters, and rocks. Evidence was mounting that the acidification and warming of the oceans are rapidly decomposing coral reef ecosystems, resulting in huge ghostly white skeletons of bleached and dead or dying coral. That a symbiotic system - coral, with its watery world-making associations of cnidarians and zooanthellae with many other critters too - indicated such a global transformation will come back into our story.

But for now, notice that the Anthropocene obtained purchase in popular and scientific discourse in the context of ubiquitous urgent efforts to find ways of talking about, theorizing, modeling, and managing a Big Thing called Globalization. Climate-change modeling is a powerful positive feedback loop provoking change-of-state in systems of political and ecological discourses. That Paul Crutzen was both a Nobel laureate and an atmospheric chemist mattered. By 2008, many scientists around the world had adopted the not-yet-official but increasingly indispensable term; and myriad research projects, performances, installations, and conferences in the arts, social sciences, and humanities found the term mandatory in their naming and thinking, not least for facing both accelerating extinctions across all biological taxa and also multispecies, including human, immiseration across the expanse of Terra. Fossil-burning human beings seem intent on making as many new fossils as possible as fast as possible. They will be read in the strata of the rocks on the land and under the waters by the geologists of the very near future, if not already. Perhaps, instead of the fiery forest, the icon for the Anthropocene should be Burning Man!

The scale of burning ambitions of fossil-making man - of this Anthropos whose hot projects for accelerating extinctions merits a name for a geological epoch - is hard to comprehend. Leaving aside all the other accelerating extractions of minerals, plant and animal flesh, human homelands, and so on, surely, we want to say, the pace of development of renewable energy technologies and of political and technical carbon pollution-abatement measures, in the face of palpable and costly ecosystem collapses and spreading political disorders, will mitigate, if not eliminate, the burden of planet-warming excess carbon from burning still more fossil fuels. Or, maybe the financial troubles of the global coal and oil industries by 2015 would stop the madness. Not so. Even casual acquaintance with the daily news erodes such hopes, but the trouble is worse than what even a close reader of IPCC documents and the press will find. In "The Third Carbon Age," Michael Klare, a professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, lays out strong evidence against the idea that the old age of coal, replaced by the recent age of oil, will be replaced by the age of renewables. He details the large and growing global national and corporate investments in renewables; clearly, there are big profit and power advantages to be had in this sector. And at the same time, every imaginable, and many unimaginable, technologies and strategic measures are being pursued by all the big global players to extract every last calorie of fossil carbon, at whatever depth and in whatever formations of sand, mud, or rock, and with whatever horrors of travel to distribution and use points, to burn before someone else gets at that calorie and burns it first in the great prick story of the first and the last beautiful words and weapons. In what he calls the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas, hydrofracking is the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Melting of the polar seas, terrible for polar bears and for coastal peoples, is very good for big competitive military, exploration, drilling, and tanker shipping across the northern passages. Who needs an ice-breaker when you can count on melting ice?

A complex systems engineer named Brad Werner addressed a session at the meetings of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in 2012. His point was quite simple: scientifically speaking, global capitalism "has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that 'earth-human systems' are becoming dangerously unstable in response." Therefore, he argued, the only scientific thing to do is revolt! Movements, not just individuals, are critical. What is required is action and thinking that do not fit within the dominant capitalist culture; and, said Werner, this is a matter not of opinion, but of geophysical dynamics. The reporter who covered this session summed up Werner's address: "He is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability." Werner is not the first or the last researcher and maker of matters of concern to argue this point, but his clarity at a scientific meeting is bracing. Revolt! Think we must; we must think. Actually think, not like Eichmann the Thoughtless. Of course, the devil is in the details - how to revolt? How to matter and not just want to matter?

Capitalocene

But at least one thing is crystal clear. No matter how much he might be caught in the generic masculine universal and how much he only looks up, the Anthropos did not do this fracking thing and he should not name this double-death-loving epoch. The Anthropos is not Burning Man after all. But because the word is already well entrenched and seems less controversial to many important players compared to the Capitalocene, I know that we will continue to need the term "Anthropocene." I will use it too, sparingly; what and whom the Anthropocene collects in its refurbished netbag might prove potent for living in the ruins and even for modest terran recuperation.

Still, if we could only have one word for these SF times, surely it must be the Capitalocene.

Species Man did not shape the conditions for the Third Carbon Age or the Nuclear Age. The story of Species Man as the agent of the Anthropocene is an almost laughable rerun of the great phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure, where man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end in tragic detumescence, once again. Autopoietic, self-making man came down once again, this time in tragic system failure, turning biodiverse ecosystems into flipped-out deserts of slimy mats and stinging jellyfish. Neither did technological determinism produce the Third Carbon Age. Coal and the steam engine did not determine the story, and besides the dates are all wrong, not because one has to go back to the last ice age, but because one has to at least include the great market and commodity reworldings of the long sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the current era, even if we think (wrongly) that we can remain Euro-centered in thinking about "globalizing" transformations shaping the Capitalocene. One must surely tell of the networks of sugar, precious metals, plantations, indigenous genocides, and slavery, with their labor innovations and relocations and recompositions of critters and things sweeping up both human and nonhuman workers of all kinds. The infectious industrial revolution of England mattered hugely, but it is only one player in planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations. The relocation of peoples, plants, and animals; the leveling of vast forests; and the violent mining of metals preceded the steam engine; but that is not a warrant for wringing one's hands about the perfidy of the Anthropos, or of Species Man, or of Man the Hunter.

The systemic stories of the linked metabolisms, articulations, or coproductions (pick your metaphor) of economies and ecologies, of histories and human and nonhuman critters, must be relentlessly opportunistic and contingent. They must also be relentlessly relational, sympoietic, and consequential. They are terran, not cosmic or blissed or cursed into outer space. The Capitalocene is terran; it does not have to be the last biodiverse geological epoch that includes our species too. There are so many good stories yet to tell, so many netbags yet to string, and not just by human beings.

As a provocation, let me summarize my objections to the Anthropocene as a tool, story, or epoch to think with:

(1) The myth system associated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story, but not the whole story.

(2) Species Man does not make history.

(3) Man plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human exceptionalists tell.

(4) That History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do not do History.

(5) The human social apparatus of the Anthropocene tends to be top-heavy and bureaucracy prone. Revolt needs other forms of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and effectiveness.

(6) Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an "unthinkable" theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian individualism - preexisting units in competition relations that take up all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide).

(7) The sciences of the Anthropocene are too much contained within restrictive systems theories and within evolutionary theories called the Modern Synthesis, which for all their extraordinary importance have proven unable to think well about sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogenesis, development, webbed ecologies, and microbes. That's a lot of trouble for adequate evolutionary theory.

(8) Anthropocene is a term most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples.

I am aligned with feminist environmentalist Eileen Crist when she writes against the managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted, modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments of so much Anthropocene discourse. This discourse is not simply wrong-headed and wrong-hearted in itself; it also saps our capacity for imagining and caring for other worlds, both those that exist precariously now (including those called wilderness, for all the contaminated history of that term in racist settler colonialism) and those we need to bring into being in alliance with other critters, for still possible recuperating pasts, presents, and futures. "Scarcity's deepening persistence, and the suffering it is auguring for all life, is an artifact of human exceptionalism at every level." Instead, a humanity with more earthly integrity "invites the priority of our pulling back and scaling down, of welcoming limitationsof our numbers, economies, and habitats for the sake of a higher, more inclusive freedom and quality of life."

If Humans live in History and the Earthbound take up their task within the Anthropocene, too many Posthumans (and posthumanists, another gathering altogether) seem to have emigrated to the Anthropocene for my taste. Perhaps my human and nonhuman people are the dreadful Chthonic ones who snake within the tissues of Terrapolis.

Note that insofar as the Capitalocene is told in the idiom of fundamentalist Marxism, with all its trappings of Modernity, Progress, and History, that term is subject to the same or fiercer criticisms. The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the brink of becoming much Too Big. Marx did better than that, as did Darwin. We can inherit their bravery and capacity to tell big-enough stories without determinism, teleology, and plan.

Historically situated relational worldings make a mockery both of the binary division of nature and society and of our enslavement to Progress and its evil twin, Modernization. The Capitalocene was relationally made, and not by a secular godlike anthropos, a law of history, the machine itself, or a demon called Modernity. The Capitalocene must be relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic SF patterns and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin could be proud of. Shocked anew by our - billions of Earth habitants', including your and my - ongoing daily assent in practice to this thing called capitalism, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers note that denunciation has been singularly ineffective, or capitalism would have long ago vanished from the Earth. A dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alternatives, as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive, and reconnect with each other, in multispecies well-being. This explication does not excuse us from doing many important things better; quite the opposite. Pignarre and Stengers affirm on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying well. They remind us that the established disorder is not necessary; another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of Progress. Many Marxist critical and cultural theorists, at their best, would agree. So would the tentacular ones.

Chthulucene

Reaching back to generative complex systems approaches by Lovelock and Margulis, Gaia figures the Anthropocene for many contemporary Western thinkers. But an unfurling Gaia is better situated in the Chthulucene, an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names. Arising from Chaos, Gaia was and is a powerful intrusive force, in no one's pocket, no one's hope for salvation, capable of provoking the late twentieth century's best autopoietic complex systems thinking that led to recognizing the devastation caused by anthropogenic processes of the last few centuries, a necessary counter to the Euclidean figures and stories of Man. Brazilian anthropologists and philosophers Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski exorcise lingering notions that Gaia is confined to the ancient Greeks and subsequent Eurocultures in their refiguring the urgencies of our times in the post-Eurocentric conference "The Thousand Names of Gaia." Names, not faces, not morphs of the same, something else, a thousand somethings else, still telling of linked ongoing generative and destructive worlding and reworlding in this age of the Earth. We need another figure, a thousand names of something else, to erupt out of the Anthropocene into another, big-enough story. Bitten in a California redwood forest by spidery Pimoa chthulhu, I want to propose snaky Medusa and the many unfinished worldings of her antecedents, affiliates, and descendants. Perhaps Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, can bring us into the holobiomes of Terrapolis and heighten our chances for dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the Heroes on a living coral reef instead of allowing them to suck the last drop of fossil flesh out of dead rock.

The terra-cotta figure of Potnia Theron, the Mistress of the Animals, depicts a winged goddess wearing a split skirt and touching a bird with each hand. She is a vivid reminder of the breadth, width, and temporal reach into pasts and futures of chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond. Potnia Theron is rooted in Minoan and then Mycenean cultures and infuses Greek stories of the Gorgons (especially the only mortal Gorgon, Medusa) and of Artemis. A kind of far-traveling Ur-Medusa, the Lady of the Beasts is a potent link between Crete and India. The winged figure is also called Potnia Melissa, Mistress of the Bees, draped with all their buzzing-stinging-honeyed gifts. Note the acoustic, tactile, and gustatory senses elicited by the Mistress and her sympoietic, more-than-human flesh. The snakes and bees are more like stinging tentacular feelers than like binocular eyes, although these critters see too, in compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics.

In many incarnations around the world, the winged bee goddesses are very old, and they are much needed now. Potnia Theron/Melissa's snaky locks and Gorgon face tangle her with a diverse kinship of chthonic earthly forces that travel richly in space and time. The Greek word Gorgon translates as dreadful, but perhaps that is an astralized, patriarchal hearing of much more aweful stories and enactments of generation, destruction, and tenacious, ongoing terran finitude. Potnia Theron/Melissa/Medusa give faciality a profound makeover, and that is a blow to modern humanist (including technohumanist) figurations of the forward-looking, sky-gazing Anthropos. Recall that the Greek chthonios means "of, in, or under the Earth and the seas" - a rich terran muddle for SF, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, and speculative fabulation. The chthonic ones are precisely not sky gods, not a foundation for the Olympiad, not friends to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, and definitely not finished. The Earthbound can take heart - as well as action.

The Gorgons are powerful winged chthonic entities without a proper genealogy; their reach is lateral and tentacular; they have no settled lineage and no reliable kind (genre, gender), although they are figured and storied as female. In old versions, the Gorgons twine with the Erinyes (Furies), chthonic underworld powers who avenge crimes against the natural order. In the winged domains, the bird-bodied Harpies carry out these vital functions. Now, look again at the birds of Potnia Theron and ask what they do. Are the Harpies their cousins? Around 700 BCE Hesiod imagined the Gorgons as sea demons and gave them sea deities for parents. I read Hesiod's Theogony as laboring to stabilize a very bumptious queer family. The Gorgons erupt more than emerge; they are intrusive in a sense akin to what Stengers understands by Gaia.

The Gorgons turned men who looked into their living, venomous, snake-encrusted faces into stone. I wonder what might have happened if those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones. I wonder if such manners can still be learned, if there is time to learn now, or if the stratigraphy of the rocks will only register the ends and end of a stony Anthropos.

Because the deities of the Olympiad identified her as a particularly dangerous enemy to the sky gods' succession and authority, mortal Medusa is especially interesting for my efforts to propose the Chthulucene as one of the big-enough stories in the netbag for staying with the trouble of our ongoing epoch. I resignify and twist the stories, but no more than the Greeks themselves constantly did. The hero Perseus was dispatched to kill Medusa; and with the help of Athena, head-born favorite daughter of Zeus, he cut off the Gorgon's head and gave it to his accomplice, this virgin goddess of wisdom and war. Putting Medusa's severed head face-forward on her shield, the Aegis, Athena, as usual, played traitor to the Earthbound; we expect no better from motherless mind children. But great good came of this murder-for-hire, for from Medusa's dead body came the winged horse Pegasus. Feminists have a special friendship with horses. Who says these stories do not still move us materially? And from the blood dripping from Medusa's severed head came the rocky corals of the western seas, remembered today in the taxonomic names of the Gorgonians, the coral-like sea fans and sea whips, composed in symbioses of tentacular animal cnidarians and photosynthetic algal-like beings called zooanthellae.

With the corals, we turn definitively away from heady facial representations, no matter how snaky. Even Potnia Theron, Potnia Melissa, and Medusa cannot alone spin out the needed tentacularities. In the tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling, the spider of my first pages, Pimoa chthulhu, allies with the decidedly nonvertebrate critters of the seas. Corals align with octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish. Octopuses are called spiders of the seas, not only for their tentacularity, but also for their predatory habits. The tentacular chthonic ones have to eat; they are at table, cum panis, companion species of terra. They are good figures for the luring, beckoning, gorgeous, finite, dangerous precarities of the Chthulucene. This Chthulucene is neither sacred nor secular; this earthly worlding is thoroughly terran, muddled, and mortal - and at stake now.

Mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral reefs, octopuses are called spiders of the sea. And so Pimoa chthulhu and Octopus cyanea meet in the webbed tales of the Chthulucene.

All of these stories are a lure to proposing the Chthulucene as a needed third story, a third netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing, for staying with the trouble. The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman. As a suffix, the word kainos, "-cene," signals new, recently made, fresh epochs of the thick present. To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen - yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the Earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this Earth are the main story.

However, the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others. It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness. Like it or not, we are in the string figure game of caring for and with precarious worldings made terribly more precarious by fossil-burning man making new fossils as rapidly as possible in orgies of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story. The chief actors are not restricted to the too-big players in the too-big stories of Capitalism and the Anthropos, both of which invite odd apocalyptic panics and even odder disengaged denunciations rather than attentive practices of thought, love, rage, and care.

Both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the "game over, too late" discourse I hear all around me these days, in both expert and popular discourses, in which both technotheocratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any possible common imagination. Encountering the sheer not-us, more-than-human worlding of the coral reefs, with their requirements for ongoing living and dying of their myriad critters, is also to encounter the knowledge that at least 250 million human beings today depend directly on the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes for their own ongoing living and dying well. Diverse corals and diverse people and peoples are at stake to and with each other. Flourishing will be cultivated as a multispecies response-ability without the arrogance of the sky gods and their minions, or else biodiverse terra will flip out into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult.

Corals helped bring the Earthbound into consciousness of the Anthropocene in the first place. From the start, uses of the term Anthropocene emphasized human-induced warming and acidification of the oceans from fossil-fuel-generated CO2 emissions. Warming and acidification are known stressors that sicken and bleach coral reefs, killing the photosynthesizing zooanthellae and so ultimately their cnidarian symbionts and all of the other critters belonging to myriad taxa whose worlding depends on intact reef systems. Corals of the seas and lichens of the land also bring us into consciousness of the Capitalocene, in which deep-sea mining and drilling in oceans and fracking and pipeline construction across delicate lichen-covered northern landscapes are fundamental to accelerating nationalist, transnationalist, and corporate unworlding.

But coral and lichen symbionts also bring us richly into the storied tissues of the thickly present Chthulucene, where it remains possible - just barely - to play a much better SF game, in nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle. We are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the Earth. Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations between and among rocks and critters for living and dying well. " 'Do you realize,' the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, 'that [once upon a time] they couldn't even read Eggplant?' And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike's Peak.' " Attending to these ongoing matters returns me to the question that began this text. What happens when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Why is it that the epochal name of the Anthropos imposed itself at just the time when understandings and knowledge practices about and within symbiogenesis and sympoietics are wildly and wonderfully available and generative in all the humusities, including noncolonizing arts, sciences, and politics? What if the doleful doings of the Anthropocene and the unworldings of the Capitalocene are the last gasps of the sky gods, not guarantors of the finished future, game over? It matters which thoughts think thoughts.

We must think!

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

This text is an edited extract from chapter 2, "Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene," in Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. Copyright, 2016, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu

Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently, Manifestly Haraway.

© 2016 e-flux and the author

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Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene - Journal #75

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https://www.wimeck.com/portfolio-items/evolving-game-terrains/

Growth cycles into the digital world.
Could soil ecology (with embedded microbes) and their impact by climate change visualized through digital means?

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Natural growth phenomena such as fractals are often simulated when procedurally generating landscape terrains for gaming. Instead of simulating such phenomena we explore if captures of bacteria and fungi exhibiting fractal growth can be used to generate a game terrain. Furthermore their real-time growth could be used to generate an evolving game terrain in real-time.
Imaging fungi and bacteria
We grow our cultures in Petri-dishes on self-made dark colored agar, providing good visual contrast with the cultures. High-resolution captures of the cultures are made using a consumer flatbed scanner. The Petri-dishes are placed upside-down to avoid condensate build-up. The resulting scans are of sufficient resolution, free of artifacts, and evenly illuminated.
Growth of fungi and bacteria captured using a flatbed scanner. These captures are used to generate an evolving game terrain in real-time Translating into a Virtual Terrain
To retain compatibility with current game creation workflows we use our captures as heightmaps. The direct mapping of grayscale values to terrain height results in sudden peaks on areas where the light of the scanner was reflected. This makes the terrain not easily accessible for ground-traveling in-game characters.
Fungi and bacterial cultures (left), and generated terrain using the captures directly as heightmaps (right)
To achieve a more accessible terrain, one could apply some form of postprocessing on the heightmap, effectively smoothing the terrain and thereby reducing terrain noise. Smoothing the heightmap using a low-width blurring filter gives suitable results, as the virtual analogy of naturally occurring erosion.
4-pixel radius blurred captures (left), and the corresponding terrain (right) Generated terrain with slope-angle based accumulation of virtual snow (left), and assignment of terrain types to height ranges (right) Our results
Overall the appearance of terrains generated by our method looks natural. To a geologically untrained observer, they appear as possible results of geological processes. Natural growth of the organisms is indeed reflected in the change of terrains over time. Although not yet explored in this study, live interaction between player and organism could be a promising addition. A player could stimulate, delay or stop growth at a certain area using light, temperature, nutrition or toxics (e.g. alcohol or antibiotics). Such terrain-altering concepts could even be integrated into gameplay mechanisms.
Generated terrain as seen from a first-person view
This research has been presented at 4th International Conference on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMUSART2015) on 8-10 April 2015 in Copenhagen (Denmark). More information about the article can be found here.
More examples Another example of a virtual landscape based on the growth of fungi and bacteria. The captures are directly used as heightmaps. 4-pixel radius blurred captures (left), and the corresponding terrain (right) Generated terrain with slope-angle based accumulation of virtual snow (left), and assignment of terrain types to height ranges (right) Generated terrain as seen from a first-person view

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Natural growth phenomena such as fractals are often simulated when procedurally generating landscape terrains for gaming. Instead of simulating such phenomena we explore if captures of bacteria and fungi exhibiting fractal growth can be used to generate a game terrain.

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http://bogost.com/games/aslowyear/

Could seasons and temporality of ecology be gamified? Can non-human species growth power digital outputs in real time?

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among the "Ten Most Anticipated Games of the Year" "Excellent and completely out there." "A Slow Year takes zen inspiration a step further, with four interactive haiku." Winner of the Virtuoso and Vanguard awards A Slow Year is a collection of four games, one for each season, about the experience of observing things.

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informed by the principles of nature based solutions, permaculture and system level biomimicry, we are trying to mitigate the desynchronisation between human and natural systems by creating new alignments between humans and nonhumans.

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The Green Planet - Series 1: 5. Human Worlds

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Two out of five plants are threatened, but people are finding many new ways to help them.

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Shifts in phenological distributions reshape interaction

potential in natural communities

Shannon K. Carter, Daniel Saenz and Volker H. W. Rudolf

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Earlier phenology of a nonnative plant increases impacts on native competitors

Jake M. Alexander and Johnathan M. Levine

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Six Seasons from the Nunavut Land Use Plan 2016

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Standing at the southern edge of the Baffin Island land mass and looking north, I'm wondering if there is an Inuktitut word to describe the breadth and richness of Canada's Nunavut Territory. Certainly the English word "vast" isn't big enough to encompass 2 million square kilometres; nor does it acknowledge the region's deep cultural history, or the rich biome in this area that most of the world considers to be empty space.

Most of Nunavut's 38,000 residents are Inuit with an ancestral connection to the landscape extending back dozens of centuries. Their Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (body of accumulated knowledge) underpins a relationship with the natural environment that is so closely linked to the dynamics of snow, changing sea ice, daylight and animal migration that the Inuit seasonal calendar needs to be more sophisticated than just "four seasons".

The Inuit calendar has at least 6 seasons (some versions are even more complex). Interestingly the seasonal breakdown is not based upon hard and fast dates. As a guide to identify when certain hunting and migration activities are appropriate, it is fluid enough to allow for annual variation, and also for specific climate adjustments to suit various sub-regions. Maybe Vivaldi needs to get back to work to update his 'Four Seasons" musical masterpiece.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/six-seasons-nunavut-wayne-olson

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Spring phenology drives range shifts in a migratory Arctic ungulate with key implications for the future

John P. Severson, Heather E. Johnson, Stephen M. Arthur, William B. Leacock, Michael J. Suitor

Annual variation in phenology can have profound effects on the behavior of animals. As climate change advances spring phenology in ecosystems around the globe, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how animals respond to variation in the timing of seasonal events and how their responses may shift in the future. We investigated the influence of spring phenology on the behavior of migratory, barren-ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus), a species that has evolved to cope with short Arctic summers. Specifically, we examined the effect of spring snow melt and vegetation growth on the current and potential future space-use patterns of the Porcupine Caribou Herd (PCH), which exhibits large, inter-annual shifts in their calving and post-calving distributions across the U.S.–Canadian border. We quantified PCH selection for snow melt and vegetation phenology using machine learning models, determined how selection resulted in annual shifts in space-use, and then projected future distributions based on climate-driven phenology models. Caribou exhibited strong, scale-dependent selection for both snow melt and vegetation growth. During the calving season, caribou selected areas at finer scales where the snow had melted and vegetation was greening, but within broader landscapes that were still brown or snow covered. During the post-calving season, they selected vegetation with intermediate biomass expected to have high forage quality. Annual variation in spring phenology predicted major shifts in PCH space-use. In years with early spring phenology, PCH predominately used habitat in Alaska, while in years with late phenology, they spent more time in Yukon. Future climate conditions were projected to advance spring phenology, shifting PCH calving and post-calving distributions further west into Alaska. Our results demonstrate that caribou selection for habitat in specific phenological stages drive dramatic shifts in annual space-use patterns, and will likely affect future distributions, underscoring the importance of maintaining sufficient suitable habitat to allow for behavioral plasticity.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.15682

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Changes in Antarctic temperature over the last million years, from ice core samples. EPICA - European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica.

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Winter moths (Operophtera brumata) defoliating a tree completely in Vermont. What causes such huge abundance in some years? What impact does this have on the wider ecosystem? Why do winter moth populations go through cyclical booms and busts?

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A different perspective on "asynchrony"?...

Phenological asynchrony between herbivorous insects and their hosts: signal of climate change or pre-existing adaptive strategy? by Singer and Parmesan.

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Theme 4 - project to rethink our relationship with time

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Theme 4 - project to rethink our relationship with time

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this is an app made by a critical designer that suggests we abandon the linear Gregorian calendar and 24 hour clock, using tools that represent lunar and solar schedules. "What if the Sun was your clock, and the Moon was your calendar?". I love this project and also think it's fun/difficult to think about designing within the extremely problematic smartphone..

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What if the Sun was your clock, and the Moon was your calendar? circa is a living biography and biology of time.

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Theme 1 - on interspecies collaboration for adaptation to extreme weather: mycoremediation after wildfire

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Theme 1 - on interspecies collaboration for adaptation to extreme weather: mycoremediation after wildfire

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CoRenewal is one of a few groups doing "mycoremediation" of waterways and soil after wildfires in California, when toxic ash-runoff from burned human structures can enter theses systems. Like many fungi-centered organisations they seem very community science and future oriented. They have a lot of resources on this site about bioremediation, permaculture, etc.

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With the rise of catastrophic megafires in California, there is a growing concern about post-fire toxic ash from wild/urban interfaces, and the consequences of this toxic ash-runoff entering the surrounding waterways. In response, there is a growing grassroots network that seeks to mitigate erosion, remediate toxins, and support post-fire ecological regeneration using fungi and other microbes.

Through this seminar, Maya Elson will leverage real-world examples, including CoRenewal's efforts to explore fungal communities within an oil-contaminated region of Ecuador and research into post-fire restoration in California using belowground microorganisms, such as plant-supporting mycorrhizal fungi. In this online seminar, Maya will explore basic fungal biology, as well as cover techniques for mushroom cultivation, biofiltration, and bioremediation with fungi and bacteria.

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With the rise of catastrophic megafires in California, there is a growing concern about post-fire toxic ash from wild/urban interfaces, and the consequences of this toxic ash-runoff entering the surrounding waterways. In response, there is a growing grassroots network that seeks to mitigate erosion, remediate toxins, and support post-fire ecological regeneration using fungi and other microbes.

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About the mismatch between mountain hares and snowfall

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plant evolved millions of years to form delicate adaptive mechanisms and fine-balanced symbiotic relationships to thrive under rapid seasonal changes.

as the change of climate out-speed the adaptability of these balances, they are facing a major crisis to be out of sync with their own natural habitat in the Anthropocene.

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"Between the tropics and the frozen poles lies a region dominated by relentless change in the form of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Each one presents plants with huge challenges, from ice and snow to raging fires; from intense competition to surprising enemies. This is a world of astonishing variety and vibrant colour. To survive here plants must use strategy, deception and remarkable feats of engineering. Most importantly, they must get their timing right." - Seasonal Worlds - BBC The Green Planet

"Four seasons in one day", as Crowded House famously sang. We witnessed four seasons in 45 minutes in another incredible exploration of the plant kingdom on the BBC. Sir David Attenborough and the team took us from winter through to winter again, exploring the seasonal changes that govern many in the plant kingdom. Despite many adaptations developed by the plants to harness the transient opportunities for germination, growth and reproduction, climate change is disrupting these rhythms of life at an unprecedented rate. How might we learn from their ways of harnessing climate uncertainty to restore planetary boundaries under this complex environmental crisis?

Dandelions

During this episode, we saw a myriad of seed dispersal mechanisms, some through partnerships with various pollinators and others using sophisticated mechanics that enhance the mobility of their seeds. The dandelion has undoubtedly one of the most economic dispersal mechanisms. Their 'parachute' or pappus is a disc of bristles that can carry the seed considerable distances in the gentlest breezes. As the seed falls, the air passing through the pappus forms a stable vortex ring held above the pappus. This increases the drag on the seed, with its pappus, by a factor of four or more, linking it more firmly into the movement of the surrounding air. Thus the seed is transported more effectively, transforming its immediate surroundings using no energy and no extra material. Magic indeed! The theoretical possibility of a stable vortex has been known for some time, but this is the first time it has been observed. Moreover, it reveals the practicality of sub-miniature drones and micro-robotics for swarm sensing.

Tongue Orchids

Doesn't it ring a bell when seeing the Male Thynnid Wasp prefer the simulated female Tongue Orchid's version of the female wasp over the real one? Like most males, the wasp goes for the Superstimulus or Supernormal Stimulus - an exaggerated version of the actual thing. This "over-attractiveness" is a tendency present in many animals, including ourselves. It is exploited by junk food or video games and probably accounts for some of Kim Kardashian's popularity! Behavioural scientists have used this effect when making biomimetic robots with deceptions such as body size, motion pattern or colour that provide a superstimulus to particular species - for example, using male fish robots in different colours to study female bluefin killifish's courtship behaviour and preferences in the face of animated stimulus. Similarly, a scientific review uncovers the advantages of using biomimetic models (e.g. Faux Frog doppelgangers) to study responses to multisensory signals such as the higher complexity of imitated behaviours and the range from a standard stimulus to a supernormal stimulus that elicits a diversity of responses.

The Day's Eye follows the sun

Aren't you fascinated by the sun-chasing movements of daisy flowers? Heliotropism (following the sun) was known in Ancient Greece. However, the mechanism behind it remains an unresolved mystery. For example, some suggest that warmth can be attractive to pollinators; others reckon it might promote pollen germination, growth of the pollen tube and seed production. Nonetheless, it's a source of innovative ideas. In the plant, special cells pump potassium ions into the motor cells of the pulvimus in the flexible joint underneath the flower, causing those cells to absorb water by osmosis, expand and move the flower. This mechanism has inspired researchers to create water filtration membranes that mimic the motor cells' osmotic process and photo-actuated solar-tracking photovoltaic panels for higher energy yield.

Aquaporins

Maintaining water content in plants is crucial to withstand uncertain climates and attacks by animals such as the sapsucker, a bird. The episode shows that millions of controllable pores (stomata) on leaves serve as a channel for the transpiration of water vapour. Probably, aquaporins (the channel protein for water transport in the cell membrane) in plant cells play a key role in regulating the turgor pressure of the cell. This pressure expands the cell within the confining cell wall, adjusting the opening and closing of the stomata. This sophisticated water regulating mechanism has inspired many research and industrial applications in membrane technologies. Aquaporin's uniqueness in high selectivity and exceptional flux outperforms many existing artificial membranes with a tradeoff between permeability and filtration. The Danish company, Aquaporin A/S, uses aquaporin's natural filtration and selective structures to create biomimetic water treatment membranes with high energy efficiency.

Mycorrhizal Network

How exciting is it to learn about nature's equivalent of the Internet - the "Wood-wide Web"! The expansive underground mycorrhizal network forms; this interconnected fabric of resources that sends signals constantly flowing across the forest. This intricate network has inspired researchers in various fields, such as the underground water system, circular economy models and even smart solar grids. The mycelium network, the vegetative part of a fungus, has initiated opportunities in regenerative biomanufacturing, such as bioremediation materials and sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based materials. For example, Biohm and Mylo create insulation materials and artificial leather grown from mycelium. The Belgian startup, Novobiom, is using this bioremediation potential to remove toxic materials from the soil.

Pinecones

There are around 615 coniferous tree species. We saw the Giant Sequoia (or Redwood) at the end of the episode. Their seed packaging (pine cones) has ensured the giant forest's continuous thriving and regeneration over the millennia. In particular, its agile response to environmental moisture fluctuation inspires a new way of imagining responsive materials. The primary mechanism behind this reactivity is the difference in the hygroscopic swelling properties of two adjacent tissue areas. By replicating this mechanism, researchers can create various adaptive materials without extra energy costs, such as adaptive fabrics, active textiles and responsive shading systems. In addition, the research team at ICD University of Stuttgart are continuing to explore the use of composite materials and laminates in construction.

It is mesmerising to see the highly sophisticated mechanisms and fine-tuned symbiotic partnerships evolved by plants to adapt to and harness seasonal changes worldwide. However, in a rapidly changing period due to human activities, the Anthropocene, the climate changes dramatically, challenging the adaptability of many species. Can we use lessons from the resilience of plants to improve our stewardship of the landscape and so harmonise better with the requirements for their and our continued existence?

Nature-inspired innovation is an idea that has been around for centuries. Still, it's only recently started to make waves in the design industry. It borrows principles from nature and applies them to human-made systems. One of the most exciting things about nature-inspired innovation is its potential applications in new technologies - something we're seeing more of every day! What other technologies can you think of? Leave your comments below.

Biomimicry Innovation Lab is a foresight and biofuturist innovation consultancy that actively works in next-generation agriculture, manufacturing and urban solutions worldwide. Have a look at our latest research on ' The State of Nature-inspired Innovation in the UK' in collaboration with the angel and venture capitalists, the Nadathur Group. We are exploring a range of projects relating to ecosystem services, planetary health and direct air carbon capture (DACC) with projects in South Africa, Madagascar and India utilising our evolving model, Project FIN.

Want to know more? Schedule an introductory call.

"Between the tropics and the frozen poles lies a region dominated by relentless change in the form of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Each one presents plants with huge challenges, from ice and snow to raging fires; from intense competition to surprising enemies. This is a world of astonishing variety and vibrant colour. To survive here plants must use strategy, deception and remarkable feats of engineering. Most importantly, they must get their timing right." - Seasonal Worlds - BBC The Green Planet

"Four seasons in one day", as Crowded House famously sang. We witnessed four seasons in 45 minutes in another incredible exploration of the plant kingdom on the BBC. Sir David Attenborough and the team took us from winter through to winter again, exploring the seasonal changes that govern many in the plant kingdom. Despite many adaptations developed by the plants to harness the transient opportunities for germination, growth and reproduction, climate change is disrupting these rhythms of life at an unprecedented rate. How might we learn from their ways of harnessing climate uncertainty to restore planetary boundaries under this complex environmental crisis?

Dandelions

During this episode, we saw a myriad of seed dispersal mechanisms, some through partnerships with various pollinators and others using sophisticated mechanics that enhance the mobility of their seeds. The dandelion has undoubtedly one of the most economic dispersal mechanisms. Their 'parachute' or pappus is a disc of bristles that can carry the seed considerable distances in the gentlest breezes. As the seed falls, the air passing through the pappus forms a stable vortex ring held above the pappus. This increases the drag on the seed, with its pappus, by a factor of four or more, linking it more firmly into the movement of the surrounding air. Thus the seed is transported more effectively, transforming its immediate surroundings using no energy and no extra material. Magic indeed! The theoretical possibility of a stable vortex has been known for some time, but this is the first time it has been observed. Moreover, it reveals the practicality of sub-miniature drones and micro-robotics for swarm sensing.

Tongue Orchids

Doesn't it ring a bell when seeing the Male Thynnid Wasp prefer the simulated female Tongue Orchid's version of the female wasp over the real one? Like most males, the wasp goes for the Superstimulus or Supernormal Stimulus - an exaggerated version of the actual thing. This "over-attractiveness" is a tendency present in many animals, including ourselves. It is exploited by junk food or video games and probably accounts for some of Kim Kardashian's popularity! Behavioural scientists have used this effect when making biomimetic robots with deceptions such as body size, motion pattern or colour that provide a superstimulus to particular species - for example, using male fish robots in different colours to study female bluefin killifish's courtship behaviour and preferences in the face of animated stimulus. Similarly, a scientific review uncovers the advantages of using biomimetic models (e.g. Faux Frog doppelgangers) to study responses to multisensory signals such as the higher complexity of imitated behaviours and the range from a standard stimulus to a supernormal stimulus that elicits a diversity of responses.

The Day's Eye follows the sun

Aren't you fascinated by the sun-chasing movements of daisy flowers? Heliotropism (following the sun) was known in Ancient Greece. However, the mechanism behind it remains an unresolved mystery. For example, some suggest that warmth can be attractive to pollinators; others reckon it might promote pollen germination, growth of the pollen tube and seed production. Nonetheless, it's a source of innovative ideas. In the plant, special cells pump potassium ions into the motor cells of the pulvimus in the flexible joint underneath the flower, causing those cells to absorb water by osmosis, expand and move the flower. This mechanism has inspired researchers to create water filtration membranes that mimic the motor cells' osmotic process and photo-actuated solar-tracking photovoltaic panels for higher energy yield.

Aquaporins

Maintaining water content in plants is crucial to withstand uncertain climates and attacks by animals such as the sapsucker, a bird. The episode shows that millions of controllable pores (stomata) on leaves serve as a channel for the transpiration of water vapour. Probably, aquaporins (the channel protein for water transport in the cell membrane) in plant cells play a key role in regulating the turgor pressure of the cell. This pressure expands the cell within the confining cell wall, adjusting the opening and closing of the stomata. This sophisticated water regulating mechanism has inspired many research and industrial applications in membrane technologies. Aquaporin's uniqueness in high selectivity and exceptional flux outperforms many existing artificial membranes with a tradeoff between permeability and filtration. The Danish company, Aquaporin A/S, uses aquaporin's natural filtration and selective structures to create biomimetic water treatment membranes with high energy efficiency.

Mycorrhizal Network

How exciting is it to learn about nature's equivalent of the Internet - the "Wood-wide Web"! The expansive underground mycorrhizal network forms; this interconnected fabric of resources that sends signals constantly flowing across the forest. This intricate network has inspired researchers in various fields, such as the underground water system, circular economy models and even smart solar grids. The mycelium network, the vegetative part of a fungus, has initiated opportunities in regenerative biomanufacturing, such as bioremediation materials and sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based materials. For example, Biohm and Mylo create insulation materials and artificial leather grown from mycelium. The Belgian startup, Novobiom, is using this bioremediation potential to remove toxic materials from the soil.

Pinecones

There are around 615 coniferous tree species. We saw the Giant Sequoia (or Redwood) at the end of the episode. Their seed packaging (pine cones) has ensured the giant forest's continuous thriving and regeneration over the millennia. In particular, its agile response to environmental moisture fluctuation inspires a new way of imagining responsive materials. The primary mechanism behind this reactivity is the difference in the hygroscopic swelling properties of two adjacent tissue areas. By replicating this mechanism, researchers can create various adaptive materials without extra energy costs, such as adaptive fabrics, active textiles and responsive shading systems. In addition, the research team at ICD University of Stuttgart are continuing to explore the use of composite materials and laminates in construction.

It is mesmerising to see the highly sophisticated mechanisms and fine-tuned symbiotic partnerships evolved by plants to adapt to and harness seasonal changes worldwide. However, in a rapidly changing period due to human activities, the Anthropocene, the climate changes dramatically, challenging the adaptability of many species. Can we use lessons from the resilience of plants to improve our stewardship of the landscape and so harmonise better with the requirements for their and our continued existence?

Nature-inspired innovation is an idea that has been around for centuries. Still, it's only recently started to make waves in the design industry. It borrows principles from nature and applies them to human-made systems. One of the most exciting things about nature-inspired innovation is its potential applications in new technologies - something we're seeing more of every day! What other technologies can you think of? Leave your comments below.

Biomimicry Innovation Lab is a foresight and biofuturist innovation consultancy that actively works in next-generation agriculture, manufacturing and urban solutions worldwide. Have a look at our latest research on ' The State of Nature-inspired Innovation in the UK' in collaboration with the angel and venture capitalists, the Nadathur Group. We are exploring a range of projects relating to ecosystem services, planetary health and direct air carbon capture (DACC) with projects in South Africa, Madagascar and India utilising our evolving model, Project FIN.

Want to know more? Schedule an introductory call.

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Air, Earth, Fire and Water...and Kim Kardashian - BIOMIMICRY INNOVATION LAB

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"Between the tropics and the frozen poles lies a region dominated by relentless change in the form of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Each one presents plants with huge challenges, from ice and snow to raging fires; from intense competition to surprising enemies.

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124893-tardigrades-turn-into-glass-to-survive-complete-dehydration/

Some thoughts:

* As one of the earliest living forms on Earth, microbes are "time immemorial" - way before humans "invented" time)
* Distinct "hibernation" capabilities (see above article).
Tardigrades are just one of many different species that do this (e.g,, bacillus spores): could microbes be used to store valuable memories that survive climate change

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They are probably the toughest creatures on Earth, and now we know how they manage to survive years of complete dehydration.

Water bears, or tardigrades, have been recorded surviving the vacuum of space, high doses of radiation and pressure. These water dwelling creatures can also survive dry environments in a shrivelled-up, dormant state for as long as a decade, reviving within an hour when exposed to water.

To pull off this remarkable trick, the animals rely on proteins unique to them, called tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs).

When there is water around, these anti-dehydration proteins are jelly-like and don't form into well-defined three-dimensional structures like most known proteins.

But when water bears start to dry out, these proteins turn into a kind of glassy sanctuary that cocoons all dehydration-sensitive materials in the animal from harm.

"When the animal completely desiccates, the TDPs vitrify, turning the cytoplasmic fluid of cells into glass," says lead author Thomas Boothby of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"We think this glassy mixture is trapping [other] desiccation-sensitive proteins and other biological molecules and locking them in place, physically preventing them from unfolding, breaking apart or aggregating together," says Boothby.

Surviving a dry spell

Boothby and his colleagues discovered the proteins after monitoring gene activity as tardigrades dried out. They noticed a spike in activity of genes that turned out to make the TDPs.

And when they blocked the activity of these genes, tardigrades died after dehydration, demonstrating they were vital for surviving desiccation.

Moreover, Boothby showed that yeast and bacteria artificially equipped with the genes could also survive dehydration, suggesting that they could potentially be transferred into crops to help them survive drought.

The researchers also ruled out a long-held assumption that tardigrades survived dehydration thanks to a specialised sugar called trehalose, which is known to perform the task in tree frogs, for example. They found that tardigrades either don't make trehalose at all, or only make tiny amounts.

Sweet trick

However, the researchers were surprised to discover that the proteins protect their living cargo in the same way as trehalose, by forming glass like sanctuaries.

Boothby says the results provide a new example of convergent evolution, in which evolution comes up with a similar solution more than once. "It's just that some animals have evolved to rely on trehalose, while tardigrades have also evolved the ability to vitrify, but using a completely different type of molecule - a protein," he says.

"It is amazing to see that evolution has found several biochemical ways to obtain the same kind of mechanism for solving the problem of desiccation. Trehalose in nematodes and brine shrimps, and apparently TDPs in tardigrades," says Ingemar Jönsson of Kristianstad University, in Sweden. "And what a wonderful adaptation to turn into a stable glassy state when the body dries out!"

The team is now investigating whether other organisms such as plant seeds rely on these proteins to survive desiccation, too.

Boothby is hoping the find can be translated into practical applications, for example as a way to store vaccines and pharmaceuticals at room temperature by dehydrating them instead of having to constantly refrigerate them.

"This could help us break dependence on the cold-chain, a huge economic and logistical hurdle for getting medicine to people in remote or developing parts of the world," he says. "We are pursuing these applications."

Journal reference: Molecular Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2017.02.018

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Tardigrades turn into glass to survive complete dehydration

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They are probably the toughest creatures on Earth, and now we know how they manage to survive years of complete dehydration. Water bears, or tardigrades, have been recorded surviving the vacuum of space, high doses of radiation and pressure.

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Possible Topics:

- interconnectedness, consequences of species/event missing each other, human-interaction

- possible topics: breeding, nutrition, communication, parenting, multidimensional interactions

- regard to: temporality, new matches – mismatches

Inspiration:
Megan Birds, human bird interaction, ecology of fear (eggs turtle)

- keyspecies as inspiration (e.g otters, elephants > let phenologist decide)

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https://placesjournal.org/article/accelerated-and-decelerated-landscapes/

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In 1984, toward the end of a long career studying relations between landscape and culture, the historian and critic J.B. Jackson alighted on a new definition for his subject. Landscape, he argued, is "space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature." He pointed to examples of dramatically reclaimed lands - the Netherlands, the Fens, the Po Valley - but gestured toward something more common. In Jackson's study of the vernacular landscape, anyone who paves a road or plows a field is engaged in a kind of temporal sorcery. Intervening within the environment, "reorganizing space for human needs," we take upon ourselves "the role of time."

Such space now encompasses the world. In the span of a few human generations, the rapid combustion of our planet's subterranean biological ancestry (its so-called fossil fuels) has instigated a mass migration of carbon into the atmosphere that radically affects living conditions everywhere. The Climate Crisis. The Great Acceleration. The Sixth Mass Extinction. These are names for landscape change of unbelievable speed and complexity, entwined with myriad assemblies: biological, geological, material, social, technological, and political. Humans intervene in landscape processes at all scales, intentionally and inadvertently, skillfully and thoughtlessly, speeding things up and slowing them down, generating cascading effects far beyond our control.

If speeding up and slowing down landscape processes is the design challenge of the times, I believe we need better conceptual tools and practices. I know I need them for myself. Following Jackson, I have been thinking about how designers can work sensitively within time-altered terrains, or accelerated and decelerated landscapes. To understand these terms it helps to see them in action, so let me take you first to a particular creek and its watershed in northern California.

Lower Alameda Creek - or rather, the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel - runs twelve miles from Niles Canyon in the Diablo mountain range, through suburban communities, then derelict salt production ponds, before emptying into San Francisco Bay. Like many creeks in the region, Alameda was reorganized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s to prevent flooding in the residential suburbs being developed throughout the East Bay. Here the creek was confined within a trapezoidal trench, up to 520 feet wide and 26 feet deep, and lined on either side by earthen levees, designed to meet specs for "standard project flood" capacity. Yet almost as soon as it was constructed, the Alameda channel proved inadequate - too wide and too shallow to transport the creek's sediments to the Bay.

If speeding up and slowing down landscape processes is the design challenge of the times, I believe we need better conceptual tools and practices.

This miscalculation was not merely a matter of sediment volume. The more profound problem was conceptual, proceeding from a colonial ideology. A floodplain is inherently dynamic. Left alone, Alameda Creek would deposit sediments along the alluvial fan of the Niles Cone, and when floodwaters pulsed through, the creek would migrate, finding a new course to the Bay. But the Corps sought to eliminate flood from the plain so the land could be colonized for building, and it did so relying on abstract analyses rooted in assumptions of stasis, predictability, control. Cut off from its surroundings, the creek now dumps its sediments in the channel, and since it can't carve a new outflow, humans and their machines have to do the work. An average of 75,000 cubic yards of material are dredged here annually, just to keep the passage clear. What seemed an efficient way of arranging the landscape turns out to be costly indeed.

Arguably, none of the channels like this in the Bay Area, and across the United States, ever delivered on their techno-imaginary promise. Planning agencies throughout the 20th century authorized flood control projects that enabled extensive development in poorly suited places, with little accounting for ecological effects, or for the future risks they were making. Today there are nearly 25,000 miles of levees in the United States, which are on average more than half a century old. Their condition is graded D by civil engineers. By any calculation this infrastructure represents an enormous amount of compounded risk. The false logic of flood control has created a paradox, the so-called "levee effect." To continue inhabiting these engineered zones will require yet more engineering - aggressive dredging, higher levees - that often intensifies problems.

What does this have to do with time? Landscape architecture and engineering are typically understood as spatial practices. Raise this, lower that; dig here, reinforce there; replace this surface with another. But at Alameda Creek we see how these spatial acts alter temporal conditions. Humans have sped up certain landscape processes (i.e. the conveyance of water from the hills to the bay) and slowed down others (i.e. erosion along the creek's banks). They have halted (for a time) the creek's migrations. Meanwhile, surrounding landscape processes accelerate with urbanization and climate change. As sea levels rise and storms intensify, the channel's ability to manage acceptable levels of risk (let alone to control floods) will be further compromised, as the residential hold on this place grows ever more tenuous.

Place and Pluralizing Time

Imagine a jet stream that rapidly conveys water vapor from the tropics to the Northern California coast. The meteorological term for this acceleration - an "atmospheric river" - has entered Bay Area parlance as these events intensify with climate change. Now imagine that this storm stalls as it arrives onshore, dropping five inches of rain in coastal areas, and more in the hills and mountains. This rain falls on an alluvial plain covered in asphalt and runs off into a channelized creek clogged with sediment. Should the channel fail anywhere along its length, the resulting flood will seem a sudden rupture, an anomaly, a temporal break. But the possibility of such a "natural" disaster is already inscribed within the landscape as configured by engineers.

A flood may seem a sudden rupture, an anomaly, a temporal break. But the possibility is already inscribed within the landscape as configured by engineers.

What I mean to show is that Alameda Creek's evolution has been accelerated and decelerated in concurrent, nonlinear ways, which are representative of Anthropocene landscapes generally. There is no objective or external standard against which to measure such changes; there is no "control Earth." So how can landscape designers operate within these conditions? Stochastic change compels us to escape a colonial understanding of time - singular, continuous - that has organized and governed the modern era. What if we shattered this ideology and replaced it with something more pluralistic? Can we learn to see landscapes through and across time? Can we embrace the phenomena of multiple, shifting temporalities, overlapping in the present? If we are able to perceive the Alameda Creek watershed in this fuller sense, how might that change our activities as designers?

Here we can distinguish time, an abstract measure of duration, from temporalities, or physical, embodied experiences of duration, as expressed in rhythms and cadences and actualized through specific, place-based actions. (As an example, compare the time of a soccer match to the temporality of a baseball game. Whereas a soccer period is fixed by rule at 45 minutes, the length of a baseball inning depends on the unfolding of unique events. Every game is performed and ends on its own unrepeatable time, subject to the ritualized, temporal making of its players.)

Can we learn to see landscapes through and across time? Can we embrace the phenomena of multiple, shifting temporalities, overlapping in the present?

In modern industrial landscapes, the temporalities are complex and the actants incredibly diverse. Along the tidal portion of the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel, the interplay of storms, tides, and sediments has created a dynamic, topo-bathymetric terrain that runs contrary to the intent of the human designers. As sediments accumulate, they form wetland "benches" at mean high tide elevation, many vertical feet above the channel floor specified by engineers. Reeds, pickleweed, pacific chord grass, and other plants colonize these benches, making them more stable and less likely to erode. Over longer durations, they become habitat for endangered wildlife: red-legged frogs, the California Clapper rail, the saltmarsh harvest mouse. Then a backhoe dredger suddenly enters the scene. In an effort to restore the channel's flood capacity, the dredger removes hundreds of cubic yards of sediment in a relative blink of an eye. This destroys (nascent, unplanned) wetland habitat, so the people in charge of the operation will be required to "mitigate" the harm, remaking this same landscape assembly somewhere else. In the process, sediments laden with mercury (a durable legacy of gold mining), previously entombed beneath cleaner sediments, are remobilized. Harmful materials transfer into plants and other organisms. And within the excavated void, storms and sediments quickly work to re-establish their own design, a miniature floodplain, a new channel-within-a-channel. This is only a quick and incomplete sketch of the many temporalities at play.

In design intent, the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel represents the abstract, hegemonic time that Adam calls Newtonian or Clock time. Under techno-capitalism, Newtonian time is deployed by powerful actors to deny and externalize contextual processes and temporalities, producing ecological crisis. As she puts it:

Newtonian time is invoked whenever technology is designed atemporally for specific functions only, that is interaction with the environment, without recognition that the created artifact forms an integral part of the world-wide-web of interconnected processes. That is to say, technological products are premised on the Newtonian principles of decontexualization, isolation, fragmentation, reversible motion, abstract time and space, predictability, and objectivity, on maxims that stand opposed to organic principles such as embedded contextuality, networked interconnectedness, irreversible change and contingency.

The pluralizing of time - in conception, experience, political construction, and material processes - has been explored by scholars in many disciplines, reaching back at least to the philosophies of Kant and Heidegger. More recently, a temporal turn in empirical and ethnographic studies has "undermined claims that capitalist modernity is characterized solely by a linear, homogeneous, abstract time" and "challenged the existence of a single chronopolitics of speed." Anthropologist Laura Bear draws on the book Timespace (2001), by geographers Jon May and Nigel Thrift, which defines timescapes as "networks of representations, technologies, disciplines, and rhythms in time."

Laura Bear's work is especially useful in its attention to design and making.... Why and how should a landscape's evolutionary path be shaped? For whom, and by whom?

For our purposes, Bear's work is especially useful in its attention to design and making, to the creative acts and imaginaries through which socio-material worlds come into existence. She argues that through the "heuristic of timescapes" we can "trace how human practices of time intersect and affect social and nonhuman rhythms." We see then that "all our various kinds of action on and with time have the quality of poeisis or skillful making." Bear discusses three domains of skillful making, or creative labor on and with time. The first domain, technique, entails deliberate action that creates "a gap between the world as it was before the action, and the new world it calls into being." The second, knowledge, consists of epistemes "associated with bureaucratic, scientific, and corporate institutions" which "layer time with resonances." These are "technologies of imagination," chronotopes formed through narrative and given body in documents and visual representations. The third, ethics, comprises the moral principles and debates that critique and inform techniques and knowledges of time, accounting for "what time is and what it should be used for."

Together these concepts provide a working model for thinking about the design of accelerated and decelerated landscapes. We can attend to technique, i.e. methods for sensing landscape's temporalities (technologies used, field methods, etc.) and the design and management strategies developed from that sensing, which are then deployed to affect processes of becoming within them. We can probe knowledge, i.e. how time and scale are implicitly and explicitly conceived, and how these understandings are represented and communicated. And we can discuss ethics, i.e. the rationale for temporal manipulations of a place and associated justice issues. Why and how should a landscape's evolutionary path be shaped? For whom, and by whom? Are the knowledges and techniques derived from and applied within this landscape equitable, representative, and participatory?

So let's now consider Alameda Creek from another vantage. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Europeans who settled the Bay Area channelized tributary streams, dug artesian wells, and installed pumping wells, causing groundwater levels to decline at a faster and faster rate. This is a classic environmental problem, typically framed as a result of overdevelopment or drought. It can also be understood as a landscape moving at different speeds, out of sync with its former assembly. By the 1960s, increased pumping had created a vacuum that drew salty groundwater from the Bay into the freshwater aquifers, thus contaminating them. Using Bear's framework, we can examine the design techniques, knowledges, and ethics that contributed to this situation and that follow from it, attending to many overlapping, interacting temporalities.

Historically, Alameda Creek deposited its coarse-grained sediments (gravel and cobble) at the top of the Niles Cone, just after emerging from the Diablo hills. As settlers mined the gravel to construct new ground for roadways and buildings, they left large open pits on either side of the creek. And today, the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel runs right through these artifacts. When the channel was built, those old quarries presented a convenient solution to the problem of groundwater salinity. Engineers installed inflatable rubber dams spanning the width of the channel, diverting the waters into the quarry pits to create reservoirs. With the creek thus decelerated, freshwater could percolate down through the porous geology into the aquifers, and salinity was pushed back to the Bay edge, where it could be further managed through extraction wells.

These operations are modeled, parametrized, and monitored in real-time by the Alameda County Water District. But this techne comes with tradeoffs. Water used to push back salinity intrusion does not flow down the creek, which means there is less water to sustain aquatic organisms and riparian habitat and to convey sediment down the channel to the Bay. To remedy this, the local district purchases additional supply from the California State Water Project, an extraordinary conveyance infrastructure that spans the entire Central Valley and up into the high reaches of the Sierra Nevada. Through the highly abstract mechanism of a water market, supply is added to upland tributaries of Alameda Creek.

Complexity grows as we follow these interactions through plural time. As sea levels rise, the Alameda County Water District will need more freshwater to keep salinity "at Bay." But drought worsened by climate change will likely mean less supply for the state water project and higher demand for what is available. Current use allocations across the state are already five times higher than average annual precipitation, and no one can accurately predict future conditions here, in the most wide-ranging climate in the United States. And so skillful making meets the domain of ethics. Scientists, farmers, designers, regulators, planners, and engineers try to determine the right action for time, space, and water - while working with dated infrastructure, massive growth, a globalized export economy, and quickly changing landscapes.

Bending and Tricking Time

Thus, people who study, design, or care for places like Alameda Creek need to become experts at the techniques, knowledges, and ethics of bending time. Intentionally speeding or slowing down a landscape involves designing temporal pathways for its evolution and dwelling in their effects. Transforming the landscape, or parts of it, into a more desired state, we select and produce differences between what was, what is, and will be. These differences take many forms: the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the surface elevation of the ocean, the choreography of sediments, changes in species composition, wildfire patterns, urbanization, rewilding, and so on. In all cases we must attend to the complexities of relational agency across human and non-human entities within the landscape medium; to take on the politics of who or what speeds up or slows down what landscapes for whom; and at what costs and benefits.

Intentionally speeding or slowing down a landscape involves designing temporal pathways for its evolution and dwelling in their effects.

Let's travel now a hundred miles upstream through the Bay-Delta watershed to the state capital, Sacramento. Here, at a series of bends along the west bank of the Sacramento River, engineers and construction crews have arduously recreated a lost floodplain, building a new levee set further back from the river and excavating holes in the existing levee so that floodwaters can fill the pocket between the two. The goal of this design is to reduce flood risk while creating off-channel habitat for migratory fish. In this newly constructed terrain, thousands of nursery-raised native plants grow in parallel rows, protected by milk carton cages, surrounded by seeded mulch. An array of irrigation pipes is fed by a robust 8-inch main line to help the young plants survive the hot, dry summers.

All this temporary infrastructure, inserted into the surface of the massive earthworks, is meant to jump-start growth, putting the landscape on a new evolutionary trajectory towards native, vegetated, riparian floodplain that sustains itself. The accelerated terrain morphs from one condition to another, colonizing space through a particular material and spatial scheme, influenced (but not determined) by the selective actions of human designers: to nurture some plants while eliminating others, to invite seasonal floodwaters and the accompanying phytoplankton and fish. Elsewhere, techniques of deceleration are used to minimize change or transformation. In areas of the same earthworks that are exposed to main stem river flows, engineers have stabilized eroding slopes with jute fabrics to prevent topsoil loss and gully erosion.

In design intent, the acceleration and deceleration of landscapes are forms of "time tricking," as defined by anthropologists Roxana Moroşanu and Felix Ringel:

Time tricking refers to the many different ways in which people individually and collectively attempt to modify, manage, bend, distort, speed up, slow down or structure the times they are living in ... to the development of individual, intersubjective and collective strategies for stretching and bending time in relation to one's needs, preoccupations and "deadlines"; for making sense of both unexpected changes in well-established temporal frameworks and conflicts between contradicting time-frames and temporal orders; and for creating and maintaining alternative ideas about time.

As background infrastructure, accelerated and decelerated landscapes occur essentially everywhere. J. B. Jackson emphasized "deliberate" modifications of time, but in fact much of this change is unintentional. The Great Acceleration, characterized by technologies such as industrial-scale fertilizer, fossil fuel energy production, dam building, mining, and global telecommunications, has led to the unplanned, accelerated change and destabilization of the climate and biosphere. As Dipesh Chakrabarty writes of the Anthropocene, "Human beings have tumbled into being a geological agent through our own decisions." Since the real impact of any one action, at any one point, cannot be known, there is a gap between design intentions and worldly outcomes. When the visible effects are undesirable, we seek to reverse or revise our actions, generating yet more novel effects.

In California, these effects include catastrophic wildfire. We can follow the Bay-Delta watershed further upstream to the woodlands and montane forests of the Sierra Nevada. For thousands of years, these forests were designed and managed by Native Americans, mainly through the skillful application of fire. Then, through genocide and expulsion, European colonizers destroyed Indigenous lifeways and their embodied landscape technologies. In the 20th century, the U.S. public agencies charged with resource extraction and management of these lands adopted a strategy of deceleration, paradoxically suppressing wildfire to maintain the status quo forest. This seemed to work for decades, until suppression became impossible, due to the buildup of biomass (e.g. dead wood and underbrush), the emergence of denser stands of less healthy trees, and the spread of forests into meadows and other habitats. Now wildfires burn with far more intensity and heat. Of the twenty largest California wildfires since 1932, half have occurred in just the past four seasons. These conditions - an unplanned, highly accelerated material cycling of the landscape - are a direct reaction to earlier attempts at deceleration. The longer fire suppression is maintained, the greater the intensity of the landscape's explosive response.

Global warming compounds this acceleration. Higher air temperatures and drought create warmer and drier soils, leading to tree disease and mortality. Uncontrollable fires rage through vast expanses of land, releasing smoke that blankets the state for weeks or months, carrying toxic particulates from human structures built in and around forests during the decades when suppression reigned. Fire risk that used to be seasonal in California now extends to most of the year. (The Camp fire, which tragically burned through the town of Paradise with extreme intensity and speed, happened in November 2018.) Such fires burn so hot they can make their own weather patterns. Even trees adapted to fire, like oaks and Ponderosa pines, are killed en masse, sending forests back to a peculiar state of primary succession. Then, when it rains and storms, the charred lands erode at much greater rate, sending accelerated flows of sediments into rivers and creeks, carrying nutrients and toxins, with attendant downstream effects. Reading forward, we might imagine a large fire in the oak chaparral uplands of Alameda Creek sending even more sediments into the flood control channel, eventually to be dredged and emplaced somewhere else.

Landscape architecture has many established methods for fostering biological and cultural diversity. We must now develop tools for pluralizing, spatializing, and contextualizing time.

In the example of forest fire management and mismanagement, we see again a layering of temporal strategies and effects: the intentional deceleration of landscape processes; the explosive, accelerated, unwanted landscape response; and, now, the desperate scramble to find a workable co-evolutionary pace. Reading through the mismeasures of settler colonialism and the Anthropocene, we can discern a more humble sense of what it means to play the "role of time." Humans are not only altering the speed of geospatial phenomena at the grandest scales ("nature" if you still find efficacy in that term), they are also altering co-evolutionary configurations of landscape that were assumed to be stable, or subject to human direction and control, within our individual lifetimes. Against the background of climate change, "the accelerated reshuffling of just about everything," Jackson's formulation of landscape - space reorganized for human needs - loses descriptive power.

At the surface, many anthropogenic landscapes seem inclined toward acceleration or deceleration, like the plant growth and soil stabilization schemes we saw in the Sacramento River levee setback. But when we look closer, we see acceleration and deceleration tactics deployed simultaneously within a single design strategy and landscape medium. The story of California's forests is characterized by conflicting trajectories, alternating from inadvertent effect to intentional corrective and back again; it is a story of landscapes shaped by countless human and more-than-human actions all mixed up and expressing different creational rhythms. Designers working within this time-space - whether they are building a new development near the Bay edge or revising forest management policy - are acting on and within multiple temporalities.

As conceptual tools for praxis, the terms accelerated and decelerated express time relatively. When we alter landscape temporalities, we produce or experience change or difference in a specific situation and context, without respect to abstract measures of time. The discipline of landscape architecture has many established methods for fostering and designing for biological and cultural diversity. We must now develop tools for pluralizing, spatializing, and contextualizing time, and engaging with the multiple temporalities that exist concurrently within landscapes.

Duration, Matter, and Evolution

As we have seen, landscapes are complexly authored, indeterminate, and mutable. Their temporal sensitivity means that they are always evolving, always becoming something else, even if that becoming is subtle or invisible to human perception. They are moving, migrating assemblies that exhibit powerful collective agency and responsiveness. As I argued in an earlier article for Places, "A landscape migrates when its unique assembly of components - the materials, entities, and actors that define it - shifts such that, over time, a new assembly forms." Therefore, "qualitatively different landscapes can and do manifest upon a single geographic terrain."

Here we can draw on Charles Darwin's ideas about biological evolution and the emergence of new lifeforms and landscapes, as developed over 150 years by theorists like Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Elizabeth Grosz. From an evolutionary perspective, duration (or continuance in time) is the force that drives relentless change and the emergence of novelty. As expressed by the feminist philosopher Grosz:

Duration is difference, the inevitable force of differentiation and elaboration, which is also another name for becoming. Becoming is the operation of self-differentiation, the elaboration of a difference within a thing, a quality or a system that emerges or actualizes only in duration. Duration is the "field" in which difference lives and plays itself out, the "domain" of becoming; duration is that which undoes as well as makes. To the extent that duration entails an open future, it involves the fracturing and opening up of the past and present to what is virtual in them, to what in them differs from the actual, to what in them can bring forth the new. This unbecoming is the very motor of becoming, thus making the past and present not given but fundamentally ever-altering.

The acceleration or deceleration of any material or socio-political process in landscape produces difference, which opens new evolutionary pathways. And this does not occur in isolation. The mode of becoming differentially changes for every part of the landscape assembly. As Grosz writes, "Everything, every process, every event or encounter is itself a mode of becoming that has its own time, its own movements, its own force." Through duration, the past and present are fractured, opened up, revealing difference between "what is virtual in them" and what is "actual." The virtual Grosz describes is, for me, the realm of design and design capacity. It includes those traits of the living - memory (history), concepts, intuition - that lead us to change the ever-moving present, to act on and collaborate with other biotic and mineral entities to bring forth something new, something different than what is and was. And, of course, this new assembly is itself indeterminate, subject to the action of physical forces and ongoing differentiation.

How time and agency are conceptualized in landscape is pivotal, since these conceptions influence how we design and act politically within it.

This may all seem far removed from the mud at Alameda Creek, but how time and agency are conceptualized in landscape is pivotal, since these conceptions influence how we design and act politically within it. Abstract and decontextualized understandings of landscape temporalities can lead to thinly conceived design strategies, and thus to a gap between intentions and outcomes that is often dysfunctional or harmful. We see this in many 20th-century landscape works in North America, and especially in the visions, policies, politics, and built works of "reclamation" and "flood control." Imposed colonial practices have attempted to reterritorialize landscapes while eliminating long-term, intimate, embodied knowledge of them. Lacking an awareness of the temporalities and processes at play within landscape, designers have failed to foresee the effects of their schemes - enabling a pervasive and consequential care-lessness. Of course, this is more or less the basis of the entire United States, via manifest destiny and the expulsion of traditional ecological knowledge.

More specific to contemporary design, Julian Raxworthy has critiqued landscape architecture's "process discourse," which represents time and landscape change in abstract ways disconnected from actual experience, materiality, and embodied knowledge:

By appropriating and valorizing processes, both architecture and landscape architecture seek to rid the architectural object of its static properties and calibrate it to the world. Denatured and accelerated by computers with advanced modeling and simulating capabilities, the flux and indeterminacy of the world seems within reach, ready to be seized and mobilized. However. I would argue that this is a vainglorious illusion that mistakes simulation for the real.

My invitation to think in terms of accelerated and decelerated landscapes is an explicit rejection of "flux" and chance operations. I am interested in a more specific, rigorous, grounded sense of landscape temporalities that helps designers (i.e. makers and stewards) skillfully and equitably affect landscape's evolution. This is especially important now, at a time when so many infrastructures and built works are ready to be undone. How we configure landscape (i.e. how we intervene in time and process) will determine the survival and quality of life for humans and so many other species and things, including those generations yet to be.

Experiencing and Interpreting Time

Where the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel empties into the Bay, it is surrounded by another network of earthen levees containing polygonal bodies of water, each a different striking color, according to the particular algae and microorganisms found there. These are former salt production ponds, which are sinking as the soil subsides. This area, known as Eden Landing, is part of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, which aims to re-establish more than 15,000 acres of tidal marsh on former industrial lands. Such wetlands are critical habitat for endangered and threatened species, and they are one of the most adaptable landscape defenses to sea-level rise.

A functioning tidal marsh is a sustainable land-generating machine. Sediment gets trapped in the vegetation, and peat soils accumulate as its plants decay, allowing the marsh to rise in tandem with sea levels, buffering onshore communities, absorbing tides and attenuating waves. But when sea-level rise surpasses this building capacity, a marsh "drowns." The plants die, and the marsh becomes mudflat, before disappearing beneath the water of an expanding Bay. With wetland defenses gone, urbanized areas are at greater risk. In the South Bay, that includes airports, housing developments, rail lines, water treatment plants, and tech campuses like Facebook's headquarters.

So how should designers intervene in the evolution of this landscape? For a marsh to take hold at Eden Landing, the bottom of the ponds must be brought back up to tidal elevation, which means placing 2 to 5 vertical feet of fill material, or over 6 million cubic yards in total. If the salt pond levees were simply breached, allowing Bay tides to bring in whatever silty sediment they carry, the slow rate of deposition would likely be outpaced by rapid sea-level rise, and the marsh would never get above water. For that reason, there is broad consensus among regional scientists, regulators, and planners that Bayland marshes should be restored as soon as possible. The longer we wait, the harder it gets. Securing political support (and funding) for such an effort involves educating the public to see two diverging trajectories of landscape change at once: the accelerated sinking of the Baylands, due to a lack of sediment supply, and accelerated sea-level rise, due to global warming. And, as we've seen, these trajectories are only part of a greater polyphony of material and socio-political phenomena happening across different scales and speeds, all making something bigger and more complex than themselves.

As Barbara Adam observes, landscapes do not conform to Newtonian time. We can index particular aspects to an imposed chronology, but in doing so we will miss the overlapping, interacting rhythms and material processes that constitute landscape at any moment, such as when high tides meet atmospheric rivers, upstream dam releases, and the flow and deposition of sediments at the mouth of a creek. To see how a landscape changes and novelty emerges, we have to probe the gap between when and how an engineering scheme is conceived and when and how it is constructed, and trace the many changes that emerge differentially from that spatial act. Instead of timelines, we must learn to create (or read, interpret, experience) timescapes that encompass an entire field of relations, understanding how actors like willows, gravel, maintenance crews, thunderstorms, and backhoe dredgers act on and beside one another through duration, forming relationships that are spatially and temporally interdependent.

From the point of view of the observer, of course, a landscape can never be an objective absolute, since what observers can see depends on their prior knowledge, their power of deduction, and their imagination. The scape - be this a landscape, seascape, or cityscape - arises from the interactive unity of observer and observed, of material phenomena and forces inaccessible to the senses, of visible and invisible influences.

From a design perspective, this subjectivity raises questions about how phenomena are sensed within landscape, and how temporalities are made sensible to future occupants. Which processes, actors, and materialities are deemed important? What scales of time and space are sensed or observed? How do designers engage, map, model, and interpret the existing evolutionary pathways of a given site - how do they survey and make sense of a place - as the basis for design research and intervention? Do they use GIS-based remote sensing and aerial imagery? Digital or scaled physical models? Cost-benefit equations? Embodied labor and experience within the actual medium? Is their engagement quick and superficial, or deep and sustained over time through intimate relationships? In what ways is this knowledge translated and mediated? The methods and technologies applied to this task - the media ecology - strongly influence designers' knowledge of what a landscape was, is, and might be.

How do designers engage, map, model, and interpret the existing evolutionary pathways of a given site? How is this knowledge translated and mediated?

The challenge grows as we approach a landscape across great spatial distances or through geological time. Alameda Creek is one of many tidal creeks that drain into San Francisco Bay that have been transformed by urbanization, channelization, and flood control efforts. If we aim to "restore" the ecological function of these creeks, we can skip across time, trying to understand how they worked before their modification, but what would we use as a baseline? Humans were here 10,000 years ago, when none of those creeks were tidally influenced because the Bay as we know it did not exist. The coastline was located some 30 miles west of the Golden Gate, all the way out to the Farallon Islands, and the Bay was a terrestrial alluvial plain. Other humans were here 5,000 years ago, when the rapid sea-level rise that inundated the lower reaches of the Sacramento River watershed began to slow, creating a vast drowned valley that was the general shape and extent of the Bay we know today.

Within this stabilized climate, vegetation colonized the shallow edges of the Bay, forming tidal wetlands which expanded steadily until the era of European colonization, when that trajectory was accelerated. Upland land uses such as grazing, agriculture, and land clearing caused soil erosion that sent larger flows of sediment down the creeks and into the Bay, leading to more shallowing and marsh expansion. And then, in the late 19th century, the Sierra Nevada foothills were blasted with high-pressure water cannons to extract gold, which produced a tenfold increase in sediment coursing through the estuary, wildly changing its bathymetry and expanding the wetlands, beaches, and mudflats. This pulse of sediment provided the raw material settlers used to "reclaim" (i.e. destroy) the Bay's marshes, through diking, draining, and landfilling.

Wetlands today are valued far more than they were in the 19th century. They are known to provide dynamically rich habitats and nursery grounds for various species; to absorb and cleanse water; and to protect and stabilize coastlines, adapting readily to changes in environmental conditions. Many people also appreciate their recreational affordances. In the Bay Area, this translates to political support for major efforts to restore marshes such as Hamilton Wetlands, Sears Point, Montezuma Wetlands, and the lower Napa River. But the regional, science-based planning process behind these efforts, the Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals Project, is guided by a map of the early 1800s - a snapshot of that very brief paleogeographic moment, just after the calming of a long duration of accelerated sea-level rise, when humans were busily mobilizing all kinds of materials, labor, technologies, bodies, and desires into collective action that would send increased quantities of sediment into the Bay. The temporal collision of hydrogeological, cultural, and climatic forces that led to the conditions surveyed at that moment are absent from the map's abstraction. And without them, the map's representation reads as a much more stable, naturalized condition.

We might have about 30 more years of a relatively stable climate before things really start to move out of sync at high speed. The time to prepare for that acceleration is now.

Scenarios for sea-level rise in the Bay vary, but differences between projections are relatively small until around 2050, when they diverge depending on greenhouse gas emission rates. Under more extreme scenarios, California's coastal waters are projected to rise 2 inches per year by the end of the century, with the total rise exceeding 10 feet. Atmospheric rivers, droughts, and forest fires will affect coastal flooding and erosion and sediment transport throughout the surrounding watersheds. In other words, we might have about 30 more years of a relatively stable climate before things really start to move out of sync at high speed. The time to prepare for that acceleration is now. How can designers interpret this time (for themselves and others) in ways that are likely to make those preparations useful?

According to the Bayland Goals, planners aim to restore 100,000 acres of wetlands to buffer the effects of climate change, including the 15,000 acres in the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. Under prevailing political conditions (in this relatively progressive region of a relatively progressive state), such plans pass for climate "adaptation." But meeting that restoration target is overwhelmingly improbable. Even if all the sediment routinely dredged in the Bay were beneficially used for this purpose, and even if sea-level rise could be slowed to let the wetlands keep pace, there wouldn't be enough sediment to meet demand. The former Bay, as it emerged prior to colonial contact, cannot be recreated. Whatever the future holds for the humans and other species who occupy this region, it will be very different from the past.

My colleagues and I have tried to convey that reality. As a member of the Dredge Research Collaborative and of Public Sediment, a design team which participated in the Bay Area's Resilient By Design challenge, I have been involved in efforts to shape knowledge and ethics through maps and diagrams that show the relationships between sediment supply and sea-level rise. Observing that the prevailing chronotopes (constructed space-time narratives) for the Bay did not accurately reflect landscape conditions and evolutionary trajectories of change, we have presented new ones. This is an activist attempt to show the radical change that will come to the Bay Area in the second half of the century, and to raise public awareness about the fact that there is no real plan for dealing with likely future conditions.

One role for designers is to help the public interpret and respond to climate change by reframing what is considered coastal. The coastline drawn on maps is a highly relative construction, an index at a particular scale of observation and experience. We should instead conceive the coast as a constantly changing zone that moves and varies across the quick temporalities of lunar, solar, and storm cycles, as well as slower but more consequential geologic and climatic rhythms. And, materially, the coast is much more than a thin strip of land that meets the waves. It should be understood to include sedimentshed s extending far inland, which supply the earthen material that sustains bays, deltas, estuaries, and beaches. In design and planning, the physiographic units of watersheds and subwatersheds help structure efforts according to hydrological patterns and processes. We need to do the same for sediment, recognizing that dams, infrastructures, and other landscape works shape the accumulations, erosion, and flows of sediments within a watershed, and that these relationships change over time.

We cannot undo our collective legacy of climate destabilization. If we strip away the modernist propaganda, the Anthropocene is about loss.

Futuring and Acting on Time

This returns us to the question of how designers can intervene in time and process to affect a landscape's evolution. Public Sediment's proposal for Eden Landing calls for sediments dredged from around the Bay (typically from shipping channel maintenance and deepening), to be brought by barge to a deepwater hydraulic offloading facility three miles offshore, then pumped as slurry through 47,000 feet of pipeline into the subsided salt ponds, at a rate of 1 to 2 million cubic yards per year, in order to actualize an anthro-geologically accelerated remaking of Bayland marsh. To help nourish those marshes, the Alameda Flood Control Channel would be cut open, allowing the creek's water, fish, and sediments to flow freely between the marshes, the Bay, and back up the creek. The Public Sediment team also worked with the local flood control district to propose changes along the length of the channel, from Bay to foothills. Within the current profile, a narrower, deeper channel would be carved, creating more flood capacity while providing deeper and cooler water for migratory fish. Shaded and held in place by native vegetation, this meandering channel would push more sediment downstream to the Bay by accelerating water velocity during storms. Newly designed floodrooms, mudrooms, and terrace trails along the creek would provide public spaces that connect rather than divide communities.

Whether and how these design interventions are made depends on a meshwork of temporal design decisions. Breaching and decommissioning a large part of a federal flood control channel is, under the ideology of 20th century engineering, complete blasphemy. Treason. It is a radical departure from past ways of doing and working with time, flow, and water, which will require big changes in institutional and cultural habits. Changing those habits is also the work of design. Too often, people assume that the act of design ends with the creation of a plan or rendering. What comes next is left to policymakers, public agencies, builders, voters. But design isn't just about the move. Design is ontological. Which is to say: design designs. Every step in the chain of events that leads from idea to outcome is part of design and the making of worlds.

Time is not a given in the Anthropocene. Rather, it is designed, intentionally or accidentally. We cannot control the future, but we can participate in its choreography.

Here we might look for motivation within transitional design theory, which observes a distinction between defuturing and futuring. As described by anthropologist Arturo Escobar (interpreting the work of designer Tony Fry), defuturing is "the systemic destruction of possible futures by the structured unsustainability of modernity." Futuring is the opposite, the creation of "a future with futures," through designing alternative ways of being, beyond the confines of global capitalism. From this perspective, design isn't something to be siloed in a separate realm. Again, design designs. It creates and de-creates the times and landscapes we inhabit. The activist call of transitional design is to create new evolutionary pathways that transition defuturings into futurings. This is to insist on design's central role and responsibility in the making of futures yet to be experienced. Rather than the hegemonic, "one world" of modernism (Escobar's target of criticism), transitional design theory envisions a plurality of worlds customized and co-created with the places where they occur.

In inviting readers to think through and work within accelerated and decelerated landscapes, I am invoking a similar role for design, with an emphasis on the plurality of temporalities that constitute landscape, which can be encountered and altered through knowledges, techniques, and ethics of bending time. These concepts guide us toward the design of temporal infrastructures, those techniques and relational assemblies that affect and refashion how time happens. We try to discern the cadences and rhythms of how things unfold and differentiate over duration, at this uncanny moment when the climates and landscapes we depend on are destabilizing, changing at rates so fast, that they are tangibly felt. We encounter these phenomena through our limited senses, as stronger heat waves, species extinctions, and worsening air quality; as intense storms and frequent droughts and flooding; as wars over resources and displacements of communities, both human and more than human. And as this slow violence builds over the next few decades, it will evolve into a new, undeniable condition, the acute perception of landscape asynchronies and their effects. Time is not a given in the Anthropocene. Rather, it is designed, intentionally or accidentally. And so much of what has been designed for the industrial, colonial, capitalist legacies we inherit needs refuturing. We cannot control the future, but we can participate in its choreography, intervening in the many rhythms and formative processes that constitute the temporal medium of landscape.

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In 1984, toward the end of a long career studying relations between landscape and culture, the historian and critic J.B. Jackson alighted on a new definition for his subject. Landscape, he argued, is "space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature."

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https://ecologicalprocesses.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13717-018-0136-6

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Introduction

Western climate science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) represent complementary and overlapping views of the causes and consequences of change. In particular, observations of changes in abundance, distribution, phenology, or behavior of the natural environment (including plants and animals) can have a rich cultural and spiritual interpretation in Indigenous communities that may not be present in western science epistemologies.

Results

Using interviews with Indigenous elders and other Traditional Knowledge holders, we demonstrate that assumptions about the nature, perception, and utilization of time and timing can differ across knowledge systems in regard to climate change.

Conclusions

Our interviewees' focus on relationality predisposes them to notice interactional changes among humans and other species, to be sensitive to smaller scale examples of change, to be more likely to see climate change as part of a broader time scale, and to link changes to a greater suite of socio-political phenomena, including the long arc of colonialism. One implication of this research and the interactions among humans and other species is that policies restricting Native and non-Native access to resources (i.e., hunting and fishing) to certain calendar seasons may need to be revisited in a changing climate.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)

Traditional Knowledge (TK)

Indigenous Knowledge (IK)

Climate change

Phenology

Seasonality

Time

Indigenous peoples around the world have been some of the most vocal in acknowledging that (a) climate change is visibly occurring; and (b) that their communities, and all communities, should mitigate, plan for, and adapt to those changes (Harrington ; Maldonado et al. ; The Mystic Lake Declaration ; Wildcat ). This vocality, and the organizing around it (Salick and Byg , Maldonado et al. ), has brought new prominence of TEK within climate science that takes many different forms. Some mainstream scholars acknowledge the unique and complementary value of TEK in providing additional information about changes in the natural world (e.g., phenology) that are not as readily available through western science observations (Berkes et al. ; Huntington ; Drew ). This utilitarian view can selectively admit TEK into the western view of climate change or climate change adaptation. Here, TEK often serves as data that are useful for scientific research, for describing climate change impacts, or for adaptation wisdom that may support community-level planning efforts.

Another form is to focus on how climate change uniquely affects Indigenous communities (e.g., Bennett et al. ). For example, Field et al. () note that one risk connected with sea-level rise is "Loss of common-pool resources, sense of place, and identity, especially among Indigenous populations in rural coastal zones." In the USA at least, recognition that Indigenous peoples face special challenges connected to climate change has led to some dedicated research and engagement resources directed toward Indigenous communities and nations from governments, non-governmental organizations, universities, and the media (Bennett et al. ; Wotkyns ). A third alternative (that may include one or both models above) is research conducted by Indigenous scholars and scientists themselves (formally or informally), either through university and government research institutions, or as community-driven knowledge production. These latter examples often take the form of practical climate change adaptation planning such as the Climate Adaptation planning with the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals at Northern Arizona University ( https://www7.nau.edu/itep/main/Home/ ).

However, while these two primary sets of knowledge (mainstream and Indigenous) can and do inform one another, their epistemological differences are significant and deserve examination. Indigenous peoples often interpret the nature and significance of climate change differently from non-Indigenous scientists (Bennett et al. ; Chief et al. ; Maldonado et al. ; Vinyeta et al. ; Willox et al. ). These differences may significantly affect the production of science, and the relationships among non-Indigenous scientists, Indigenous scientists, and communities experiencing change (Williams and Hardison ).

The literature points to several differences between these two sets of knowledge. First, while western scientists usually describe vulnerability to climate change in economic or ecological terms, or occasionally mention deeper effects (as in the Field et al. quote above, about identity, or Lynn et al. about tribal first foods), many Indigenous peoples and communities approach the question of how climate change affects them quite differently. They see themselves additionally vulnerable psychologically and existentially, and see climate change as threatening the integrity of their communities' cohesion, or as altering the existential, personal, and intimate (as opposed to metaphorical or consumptive) relationships with the natural world (Maldonado ; Maldonado et al. ; Marino ; Willox ; Willox et al. ; LaDuke ; Whyte et al. ).

Second, climate science-when describing changes to the environment-draws sharp distinctions between empirical data (whether observed or modeled) and the sociocultural context of those data. By contrast, Indigenous peoples often understand the nature and significance of their knowledges within political, environmental, cultural, and social systems that differ greatly from those of many scientists (Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup ; Whyte ; Williams and Hardison ).

Third, related to cause, scientists and other non-Indigenous persons distinguish natural climate variability from anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change through a rigorous statistical process aimed at determining, e.g., how much of the warming in the past half-century was caused by rising greenhouse gases (Stocker et al. ). Yet Indigenous peoples, and some scholarly and activist commentators, link climate change with other environmental and social changes that are related to longstanding issues of power, especially colonialism (both historically and today) and exploitative business practices (Cameron ; Haalboom and Natcher ; Marino ; Whyte ; Wildcat ).

Missing from this literature is a comparison of the epistemology of time between scientific and Indigenous Knowledge sets. Moreover, because one important aspect of climate change is changes in seasonality (the regular occurrence of natural events), understanding how different knowledge sets relate to time and seasonality is essential for understanding these different ways of knowing, how they are complementary, and how they may differ. The specific objective of this paper is to present Indigenous Knowledge holders' understanding of ecological change, and any shifts that may be climate change driven, as perceived through the lens of TEK in their communities and to identify the assumptions about time and seasonality that are made therein based on western scientific understandings. We argue that traditional ways of knowing are not only valid, they are built on a different intellectual and cultural framework that needs to be understood in its own right. We compare those assumptions with assumptions in the climate science literature on time and timing in the same region. This comparison provides important insights into assumptions (when studying climate change) about the nature of time, what subsequent to those assumptions becomes more likely to be observed, and what counts as information within these epistemological systems, as well as the outcomes and adaptation possibilities that stem from that knowledge. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how Indigenous Knowledge of the environment and/or TEK may detect changes that are imperceptible to western science, in part, because of a unique and holistic relationship with the timing of change.

Knowing about time and the timing of knowing

Knowledge systems, which derive from institutions that furnish their reliability, represent approaches to gaining a reliable understanding of the world we inhabit so that societies flourish. Scientific peer review is such an institution, as is gaining promotion and rank in organizations. In Indigenous communities, complex knowledge systems are sometimes referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). For the purposes of this paper, TEK is defined as the application of the specific area of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Science Knowledge that relates to the environment in a given traditional homeland of Indigenous groups and/or Usual and Accustomed (U&A) areas. This may include but is not limited to botany knowledge, medicinal application (collection and/or administration), hunting, fishing, gathering, processing of material(s), caretaking such as burning, coppicing, thinning, astronomy, phenology, time, ecological markers, species markers, weather and climate knowledge (Hong et al. ). TEK is complex, unique, and can include a suite of experts, institutions, referendums on knowledge, and checks and balances for ensuring the successful creation, accumulation, and transfer of knowledge, information, and ethical guidance on how to use that information (Cochran et al. ; Barnhardt and Kawagaley ). Ceremonies, such as potlatch ceremonies, and training protocols for harvesters, as just two examples, have been discussed in the literature as institutions that support the reliability of Indigenous Knowledge systems (Trosper ). Ceremonies and ceremonial areas vary from tribal group, area, and location. Some ceremonial practices are intellectual property and are not released information, while other ceremonial practices are adjusted and moved depending on TK and TEK.

Perceptions of time and temporality are deeply intertwined with knowledge creation, accumulation, and transfer, as well as cultural orientation (Gingrich et al. ), and can vary greatly from one knowledge community to another. In some contexts, time is presumed to be the linear progression of certain events happening one after another. This presumption is now understood as profoundly ethnocentric and "brazenly cultural in character." (Hodges ). As Bates writes "Assumptions about time as a linear flow of constant rate, with neat chronologies linking events in the past, present, and future are convictions that are deeply embedded in Western thought" (Bates ), and thus, embedded in Western, non-Indigenous scientific discourses.

Conversely, conceptions of time in Indigenous contexts can vary widely and are often encoded in Indigenous languages or methods of discourse and knowledge exchanges, including storytelling and explanations about the relationships among things in place. Different ontologies also highlight different metaphorical constructions to explain the flow of time. For example, among Aymara speakers of South America, the present-past is visible and perceivable, but the future is behind a person and, therefore, un-seeable and unknowable. Similar constructions of present-past and future are present in Tuvaluan languages and larger Pacific cultural groups, and these constructions can clash with Western scientific discourses on climate change which posit that an adequate understanding of processes and other information permit reasonably accurate quantitative predictions and are thus oriented toward the future (Marino and Lazrus ). Indigenous scholars and scholars of Indigenous studies discuss the differences in concepts of time. Stewart-Harawira () claims that "Within Māori ontological and cosmological paradigms it is impossible to conceive of the present and the future as separate and distinct from the past, for the past is constitutive of the present and, as such, is inherently reconstituted within the future" (Stewart-Harawira ). In the Anishinaabemowin ( Neshnabémwen) language, the expression aanikoobijigan ( yankobjegen) (Whyte , pg. 5) means ancestor and descendent at the same time. This meaning suggests an Anishinaabe perspective on intergenerational time-a perspective embedded in cyclicality in which it makes sense to consider ourselves as living alongside future and past relatives simultaneously as we walk through life. Cyclical time or cyclical temporality, here, refers to various ways of experiencing ourselves in the world as participants within narratives involving our ancestors and descendants.

We know, additionally, that climate change will include changes in temporality, timing, and seasonal shifts. These changes in seasonality have been widely noted. Particularly in the Arctic, researchers and Indigenous residents have noted changing in the timing and intensity of weather patterns such as rain, snow, or cloud cover (Huntington and Fox ; McNeeley and Shulski ; Robinson and Frei ). Some research has indicated that these changes, while relatively small when measured by climate scientists, can indicate important seasonality shifts for people engaged in subsistence practices (McNeeley and Shulski ; Weatherhead et al. ).

Seasonality does not refer to the commonly accepted four seasons, but rather how annual environmental changes affect harvesting, monitoring, storing, and consuming of sometimes hundreds of plants, animals, and insects. Seasonal perceptions of climate change may be tied to detailed accounts of movements of plant, animal, and insect populations and conditions such as ice cover or water levels that differ from perceptions of climate change rooted only in changes of precipitation or temperature on a four seasons model of annual change. For example, many Indigenous peoples perceive more than four seasons, such as the Anishinaabe 13 moons system or "seasonal round" (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes ; Benton-Banai ).

Indigenous perspectives on time, seasonality, and the impacts of climate change have not previously been compared with perspectives from climate science in the western USA. Natural scientists have demonstrated significant changes in climate (e.g., Abatzoglou et al. ) and some consequences of those changes (e.g., Dalton et al. ). Native American communities are also recognizing change (Charnley et al. ; Alexander et al. ). Our original goal in this research was to investigate the observations of five tribes in the western USA, utilizing a TEK perspective, to discover whether they perceived impacts of climate change impacts, and whether any adaptive strategies were being implemented. Research can produce surprises, and the same was true with this project. We initially expected to focus on visible expressions of culture, including songs, stories, dances, and ceremonies, but the dominant emphasis in interviews led us to emergent results concerning deeper notions of how one frames change, responses to change, and the interactions among species, ecosystems, and culture. These observations are linked to notions and perceptions of time and seasonality that appeared quite different, in certain ways, from their climate science counterparts.

The overall research objective of this project at its inception was to identify the behaviors and patterns of Native American culturally relevant natural resources through a TEK lens and note responses, if any, to climate change. We did this by the following: (1) interviewing tribal elders and cultural experts from five carefully chosen tribes (Fig. ): the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Paiute Shivwits Band, the Duckwater Shoshone, and the Quinault Indian Nation, and classifying their responses about cultural impacts; (2) comparing responses and adaptation measures; and (3) comparing those findings with climate science findings in the same region. The five tribes selected were all from the west and included the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin regions.

The categories of questions included (a) plants and animals responding to changing climate conditions; and (b) elements of tribal tradition and culture that depend heavily on those plants and animals. However, our interviews were intended to establish, primarily, the last causal step: (c) whether the fluctuations in the abundance and distribution of plants and animals and other environmental factors have resulted in modifications or adaptations of tribal cultural traditions or other aspects of culture. Interviewees were not asked to speculate on the influence of global or regional climate change, and it was not the intention of this research to establish, through new analysis, whether any of these changes mentioned by interviewees are a consequence of climate change.

Selection of tribes

We chose the aforementioned five tribes with high engagement and promotion of traditional cultural activity on their websites, similar enrollment numbers, and breadth of geographic distribution ranging from coastal to mountain to desert. None of the tribes selected are directly connected to each other, but are autonomous, federally recognized sovereign tribes located within the western USA.

Recruitment and data collection

The lead author interviewed 24 members of the five tribes. The participants were chosen based on their cultural expertise, and were identified by tribal resource managers who assisted in the selection process for this project. Snowball technique was applied, as was purposeful sampling and identification. Data was analyzed utilizing TEK information, relating to the topics addressed previously as they related and were utilized in traditional Native American culture practices and behaviors. Stories, anecdotes, and traditional information systems were all scanned and analyzed for TEK information. Sensitive information and/or intellectual property was not disclosed to the public and is not included in this information because of sovereignty and intellectual property rights of the respective tribes. Analyses were based on documented information systems that have been passed down, as well as traditional information systems that are based in TK and are applied, utilized TEK methodologies. These knowledge systems operate on well-defined and precise practices, and are adjusted in a variety of ways to account for changes in environmental factors. These adjustments were noted and comparisons were made to self-reported previous behaviors to decipher the levels of change and seasonality that have been impacted. Terminology which is rooted in TK and/or TEK was noted and adjusted for as it differs from western science terminology just as a foreign language would. Some TEK terms are rooted in Native base languages, and cannot be fully translated.

Interviews lasted for 1 h, on average. Interviews were informal and semi-structured, allowing participants to lead discussions. Interviews were audio recorded, brought to Oregon State University, evaluated, and transcribed for further review. All interviews were subject to intellectual property rights restrictions of the tribe (Williams and Hardison ). We provide analysis and examples of data here, with permission; but full transcripts are owned by the respective tribes.

Our analysis of the interviews suggested four significant conclusions, which are each outlined in the next four subsections. We reflect on (1) tribal perspectives on time and seasonality, (2) temporal adaptations, (3) construction of time from the perspective of climate science, and (4) perceived association of climatic change in relation to other changes.

The importance of time, seasonality, and relationship

For these tribes, the most culturally significant aspect of climate change is how it affects the definition of time, and particularly seasons. Our study found that the tribal understandings of time are defined by cues and patterns observed in the natural world. As such, time is then relied on, operated in, and based on a 3D construction rather than the westernized linear time system. Their concepts of time are important not least because they indicate when certain traditional behaviors should begin, for example, hunting, fishing, and gathering. They are also strikingly relational, so that seasonal patterns are observed as an intricate system of connectivity and integration among plant, animal, insect, and human experience.

These cues for human behavior include weather events, like the first appearance of snow on a certain mountain, botanical indicators like when berries emerge, and animal behaviors like the emergence of a certain species of ant.

"... in the spring, you got carpenter ants, big black carpenter ants, and [eel hunters] didn't go eeling until they saw those carpenter ants, they came out to mate, grow wings and fly off and start new colonies and stuff and that was what they marked when the weather was right to start eeling.... they marked other things the same way, but you can't do that anymore because our weather's changed so much that you can't mark anything like that; there's no way to do it." (Oscar Hatfield, CTSI Elder)

In the above example, the carpenter ants have no direct biological connection to the spawning times of "eels" (Pacific Lamprey) or water levels, yet the emergence of the ant colonies historically corresponded to eel patterns in the river, and the Siletz relied on this correspondence to know when to go eeling, like a timer going off. This example is also directly (if implicitly) related to climate change caused by rising greenhouse gases, as noted by the comments on changing weather. Winter seasons are shorter and spring seasons are notably occurring earlier in the Pacific Northwest.

Quinault tribal member Doug James gave a similar account relating to Blueback salmon: "The older guys used to tell us that when the salmon berries start coming out, you'd start throwing your net out for blueback, and when we start seeing the salmon berries start coming out, we'd start seeing one or two even if they were games (not full runs, but isolated fish that indicated runs were arriving)." Figure shows a Quinault tribal member fishing.

Disruption of the seasonal cycle, consequently, has profound effects for Native cultures. When a changing climate alters long-established associations between phenological events as in the examples above, the consequences are not merely an inconvenience or a set of information; instead, they challenge the fundamental belief about how elements of the natural world are connected, as well as the timing of when traditional patterns occur and behaviors are performed. Bonds between species such as those between carpenter ants and eels, between salmon berries and blueback, represent a fundamental order of the universe; when these bonds dissolve, the sense of order begins to fray and several interviewees expressed confusion, dismay, and concern, as in the last part of Hatfield's remark.

These phenological events are indicators of what is referred to sometimes in Native communities as Indian time-understood here as precision in timing, oriented in relationship to other environmental phenomena and in relationship to appropriate behavior and action. Cycles of events, bound together, not only show these patterns of seasonality, but illustrate the sensitivity with which relationships among people, animals, plants, and landscape may be observed and interpreted. While phenology and relationality do appear in Western science, particularly in noting climatic changes (e.g., Menzel et al. ), the primacy of relationality as a mechanism of knowing and identifying change, and the inclusion of right human behavior within these relations, we see as distinct from most western science frameworks and understand it as an epistemological difference between these ways of knowing.

Some aspects of traditional culture are adapting to timing shifts

Some traditional cultural elements or events are being altered in ways that many members see as temporary, and short term, compared with the extensive period that Natives have been in their aboriginal landscapes. Examples that arose in our interviews included those linked with seasonal indicators.

A seasonally important time period (generally winter, but it varies with each tribe's customs and beliefs) are those days, weeks, or months when some tribes deem it traditionally appropriate to "talk story," and thereby to transmit and sustain traditional information. The term "story" is a misnomer, as this period of time is quite literally an Indigenous informational data system within respective tribes. For Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, traditional "talk story" time began when a snowfall of several inches visibly covered the nearby mountains. Owing to the shifts in autumn snowfall timing, the beginning of this time has changed. Due to lessened snowfall amounts, adaptations have taken place. Now less snow is required to indicate when "talk story" time begins. Time, measured as periodic, and timing, understood as onset or co-occurrence of related events, are both important in traditional practice. Adaptive responses, in this case, is offsetting the change in snow with a change in defining appropriate behavior, or timing, thus minimize the effects of climate change on some practices.

Climate science and assumptions about time and seasonality

In our study region, the Pacific Northwest, changes in climate have been observed over roughly the last century. The most recent and comprehensive study calculated an annual mean warming of 0.6-0.8 °C (1.3 °F) in the Pacific Northwest from 1901 to 2012 and demonstrated that the warming is anthropogenic (Abatzoglou et al. ). Several other metrics of climate changed too, including a large rise in the coldest night of the year, lengthened freeze-free season, and increased growing-season evapotranspiration. Abatzoglou et al. () found no change in annual total precipitation since 1901, though there were shorter term trends in precipitation during certain seasons. Numerous studies have documented other aspects of climate change in the western USA, including timing in the arrival of spring (Cayan et al. ), spring runoff arriving earlier (e.g., Stewart et al. ; Fritze et al. ), reduced mountain snowpack (Mote et al. ), changed timing of spring fish migration (Robinson and Bayer ), and increased wildfire activity (Abatzoglou and Williams ), to name a few.

In order to meet stringent statistical requirements, such studies typically describe change over periods comparable to the change in radiative forcing (decades) and dismiss as "noise" shorter term variations, especially if they are not statistically attributable to identifiable causes (as is the case for precipitation). Indeed, shorter term trends can be so dominated by statistical 'noise' that they are in the opposite direction as the forced response (e.g., spring cooled 1980-2012, Abatzoglou et al. ). By contrast, Indigenous and other experiential views of climate may be more sensitive to more subtle changes because they are focused on the interactions among constituents in an environment in nuanced ways. This relational quality is a benchmark of significance in our interviews.

In mainstream climate science, seasonality can be defined in several ways. Climate data are often averaged into 3-month seasons (December-February is winter, etc.), but seasons can also be defined in other ways, like growing season or rainy season. Some studies also focus on the timing of key events and how they are shifting: first fall freeze is coming later (Kunkel et al. ), lilacs are blooming earlier in the spring (Cayan et al. ), peak spring flow is shifting earlier in snowmelt-driven basins (Stewart et al. ), and lakes are freezing later in fall and melting earlier in spring (Benson et al. ), to name a few. In the Northwest, the freeze-free season has lengthened by about 9 days (Abatzoglou et al. ).

Such descriptions of seasonal change, focusing on timing, are relatively rare in academic papers describing climate; most papers focus on the changes in quantitative attributes within a 3-month season (i.e., spring is always March through May, MAM). Even rarer in the climate science literature is a holistic description of change; for example, Cayan et al. () describe both interannual variability and long-term change in spring (MAM) temperature, date of lilac bloom, and date of spring snowmelt runoff. By contrast, the Native TEK view of seasons is entirely about timing and connections; seasonality is emergent and describes how the whole system changes, and how interactions among things are moving in relationship to one another.

Grounding the view: climate change in perspective

Perhaps the most striking difference between our interviews and climate science is that our interviewees described the changes in environment, culture, ceremony, and socio-politics together, as a body of observable changes over a centuries-long period of time. Regardless of cause, all interviewees were hesitant and anxious about the manner, rate, and sustainability of resource use. This anxiety, which extends to resources not yet in decline, stems from uncertainties that cannot be explained with the traditional stories, songs, or cycles that have been witnessed and conveyed for generations. TEK, then, has been rendered inconsistently reliable by climate-driven uncertainty. This longstanding traditional way of discussing change as a whole was contrasted with the generally more compartmentalized climate science literature, which only rarely produces a holistic or integrated view of climate change within larger socio-political or human-ecological contexts (e.g., Pachauri et al. ).

The scope of observable change demonstrated by interviewees is profound, even to the point of altering foundational ceremonies. For example, in the traditional marriage ceremony of the Siletz, a woman accepted a man's marriage proposal, in response he gave a dowry to her family, she then would move into their new home and make ceremonial acorn soup; the soup completed the marriage ceremony, and the couple was then considered married. For complex reasons including the Tribe's relocation in the 1850s but also the dwindling population of oak trees in western Oregon, the acorn soup part of this ritual is no longer practiced. Invasive species like Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry prevent survival of oak seedlings, which require moist soil and ground cover of leaf litter for propagation and survival.

Additionally, the Quinault Indian Nation described the traditional practice that Elders had for collecting eels (Pacific Lamprey) during the spring. Because the eel population has declined, this collection practice has largely died out, and even the Elders who prepare and consume eels rely primarily on the fish hatchery, which collects a few every spring, mainly for the Elders who request them. Justine James (QIN) states: "A lot of the eels in this area, they started going out in about the 60s, some of the Elders still follow that old life-way of eating, preparing eels, and it's kind of a dietary change and the logging practices have kind of altered the environment and so you don't get the eels as much." Close et al. () suggest that the decline may have been exacerbated by a Euro-American notion that the Pacific lamprey is a pest and managed it as such.

Nearly every participant described changes they had observed and expressed anxiety about these changes, but also expressed apprehension about future changes. These perspectives included changes resulting from a host of factors connected to the cataclysmic replacement of an Indigenous management system of the socio-political and natural environment in North America, with a Western management system. The latter system has brought assimilation pressures, economic upheaval, increases in invasive species, ecosystem changes, and climate change together. In other words, by not compartmentalizing climate change from other human-environmental changes, connections among human action and resulting risk to animal and plant species are more visible in a TEK epistemological construction of climate change.

We argue this difference in assessment, in part, has to do with the organization of knowledge, knowledge construction, and understandings of time and temporality. Understanding inter-relational change puts the events described above in a temporal field that understands changes as dense, intimate to place, interrelated, and across systems, including and especially in changes to socio-political systems and the impacts of colonialism writ large (Killsback ). Whereas the primary emphasis in TEK is holistic, the primary emphasis in climate science literature is in thoroughly understanding each component (e.g., physics of sea ice), with much less attention given to seeking connections (as in Cayan et al. ) or understanding strong interrelationships. Climate science has developed complex earth system models representing the physical and biophysical components and their interactions (e.g., Flato et al. ) and also integrated assessment models representing the interactions between humans (chiefly as their activities affect the radiative energy balance of the planet) and the climate system (e.g., Clarke et al. ). Such tools are intended to emphasize interactions and connections among components, and though the two epistemological constructions might share many overarching goals, they also have clearly different approaches and aims.

Epistemological differences and suggestions moving forward

Differences between these perspectives on time are multifaceted and range from pragmatic to deeply philosophical. To begin with, there are species management implications to our work. We find that with disruptions in seasonality and availability, tribal communities need flexibility in management systems in order to access traditionally harvested resources. However, the "calendar-driven" agency rules about harvest present a challenge. Namely, the defined "season" for harvesting salmon, deer, and shellfish is in some cases in conflict with the actual season of availability. As one elder said, "Our weather is changing, our seasons are not definite like they used to be and you used to be able to count on the rains coming, in October, that brought you the fish up the river so we could catch fish and now sometimes you don't have any rain clear into December." (Oscar Hatfield, CTSI Elder). Specifically, Oregon salmon harvesting season is established by the state department of Fish and Wildlife. The season generally begins in the middle of September and goes through the end of November, depending on location (ODFW ). Our research suggests that, not only should the "timing" of the "salmon season" be revisited under conditions of climate change, but that tribal communities need flexibility in determining when is the most appropriate time to harvest species because seasons of "onset" are in flux. In other words, management should be more on Indian time.

Second, we recognize that Traditional Ecological Knowledge may be particularly sensitive to changes in co-occurring temporality-shifts because of a focus on relationality, as per our examples above. Traditional Knowledges maintain vast cultural information, in addition to TEK maintaining profound knowledge of landscapes and seascapes over time, and may observe temporal relationships and changes that exceed the capacity of Western science methods to measure. Thus, we suggest that there is potential for collaboration among Indigenous TEK holders and climate scientists. However, there must be appropriate sharing of epistemological underpinnings if this relationship is to be fruitful and maintain respect for all knowledge holders.

Last, we want to acknowledge that Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change because of the strong reliance on subsistence resources, and because of the lack of flexibility to adapt to changes because of colonial legacies and other social and environmental change including inequitable access to economic capital and resources, invasive species disruptions, and other changes over the last 150 years, discussed above (Marino ; Whyte ; Wildcat ). Adaptation to climate change in tribal communities, therefore, is not absolutely distinct from other cataclysmic changes in tribal communities within Traditional Knowledge sets. Following, adaptation to climate change cannot be done realistically without addressing rights to sovereignty, land rights, treaty rights, and other environmental injustices and changes.

Ultimately, we see Indigenous concepts of time in this study as 3D, integrating observations and knowledge about the environment, knowledge of cultural tradition, environmental awareness, application of longstanding Traditional Knowledges, reliance on and understanding of environmental cues, and finally, finding the right moment or "time" to act based on environmental indicators. These frameworks for time are built into systems of knowing that are complex and sensitive to change. As environmental systems change and there is a decline of certain resources, it poses a challenge to the very basis of how Native identity is formed and maintained. The identity and the robustness of socio-ecological relationships that Natives have been basing themselves on and with for many generations is steeped in this Traditional Knowledge and relationship of reciprocity with the environment. For scientists who wish to work with Native peoples, and for the purposes of advancing climate knowledge in general, special attention should be paid to the relational and seasonal frameworks with which Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous scientists interpret the natural world. Awareness of differences in temporal constructions of knowledge is essential for cross-epistemological sharing, for maintaining respect across knowledge holders, and for seeing climate change as it really is.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Paiute Shivwits Band, the Duckwater Shoshone, and the Quinault Indian Nation for their gracious hosting and sharing of selected information about traditional culture. The project described in this publication was supported by the Department of the Interior Northwest Climate Science Center (NW CSC) through a Cooperative Agreement G13AC00264, by NOAA (grant NA10OAR4310218), and the Great Basin Landscape Conservation Cooperative.

Ethical approval and consent to participate

The participants were chosen based on their cultural expertise, and were identified by tribal resource manager who assisted in the selection process for this project.

Recruitment Tribal Cultural Resource Departments were contacted via phone calls and/or emails to initially identify interest in the project and to provide guidance on key tribal individuals as possible participants. Purposeful sampling is then commenced by identifying key respondents who held critical information. Individuals identified as having critical information to this research study were then contacted through the respective tribal cultural resources department, or through phone calls. Interviews were arranged through the respective tribes' cultural resources department when possible. The researcher directly contacted individuals not arranged through the tribal department representatives to schedule interviews when it was appropriate. Upon agreement of the individuals, a meeting date and time was established for the interview.

Oral Consent Process: The oral consent process occurred as outlined in the Oregon State University Institutional Review Board guidelines

( http://oregonstate.edu/research/irb/exempt%2D-review ), and the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Research Board

( http://www.npaihb.org/health-research/ ). Standard informed consent information was provided.

Consent obtained in person: Participants were handed the printed verbal consent document after they had been contacted and agreed to meet, prior to being interviewed. The project was explained verbally following the outline of the printed verbal consent document. Participants were notified that copies of the taped interviews would be sent to their tribe, and other redacted copies would be stored at USGS, and/or the Oregon State University Library Archives. The participants would be interviewed at the location they suggested for the interview, or at the respective tribal center if no specific suggestions were made. The estimated time commitment for a participant's involvement was approximately an hour, though actual time depended on participant's responses. Interviews were informal and semi-structured, allowing for participants to lead discussions where they felt information was relative to the question prompts.

Funding

This study was funded by the Department of the Interior Northwest Climate Science Center (NW CSC) through a Cooperative Agreement G13AC00264, by NOAA (grant NA10OAR4310218), Great Basin Landscape Conservation Cooperative grant.

Availability of data and materials

Transcriptions of research interviews are housed at Oregon State University, and with the tribal governments.

Authors' contributions

Each author wrote specific contributions, and all edited all sections prior to the agreement of the final manuscript approval.

Authors' information

Chisholm Hatfield is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and is also Cherokee. Her expertise is in that area Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Indigenous peoples. She is an active sitting board member for the Oregon State University Klatowa Eena Native American Longhouse and regularly mentors Native students. She has been a Korea Foundation Field Research Fellow and HJ Andrews Academic Writers in Residence Visiting Scholar. She assisted with facilitation, coordination, and advisement of the Northwest Climate Science Center Climate Boot Camp as well as being a featured speaker. She has had her Traditional Ecological Knowledge writings featured in special blogs in Union of Concerned Scientists, Whitefish Review Literary Journal, and Apogee Journal. She has been a speaker at National Congress of American Indians conference, Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians conferences, a TEDxSalem speaker, a frequent keynote speaker, and is an active international speaker giving talks about TEK and Indigenous culture.

Marino is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sustainability at Oregon State University - Cascades. Elizabeth is an author on the forthcoming National Climate Assessment, has worked with the Humboldt Forum in Berlin on representations of climate change and disasters, and has worked with the Emmet Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law on issues of environmental refugees and displaced peoples. She has also worked with the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) on migration, climate change and humanitarian crisis issues.

Pows Whyte is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Kyle holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability, a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs.

Dello is the Associate Director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and the Deputy Director of the Oregon Climate Service, which is the state climate office for Oregon. Kathie is a skilled climate communicator. She is featured often in the press and gives multiple talks around the region and country. Kathie maintains an active social media presence on her twitter account, @kathiedello.

Mote is the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) and Associate Dean and professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. He is the co-leader of the NOAA-funded Climate Impacts Research Consortium (CIRC) for the Northwest. He has served as a lead author for the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on three US National Climate Assessments, and seven reports of the National Academy of Sciences. He is President-Elect of the Global Environmental Change Section of the American Geophysical Union.

Consent for publication

The participants in this study gave their consent to publish this research.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Indian time: time, seasonality, and culture in Traditional Ecological Knowledge of climate change

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Western climate science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) represent complementary and overlapping views of the causes and consequences of change. In particular, observations of changes in abundance, distribution, phenology, or behavior of the natural environment (including plants and animals) can have a rich cultural and spiritual interpretation in Indigenous communities that may not be present in western science epistemologies.

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Marcus A. Lashley , M. Colter Chitwood , Jacob L. Dykes , Christopher S. DePerno , Christopher E. Moorman ,

Corresponding Author

Christopher E. Moorman

Dept of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC, USA

Contribution: Funding acquisition (lead), ​Investigation (equal), Methodology (equal), Writing - review & editing (supporting)
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Christopher S. DePerno

Dept of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC, USA

Contribution: Funding acquisition (equal), ​Investigation (supporting), Methodology (supporting), Writing - review & editing (supporting)
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Jacob L. Dykes

Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Inst., Texas A&M Univ.-Kingsville, Kingsville, TX, USA

Contribution: Data curation (equal), Visualization (equal), Writing - review & editing (equal)
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M. Colter Chitwood

Dept of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, Oklahoma State Univ., Stillwater, OK, USA

Contribution: Data curation (supporting), ​Investigation (supporting), Methodology (supporting), Project administration (supporting), Writing - original draft (supporting), Writing - review & editing (supporting)
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Corresponding Author

Marcus A. Lashley

Dept of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Contribution: Conceptualization (lead), Data curation (equal), Formal analysis (lead), Funding acquisition (equal), ​Investigation (equal), Methodology (equal), Project administration (lead), Visualization (lead), Writing - original draft (lead), Writing - review & editing (equal)
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First published:

Abstract

Trophic mismatches are commonly reported across a wide array of taxa and can have important implications for species participating in the interaction. However, to date, examples of trophic mismatch have centrally focused on those induced by shifts in climate. Here we report on the potential for humans to induce trophic mismatch by shifting the phenology of fire. Globally, anthropogenic fire ignitions are phenologically mismatched to that of historic lightning ignitions but the effects of this phenological mismatch on trophic interactions are poorly understood. Using fire records from 1980 to 2016 from the southeastern USA, a hotspot of anthropogenic fire, we demonstrate that there is a temporal mismatch between anthropogenic and lightning lit fires in this region. The peak of anthropogenic ignitions (i.e. 45% during March and April) occurred 3 months earlier than the peak in lightning-ignited fires (i.e. 44% occurred during June and July), a pattern consistent with reports from several other regions and continents. We demonstrate with a field experiment conducted at a nutrient-poor site in the southeastern U.S., that anthropogenic fire phenology shifts nutrient pulses in resprouting plants so that they mismatch herbivore reproductive demands. Consequently, plant nutrient quality in four commonly consumed forages was below the threshold to meet lactation requirements. Neonates subsequently were more likely to starve when born far from areas burned during the peak month of lightning fire phenology. Our data indicate that human activities may be an additional causative agent of trophic mismatch.

Introduction

We investigated anthropogenic use of fire as a cause of human-induced trophic mismatch. Using fire occurrence data, we evaluated seasonal timing of human-mediated fire versus lightning fire of the southeastern United States. We then designed a field experiment where we manipulated the seasonal timing of fire to test the hypothesis that fire phenology modulates the timing of resource availability relative to the nutritional demands of a local herbivore and measured the effect of proximity to that resource on survival probability of neonates.

Material and methods

Regional fire data

We downloaded wildland fire occurrence data for all fires that occurred in 11 states in the southeastern United States for the time period of 1980-2015 from the federal fire occurrence database (< https://wildfire.cr.usgs.gov/firehistory/data.html>). The states chosen included Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. We extracted all fires known to be caused by lightning and all fires that were known to be prescribed, along with their respective ignition dates. We used the start date listed for each fire to assign it to month of ignition. We then plotted the average percentage with standard error across years by month of anthropogenic and lightning ignited fires.

Field experiment study area

We sampled forage quality and neonate survival at Fort Bragg Military Installation (Fort Bragg), North Carolina, USA (35.1°N, −79.2°W). The 73 469 ha area was located in the Sandhills physiographic region of the longleaf pine Pinus palustris ecosystem. This ecosystem and the species within evolved over millennia with relatively frequent (3-year average), low-intensity surface fires occurring due to lightning, and native American activities over the past 10 000-20 000 years (Outcalt 2000). For the purposes of restoring ecosystem function and conserving endangered species, the United States Department of Defense has managed forested stands on a 3-yr fire regime (Lashley et al. 2014b). The parturition phenology of the local ungulate (i.e. white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus) peaks in early June (Chitwood et al. 2015a). Thus, because the peak nutritional demand occurs during lactation 3-6 weeks after parturition in white-tailed deer (Hewitt 2011), the peak nutritional demand based on reproductive phenology of this herbivore in this area is during July.

In this study area, soil productivity is particularly poor (Lashley et al. 2015b). Thus, deer may be sensitive to shifts in resource pulse phenology. As evidence of this nutritional burden, a relatively large portion of neonates starve on the site, regardless of fire timing, as compared to similar studies in more productive soil regions (Chitwood et al. 2014, 2015b). Likewise, diet selection is relatively narrow and concentrated on obtaining exceedingly limited quantities of phosphorus (Lashley et al. 2015b, 2016). Moreover, predation risk is relatively high (Chitwood et al. 2014, 2015b, 2017) and may limit female selection of the highest quality resources during lactation (Lashley et al. 2015c). Importantly, this population does not have access to anthropogenic subsidies as is common in other parts of their range, so changes in starvation should be related to available nutrition in the native plant community.

Field experiment study design

In a randomized block design, we selected four upland longleaf pine forest stands in each of 3 separate watersheds (blocks), averaging ~8 km apart, with similar soil types (Candor Sands complex) and similar basal area (45-60 m 2 ha −1). We randomly assigned stands to each of four fire phenologies relative to our plant sampling period (see next section): fires ignited in June of the previous year (1 year-since-fire), and fires ignited in the same year in February (i.e. early anthropogenic phenology), April (i.e. late anthropogenic phenology) and June (lightning phenology). The February fire phenology was meant to represent the onset of the anthropogenic fire season (Brennan et al. 1998, Cox and Widener 2008). The April fire phenology was intended to represent the end of the anthropogenic fire season (Platt et al. 1988, Robbins and Myers 1992, Streng et al. 1993, Glitzenstein et al. 1995, Kirkman et al. 1998, Hiers et al. 2000, Knapp et al. 2009). The June fire phenology was meant to represent the peak in lightning fires for this region (Knapp et al. 2009). Each block contained a replicate from each treatment, and 1 year-since-fire was intended to be the control for comparison to fires ignited in the same year because previous reports suggested that any nutritional benefits would be lost after a single growing season (Dills 1970, Wood 1988, Carlson et al. 1993, Van de Vijver et al. 1999, Long et al. 2008, Nichols et al. 2021).

Plant sampling and analysis

We selected 4 native plant species that occurred in every replicate of each fire treatment. Because deer eat plants of several growth forms, we selected 2 trees, 1 shrub and 1 forb to ensure the plants represented responses across functional groups. The trees collected were common persimmon Diospyros virginiana and sassafras Sassafras albidum, the shrub was dwarf huckleberry Gaylussacia umosa and the forb was fragrant goldenrod Solidago odora. We selected these species because they are common in the study area and commonly consumed by white-tailed deer (Lashley et al. 2015b, 2016).

In each month of the growing season (i.e. May-September), we remotely established a plot center in each replicate of each treatment using a geographic information system. We navigated to the a priori selected plot center and collected the foliage of the nearest 10 plants of each species that were in the understory strata (i.e. < 1.5 m tall), separately bagging young leaves and the mature plant parts not typically eaten by this herbivore (Lashley et al. 2014a). We used previous data collected on site to determine that 10 plant samples was robust to the expected variation in intraspecific plant nutritional value (Lashley et al. 2015b). We separated physiologically mature and immature plant parts because plant maturity affects quality, and we were interested in how fire affects relative maturity of plant tissue, quality of young leaves, as well as quality of the whole plant. We assumed that secondary plant compounds were not significantly affecting nutritive quality based on results presented in Jones et al. ( 2010) that demonstrated tannin defensive compounds in forages consumed by herbivores in this region were generally low. If a plant was discolored, malformed or damaged (by herbivory or otherwise), we did not collect the plant tissues and instead sampled the next nearest plant. To avoid biases associated with forage handling, we followed the protocol presented by Lashley et al. ( 2014a) by transporting samples within 3 hours to a convection oven and drying forages to constant mass at 47°C. After drying samples, we measured weight to the nearest 0.01 g of the young and mature plant parts and shipped samples to the Clemson University Agricultural Service Laboratory, which was certified by the United States National Forage Testing Association.

The lab performed a standard full nutrient array with chemical determination methods to yield the percent of each sample of young and mature plant parts that was crude protein (i.e. nitrogen × 6.25; CP), acid detergent fiber (ADF) and neutral detergent fiber (NDF). For the same samples, we obtained measurements for macro-nutrients phosphorus (P), potassium (K) and calcium (Ca), and micro-nutrients magnesium (Mg), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), manganese (Mn), iron (Fe), sulfur (S) and sodium (Na). After obtaining the nutritional parameters for physiologically young and mature plant parts, we calculated the whole plant nutritional value by weighting each sample by the relative proportion of physiologically young and mature plant parts and their associated nutritional values.

For the purposes of understanding the effects of fire phenology mismatch on available nutrition for white-tailed deer, we calculated the phosphorus requirements of a lactating white-tailed deer conservatively based on the minimum concentration needed to obtain adequate phosphorus assuming forage abundance was not limiting maximum possible physiological intake. We used this nutrient specifically because it was formerly deemed the limiting nutrient on this study site (Lashley et al. 2015b). However, we recorded the array of nutrients because it was part of a standard analysis at the lab. We assumed a maximum daily intake for a 45 kg animal (i.e. average adult female on site (Lashley et al. 2015b)) was 4.8% of the body weight or 2.16 kg day −1 (dry matter), which is the reported physiologically limited possible dry matter intake for female white-tailed deer during peak lactation (National Research Council 2007). Our intention with this calculation was simply to compare the forage quality in terms of phosphorus availability in the plants following each respective fire phenology to determine if those plants would meet the phosphorus requirement for an average size female with one fawn in the study area. We estimated the phosphorus concentration of the plants would need to be a minimum of 0.025% for a lactating female which is consistent with previous estimates (McEwen et al. 1957, Barnes et al. 1990).

In JMP Pro 11.0 (SAS Corporation, Cary North Carolina, USA), we fit general linear mixed models with restricted maximum likelihood to evaluate the effects of fire treatments on the proportion of biomass contributed by young leaves, the nutritional quality of young leaves and the nutritional quality of the whole plant. We included random effects of drainage (i.e. block) and plant species to control for influences on nutritional quality not related to fire.

Influence of fire phenology on deer reproductive success

To determine the influence of fire phenology on deer reproductive success, we radiotagged pregnant female white-tailed deer in winter to identify birth site locations relative to burned areas on the landscape and measure the subsequent survival of the neonates. Each female was fitted with a vaginal implant transmitter (VIT) to aid in the discovery of birth sites and hours-old neonates. We fitted each neonate with an expandable, breakaway VHF collar that had a 4-hr motion-sensitive mortality switch. We monitored neonates intensively (i.e. every 4-8 hrs) for the first month of life via VHF and continued monitoring survival at reduced time intervals until fawns reached 16 weeks (Chitwood et al. 2015a). Thus, survival of neonates was our proxy for reproductive success in this study. When we detected a mortality signal from the collar, we tracked to the collar to determine cause of mortality using field evidence and, when predation was evident or suspected, DNA swabs for residual predator saliva on the carcass and/or radiotag (Chitwood et al. 2015a). We necropsied all carcasses to finalize cause of mortality; individuals with no signs of predation that had lost body mass since capture and had empty digestive tracts were classified as starvation (Chitwood et al. 2015a). We used the birth site location of each neonate to calculate a straight line distance to the nearest area burned during the lightning season (i.e. June in the study area). This allowed us to determine if proximity to areas burned in the lightning season affected the likelihood of neonate starvation. Using a binary logistic regression in JMP Pro 11.0, we used the straight line distance from each birth site to the nearest area burned during the lightning phenology to predict the probability of starvation. Our rationale for using straight line distance to areas burned in lightning season was that in this resource limited environment, which does not contain anthropogenic subsidies or agriculture, the predicted pulse in available nutrients following fire would serve as the highest quality foraging opportunity for lactating females in this system and thus, serve as a primary means to meet the demands of lactation (Chitwood et al. 2015a, 2017, Lashley et al. 2015b, Nichols et al. 2021). All protocols presented herein were approved by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the NCSU IACUC (no. 10-143-O).

Results

Regional fire

We collected data on 4541 lightning-generated fires and 5224 anthropogenic fires over the 36-year data set. Over that time period, a peak in lightning-ignited fires occurred during June and July, with 44% of lightning fires occurring in those two months (Fig. 1 A). Also, a peak occurred in human-ignited fires, but the peak was three months earlier than lightning fires, with 45% of fires occurring in the months of March and April. On average, 66% of prescribed fires occurred between January and April whereas only 16% of lightning fires occurred during those months.

Field experiment

Leaf phosphorus, which was previously identified as the limiting nutrient to herbivores in this study area (Lashley et al. 2015b), on average across the four plant we sampled, did not meet the nutritional requirements of an adult female white-tailed deer to support lactation for a single fawn when burned a year prior (Fig. 1B). Anthropogenic fire phenology, lit in February or April, both increased leaf P concentrations relative to plants burned the year prior (Fig. 1C-D), but only during May, before peak lactation of white-tailed deer in the study area. Lightning fire phenology caused a pulse in leaf P relative to plants burned the year prior, which coincided with peak lactation in July and August and surpassed the minimum level needed to meet lactation requirements for a single fawn (Fig. 1 E). Similar patterns were observed in many other plant nutritional qualities both in the young plant tissues selected by deer and in the whole plant in general (Supporting information).

Fire timing affected the proportion of available biomass comprised of young leaves (p < 0.01, r 2 = 0.3; Fig. 2). In particular, plants contained a greater proportion of young leaves in the 3 months following lightning phenology (i.e. June-lit fire) as compared to the control (i.e. 1 year-since-fire; β = 0.14, p < 0.01). The early anthropogenic fire phenology (i.e. February-lit fire; β = −0.02, p = 0.5) and late anthropogenic fire phenology (i.e. April-lit fire; β = −0.06, p = 0.06) had similar proportions of young leaves as the control in all months measured. The watershed, month of collection and the plant species had no effect on the proportion of young leaf biomass (p > 0.22). No young leaves were available for persimmon, sassafras and dwarf huckleberry in August and September following the early and late anthropogenic phenology, or control.

Of the 28 neonates used in the analysis, 10 of those neonates starved, all within 48 hours of parturition. The other 18 neonates either survived the study or were depredated outside the initial threat of starvation. Neonates that died of starvation were born on average more than three times as far from lightning season fires that occurred in the same season than neonates surviving the starvation window (i.e. 408-128 m, respectively; Fig. 3A-B). Logistic regression indicated the probability of starvation increased as a function of distance to lightning-season fire (r 2  = 0.38, p = 0.006).

Models had substantial predictive power in explaining the variation in fiber and nutrients within young leaves (r 2 0.63-0.92). The exception again was Fe, which was predicted poorly by the variables included (r 2  = 0.03). Overall, fire phenology was an important predictor for CP (p = 0.01), P (p = 0.01), K (p = 0.01), Mg (p < 0.01), Zn (p < 0.01), S (p = 0.02) and Na (p = 0.02) but not for Ca (p = 0.98), Cu (p = 0.07), Mn (p = 0.07), Fe (p = 0.64), ADF (p = 0.21) and NDF (p = 0.91). The early and late anthropogenic fire phenology did not affect any macro-nutrients or fiber content within young leaves (i.e. CP, P, K, Ca), but lightning phenology resulted in greater CP, P and K than control (Supporting information). The early and late anthropogenic fire phenologies did not affect any micro-nutrients within young leaves except that the late anthropogenic phenology resulted in less Mg than control (Supporting information). Lightning phenology resulted in greater concentrations of Mg, Zn and S in young leaves than control but did not affect other micro-nutrients (Supporting information). Nutrient concentrations increased substantially in the month following lightning phenology and remained greater (all the way through September) than control. Similar relationships were evident in each plant species and with all macro- and micro-nutrients surveyed except Ca and Fe (Supporting information). No relationships were evident for ADF or NDF (Supporting information).

Models had substantial predictive power in explaining the variation in whole plant nutritional value for fiber and nutrients (r 2 0.67-0.93). The exception was Fe, which was predicted poorly by the variables included (r 2  = 0.33). Overall, fire phenology was an important predictor for CP (p < 0.01), P (p < 0.01), K (p < 0.01), Ca (p = 0.02), Zn (p < 0.01), Cu (p < 0.01), Mn (p < 0.01), Fe (p = 0.01) and S (p < 0.01) but not for Mg (p = 0.08) and Na (p = 0.90). The early and late anthropogenic fire phenology did not affect any macro-nutrient value for the whole plant (i.e. CP, P, K, Ca), but lightning phenology resulted in greater CP, P and K and less Ca than control (Supporting information). Early anthropogenic phenology resulted in less whole plant nutritional value for Cu, and late anthropogenic phenology resulted in less whole plant nutritional value of Mg and greater whole plant nutritional value of Mn and Fe than control (Supporting information). Lightning phenology resulted in greater whole plant nutritional values of Zn, Cu and S than control but did not affect other micro-nutrients (Supporting information). Macro-nutrient concentrations in the whole plant increased substantially in the month following lightning phenology. Also, whole plant nutritional value of each macro-nutrient remained greater through September following lightning phenology than control. Similar relationships were evident with whole plant nutritional value of all macro- and micro-nutrients surveyed except Ca and Fe (Supporting information). No relationships were evident for ADF or NDF (Supporting information).

Discussion

We provide evidence that anthropogenic fire timing may shift or weaken pulses in resource availability which could result in a trophic mismatch. As a result of that mismatch, plants we sampled did not contain the required nutrients to meet the nutritional demands of reproductive females which likely explains the positive relationship between neonate starvation probability and distance to areas burned in the lightning season. To our knowledge, no previous empirical data have been presented to suggest that humans induce phenological trophic mismatches, but our results provide key evidence that humans may do so commonly across much of the terrestrial landscape by manipulating the phenology of fire.

Acknowledgements

- We thank A. Schultz, J. Jones, C. Brown, J. Heisinger and the Fort Bragg Wildlife Branch for logistical support. We thank A. Lucia, B. Patterson, J. Nevins and M. Bennett for assistance in data collection and entry.

Funding

- Funding was provided by the United States Dept of Defense, the Fort Bragg Wildlife Branch, and the Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology Program at North Carolina State University.

Author contributions

Marcus Lashley: Conceptualization (lead); Data curation (equal); Formal analysis (lead); Funding acquisition (equal); Investigation (equal); Methodology (equal); Project administration (lead); Visualization (lead); Writing - original draft (lead); Writing - review and editing (equal). M Chitwood: Data curation (supporting); Investigation (supporting); Methodology (supporting); Project administration (supporting); Writing - original draft (supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Jacob Dykes: Data curation (equal); Visualization (equal); Writing - review and editing (equal). Christopher DePerno: Funding acquisition (equal); Investigation (supporting); Methodology (supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Christopher Moorman: Funding acquisition (lead); Investigation (equal); Methodology (equal); Writing - review and editing (supporting).

Supporting information

Any supporting information associated with this article is available from the online version.

Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: < https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sxksn034z> (Lashley et al. 2022).

Abstract

Trophic mismatches are commonly reported across a wide array of taxa and can have important implications for species participating in the interaction. However, to date, examples of trophic mismatch have centrally focused on those induced by shifts in climate. Here we report on the potential for humans to induce trophic mismatch by shifting the phenology of fire. Globally, anthropogenic fire ignitions are phenologically mismatched to that of historic lightning ignitions but the effects of this phenological mismatch on trophic interactions are poorly understood. Using fire records from 1980 to 2016 from the southeastern USA, a hotspot of anthropogenic fire, we demonstrate that there is a temporal mismatch between anthropogenic and lightning lit fires in this region. The peak of anthropogenic ignitions (i.e. 45% during March and April) occurred 3 months earlier than the peak in lightning-ignited fires (i.e. 44% occurred during June and July), a pattern consistent with reports from several other regions and continents. We demonstrate with a field experiment conducted at a nutrient-poor site in the southeastern U.S., that anthropogenic fire phenology shifts nutrient pulses in resprouting plants so that they mismatch herbivore reproductive demands. Consequently, plant nutrient quality in four commonly consumed forages was below the threshold to meet lactation requirements. Neonates subsequently were more likely to starve when born far from areas burned during the peak month of lightning fire phenology. Our data indicate that human activities may be an additional causative agent of trophic mismatch.

Introduction

We investigated anthropogenic use of fire as a cause of human-induced trophic mismatch. Using fire occurrence data, we evaluated seasonal timing of human-mediated fire versus lightning fire of the southeastern United States. We then designed a field experiment where we manipulated the seasonal timing of fire to test the hypothesis that fire phenology modulates the timing of resource availability relative to the nutritional demands of a local herbivore and measured the effect of proximity to that resource on survival probability of neonates.

Material and methods

Regional fire data

We downloaded wildland fire occurrence data for all fires that occurred in 11 states in the southeastern United States for the time period of 1980-2015 from the federal fire occurrence database (< https://wildfire.cr.usgs.gov/firehistory/data.html>). The states chosen included Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. We extracted all fires known to be caused by lightning and all fires that were known to be prescribed, along with their respective ignition dates. We used the start date listed for each fire to assign it to month of ignition. We then plotted the average percentage with standard error across years by month of anthropogenic and lightning ignited fires.

Field experiment study area

We sampled forage quality and neonate survival at Fort Bragg Military Installation (Fort Bragg), North Carolina, USA (35.1°N, −79.2°W). The 73 469 ha area was located in the Sandhills physiographic region of the longleaf pine Pinus palustris ecosystem. This ecosystem and the species within evolved over millennia with relatively frequent (3-year average), low-intensity surface fires occurring due to lightning, and native American activities over the past 10 000-20 000 years (Outcalt 2000). For the purposes of restoring ecosystem function and conserving endangered species, the United States Department of Defense has managed forested stands on a 3-yr fire regime (Lashley et al. 2014b). The parturition phenology of the local ungulate (i.e. white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus) peaks in early June (Chitwood et al. 2015a). Thus, because the peak nutritional demand occurs during lactation 3-6 weeks after parturition in white-tailed deer (Hewitt 2011), the peak nutritional demand based on reproductive phenology of this herbivore in this area is during July.

In this study area, soil productivity is particularly poor (Lashley et al. 2015b). Thus, deer may be sensitive to shifts in resource pulse phenology. As evidence of this nutritional burden, a relatively large portion of neonates starve on the site, regardless of fire timing, as compared to similar studies in more productive soil regions (Chitwood et al. 2014, 2015b). Likewise, diet selection is relatively narrow and concentrated on obtaining exceedingly limited quantities of phosphorus (Lashley et al. 2015b, 2016). Moreover, predation risk is relatively high (Chitwood et al. 2014, 2015b, 2017) and may limit female selection of the highest quality resources during lactation (Lashley et al. 2015c). Importantly, this population does not have access to anthropogenic subsidies as is common in other parts of their range, so changes in starvation should be related to available nutrition in the native plant community.

Field experiment study design

In a randomized block design, we selected four upland longleaf pine forest stands in each of 3 separate watersheds (blocks), averaging ~8 km apart, with similar soil types (Candor Sands complex) and similar basal area (45-60 m 2 ha −1). We randomly assigned stands to each of four fire phenologies relative to our plant sampling period (see next section): fires ignited in June of the previous year (1 year-since-fire), and fires ignited in the same year in February (i.e. early anthropogenic phenology), April (i.e. late anthropogenic phenology) and June (lightning phenology). The February fire phenology was meant to represent the onset of the anthropogenic fire season (Brennan et al. 1998, Cox and Widener 2008). The April fire phenology was intended to represent the end of the anthropogenic fire season (Platt et al. 1988, Robbins and Myers 1992, Streng et al. 1993, Glitzenstein et al. 1995, Kirkman et al. 1998, Hiers et al. 2000, Knapp et al. 2009). The June fire phenology was meant to represent the peak in lightning fires for this region (Knapp et al. 2009). Each block contained a replicate from each treatment, and 1 year-since-fire was intended to be the control for comparison to fires ignited in the same year because previous reports suggested that any nutritional benefits would be lost after a single growing season (Dills 1970, Wood 1988, Carlson et al. 1993, Van de Vijver et al. 1999, Long et al. 2008, Nichols et al. 2021).

Plant sampling and analysis

We selected 4 native plant species that occurred in every replicate of each fire treatment. Because deer eat plants of several growth forms, we selected 2 trees, 1 shrub and 1 forb to ensure the plants represented responses across functional groups. The trees collected were common persimmon Diospyros virginiana and sassafras Sassafras albidum, the shrub was dwarf huckleberry Gaylussacia umosa and the forb was fragrant goldenrod Solidago odora. We selected these species because they are common in the study area and commonly consumed by white-tailed deer (Lashley et al. 2015b, 2016).

In each month of the growing season (i.e. May-September), we remotely established a plot center in each replicate of each treatment using a geographic information system. We navigated to the a priori selected plot center and collected the foliage of the nearest 10 plants of each species that were in the understory strata (i.e. < 1.5 m tall), separately bagging young leaves and the mature plant parts not typically eaten by this herbivore (Lashley et al. 2014a). We used previous data collected on site to determine that 10 plant samples was robust to the expected variation in intraspecific plant nutritional value (Lashley et al. 2015b). We separated physiologically mature and immature plant parts because plant maturity affects quality, and we were interested in how fire affects relative maturity of plant tissue, quality of young leaves, as well as quality of the whole plant. We assumed that secondary plant compounds were not significantly affecting nutritive quality based on results presented in Jones et al. ( 2010) that demonstrated tannin defensive compounds in forages consumed by herbivores in this region were generally low. If a plant was discolored, malformed or damaged (by herbivory or otherwise), we did not collect the plant tissues and instead sampled the next nearest plant. To avoid biases associated with forage handling, we followed the protocol presented by Lashley et al. ( 2014a) by transporting samples within 3 hours to a convection oven and drying forages to constant mass at 47°C. After drying samples, we measured weight to the nearest 0.01 g of the young and mature plant parts and shipped samples to the Clemson University Agricultural Service Laboratory, which was certified by the United States National Forage Testing Association.

The lab performed a standard full nutrient array with chemical determination methods to yield the percent of each sample of young and mature plant parts that was crude protein (i.e. nitrogen × 6.25; CP), acid detergent fiber (ADF) and neutral detergent fiber (NDF). For the same samples, we obtained measurements for macro-nutrients phosphorus (P), potassium (K) and calcium (Ca), and micro-nutrients magnesium (Mg), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), manganese (Mn), iron (Fe), sulfur (S) and sodium (Na). After obtaining the nutritional parameters for physiologically young and mature plant parts, we calculated the whole plant nutritional value by weighting each sample by the relative proportion of physiologically young and mature plant parts and their associated nutritional values.

For the purposes of understanding the effects of fire phenology mismatch on available nutrition for white-tailed deer, we calculated the phosphorus requirements of a lactating white-tailed deer conservatively based on the minimum concentration needed to obtain adequate phosphorus assuming forage abundance was not limiting maximum possible physiological intake. We used this nutrient specifically because it was formerly deemed the limiting nutrient on this study site (Lashley et al. 2015b). However, we recorded the array of nutrients because it was part of a standard analysis at the lab. We assumed a maximum daily intake for a 45 kg animal (i.e. average adult female on site (Lashley et al. 2015b)) was 4.8% of the body weight or 2.16 kg day −1 (dry matter), which is the reported physiologically limited possible dry matter intake for female white-tailed deer during peak lactation (National Research Council 2007). Our intention with this calculation was simply to compare the forage quality in terms of phosphorus availability in the plants following each respective fire phenology to determine if those plants would meet the phosphorus requirement for an average size female with one fawn in the study area. We estimated the phosphorus concentration of the plants would need to be a minimum of 0.025% for a lactating female which is consistent with previous estimates (McEwen et al. 1957, Barnes et al. 1990).

In JMP Pro 11.0 (SAS Corporation, Cary North Carolina, USA), we fit general linear mixed models with restricted maximum likelihood to evaluate the effects of fire treatments on the proportion of biomass contributed by young leaves, the nutritional quality of young leaves and the nutritional quality of the whole plant. We included random effects of drainage (i.e. block) and plant species to control for influences on nutritional quality not related to fire.

Influence of fire phenology on deer reproductive success

To determine the influence of fire phenology on deer reproductive success, we radiotagged pregnant female white-tailed deer in winter to identify birth site locations relative to burned areas on the landscape and measure the subsequent survival of the neonates. Each female was fitted with a vaginal implant transmitter (VIT) to aid in the discovery of birth sites and hours-old neonates. We fitted each neonate with an expandable, breakaway VHF collar that had a 4-hr motion-sensitive mortality switch. We monitored neonates intensively (i.e. every 4-8 hrs) for the first month of life via VHF and continued monitoring survival at reduced time intervals until fawns reached 16 weeks (Chitwood et al. 2015a). Thus, survival of neonates was our proxy for reproductive success in this study. When we detected a mortality signal from the collar, we tracked to the collar to determine cause of mortality using field evidence and, when predation was evident or suspected, DNA swabs for residual predator saliva on the carcass and/or radiotag (Chitwood et al. 2015a). We necropsied all carcasses to finalize cause of mortality; individuals with no signs of predation that had lost body mass since capture and had empty digestive tracts were classified as starvation (Chitwood et al. 2015a). We used the birth site location of each neonate to calculate a straight line distance to the nearest area burned during the lightning season (i.e. June in the study area). This allowed us to determine if proximity to areas burned in the lightning season affected the likelihood of neonate starvation. Using a binary logistic regression in JMP Pro 11.0, we used the straight line distance from each birth site to the nearest area burned during the lightning phenology to predict the probability of starvation. Our rationale for using straight line distance to areas burned in lightning season was that in this resource limited environment, which does not contain anthropogenic subsidies or agriculture, the predicted pulse in available nutrients following fire would serve as the highest quality foraging opportunity for lactating females in this system and thus, serve as a primary means to meet the demands of lactation (Chitwood et al. 2015a, 2017, Lashley et al. 2015b, Nichols et al. 2021). All protocols presented herein were approved by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the NCSU IACUC (no. 10-143-O).

Results

Regional fire

We collected data on 4541 lightning-generated fires and 5224 anthropogenic fires over the 36-year data set. Over that time period, a peak in lightning-ignited fires occurred during June and July, with 44% of lightning fires occurring in those two months (Fig. 1 A). Also, a peak occurred in human-ignited fires, but the peak was three months earlier than lightning fires, with 45% of fires occurring in the months of March and April. On average, 66% of prescribed fires occurred between January and April whereas only 16% of lightning fires occurred during those months.

Field experiment

Leaf phosphorus, which was previously identified as the limiting nutrient to herbivores in this study area (Lashley et al. 2015b), on average across the four plant we sampled, did not meet the nutritional requirements of an adult female white-tailed deer to support lactation for a single fawn when burned a year prior (Fig. 1B). Anthropogenic fire phenology, lit in February or April, both increased leaf P concentrations relative to plants burned the year prior (Fig. 1C-D), but only during May, before peak lactation of white-tailed deer in the study area. Lightning fire phenology caused a pulse in leaf P relative to plants burned the year prior, which coincided with peak lactation in July and August and surpassed the minimum level needed to meet lactation requirements for a single fawn (Fig. 1 E). Similar patterns were observed in many other plant nutritional qualities both in the young plant tissues selected by deer and in the whole plant in general (Supporting information).

Fire timing affected the proportion of available biomass comprised of young leaves (p < 0.01, r 2 = 0.3; Fig. 2). In particular, plants contained a greater proportion of young leaves in the 3 months following lightning phenology (i.e. June-lit fire) as compared to the control (i.e. 1 year-since-fire; β = 0.14, p < 0.01). The early anthropogenic fire phenology (i.e. February-lit fire; β = −0.02, p = 0.5) and late anthropogenic fire phenology (i.e. April-lit fire; β = −0.06, p = 0.06) had similar proportions of young leaves as the control in all months measured. The watershed, month of collection and the plant species had no effect on the proportion of young leaf biomass (p > 0.22). No young leaves were available for persimmon, sassafras and dwarf huckleberry in August and September following the early and late anthropogenic phenology, or control.

Of the 28 neonates used in the analysis, 10 of those neonates starved, all within 48 hours of parturition. The other 18 neonates either survived the study or were depredated outside the initial threat of starvation. Neonates that died of starvation were born on average more than three times as far from lightning season fires that occurred in the same season than neonates surviving the starvation window (i.e. 408-128 m, respectively; Fig. 3A-B). Logistic regression indicated the probability of starvation increased as a function of distance to lightning-season fire (r 2  = 0.38, p = 0.006).

Models had substantial predictive power in explaining the variation in fiber and nutrients within young leaves (r 2 0.63-0.92). The exception again was Fe, which was predicted poorly by the variables included (r 2  = 0.03). Overall, fire phenology was an important predictor for CP (p = 0.01), P (p = 0.01), K (p = 0.01), Mg (p < 0.01), Zn (p < 0.01), S (p = 0.02) and Na (p = 0.02) but not for Ca (p = 0.98), Cu (p = 0.07), Mn (p = 0.07), Fe (p = 0.64), ADF (p = 0.21) and NDF (p = 0.91). The early and late anthropogenic fire phenology did not affect any macro-nutrients or fiber content within young leaves (i.e. CP, P, K, Ca), but lightning phenology resulted in greater CP, P and K than control (Supporting information). The early and late anthropogenic fire phenologies did not affect any micro-nutrients within young leaves except that the late anthropogenic phenology resulted in less Mg than control (Supporting information). Lightning phenology resulted in greater concentrations of Mg, Zn and S in young leaves than control but did not affect other micro-nutrients (Supporting information). Nutrient concentrations increased substantially in the month following lightning phenology and remained greater (all the way through September) than control. Similar relationships were evident in each plant species and with all macro- and micro-nutrients surveyed except Ca and Fe (Supporting information). No relationships were evident for ADF or NDF (Supporting information).

Models had substantial predictive power in explaining the variation in whole plant nutritional value for fiber and nutrients (r 2 0.67-0.93). The exception was Fe, which was predicted poorly by the variables included (r 2  = 0.33). Overall, fire phenology was an important predictor for CP (p < 0.01), P (p < 0.01), K (p < 0.01), Ca (p = 0.02), Zn (p < 0.01), Cu (p < 0.01), Mn (p < 0.01), Fe (p = 0.01) and S (p < 0.01) but not for Mg (p = 0.08) and Na (p = 0.90). The early and late anthropogenic fire phenology did not affect any macro-nutrient value for the whole plant (i.e. CP, P, K, Ca), but lightning phenology resulted in greater CP, P and K and less Ca than control (Supporting information). Early anthropogenic phenology resulted in less whole plant nutritional value for Cu, and late anthropogenic phenology resulted in less whole plant nutritional value of Mg and greater whole plant nutritional value of Mn and Fe than control (Supporting information). Lightning phenology resulted in greater whole plant nutritional values of Zn, Cu and S than control but did not affect other micro-nutrients (Supporting information). Macro-nutrient concentrations in the whole plant increased substantially in the month following lightning phenology. Also, whole plant nutritional value of each macro-nutrient remained greater through September following lightning phenology than control. Similar relationships were evident with whole plant nutritional value of all macro- and micro-nutrients surveyed except Ca and Fe (Supporting information). No relationships were evident for ADF or NDF (Supporting information).

Discussion

We provide evidence that anthropogenic fire timing may shift or weaken pulses in resource availability which could result in a trophic mismatch. As a result of that mismatch, plants we sampled did not contain the required nutrients to meet the nutritional demands of reproductive females which likely explains the positive relationship between neonate starvation probability and distance to areas burned in the lightning season. To our knowledge, no previous empirical data have been presented to suggest that humans induce phenological trophic mismatches, but our results provide key evidence that humans may do so commonly across much of the terrestrial landscape by manipulating the phenology of fire.

Acknowledgements

- We thank A. Schultz, J. Jones, C. Brown, J. Heisinger and the Fort Bragg Wildlife Branch for logistical support. We thank A. Lucia, B. Patterson, J. Nevins and M. Bennett for assistance in data collection and entry.

Funding

- Funding was provided by the United States Dept of Defense, the Fort Bragg Wildlife Branch, and the Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology Program at North Carolina State University.

Author contributions

Marcus Lashley: Conceptualization (lead); Data curation (equal); Formal analysis (lead); Funding acquisition (equal); Investigation (equal); Methodology (equal); Project administration (lead); Visualization (lead); Writing - original draft (lead); Writing - review and editing (equal). M Chitwood: Data curation (supporting); Investigation (supporting); Methodology (supporting); Project administration (supporting); Writing - original draft (supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Jacob Dykes: Data curation (equal); Visualization (equal); Writing - review and editing (equal). Christopher DePerno: Funding acquisition (equal); Investigation (supporting); Methodology (supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Christopher Moorman: Funding acquisition (lead); Investigation (equal); Methodology (equal); Writing - review and editing (supporting).

Supporting information

Any supporting information associated with this article is available from the online version.

Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: < https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sxksn034z> (Lashley et al. 2022).

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Human‐mediated trophic mismatch between fire, plants and herbivores

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Marcus A. Lashley , M. Colter Chitwood , Jacob L. Dykes , Christopher S. DePerno , Christopher E. Moorman , Corresponding Author Christopher E. Moorman Dept of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC, USA Contribution: Funding acquisition (lead), ​Investigation (equal), Methodology (equal), Writing - review & editing (supporting) Search for more papers by this author Christopher S.

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Scientists have been studying the effect of earlier springs on feeding relationships in deciduous forests. Concerned about the impact of rising temperatures linked to climate change, they studied the links between oak first leaf, caterpillar activity and bird nesting. The findings have been published in the respected scientific journal,Nature Ecology and Evolution, entitled Tritrophic phenological match-mismatch in space and time.
Collecting the data

Led by researchers from RSPB and the universities of Exeter and Edinburgh, the research team also included the universities of Durham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Oxford, Stirling and Cardiff. They used data from citizen science projects - projects which involve volunteers in the scientific process, in this case collecting environmental data.

This data included records from Nature's Calendar. For this research, 10,073 records of oak tree first leafing dates from 1998 to 2016 were used.

The timing of egg laying by blue tits, great tits and pied flycatchers were recorded by the British Trust for Ornithology's Nest Record Scheme, which has been running since 1939. The study used 'first egg dates' (FED) from 1960 to 2016.

Caterpillar abundance was inferred by the researchers who used traps to collect their droppings beneath oak trees between 2008 and 2016.

The impact of earlier springs

In deciduous forests there is a short window of opportunity in spring when caterpillars are abundant. Some bird species time their breeding so that their chicks benefit from this influx of food.

Although spring this year may have bucked the trend, on average spring is now arriving 11 days earlier than it was in the 19 th century. Oak trees leaf earlier in warmer springs, which correlates with an earlier peak in the caterpillar abundance too; oak and caterpillars have a similar sensitivity to temperature changes. The birds need to breed earlier to reap the rewards of the ephemeral caterpillar crop.

Main findings

The researchers found that the warmer springs create a 'mismatch', where hungry chicks hatch too late to feast on abundant caterpillars.

The earlier that spring arrives, the harder it is for birds to adjust the timing of their breeding to match the peak in caterpillars.
Read the abstract here.
Pied flycatchers experienced the greatest mismatch as they are migratory birds - not being in the UK over winter means they are less able to respond to changes in our local weather.

In the future, spring is expected to continue getting warmer and earlier due to climate change. Hatching of these forest birds will be 'increasingly mismatched' with peaks in caterpillar numbers.

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Tritrophic phenological match-mismatch in space and time

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Scientists have been studying the effect of earlier springs on feeding relationships in deciduous forests. Concerned about the impact of rising temperatures linked to climate change, they studied the links between oak first leaf, caterpillar activity and bird nesting. The findings have been published in the respected scientific journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution, entitled Tritrophic phenological match-mismatch in space and time.

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Example of 'will traditions surrounding certain phenological events change'

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Organisers of flower festivals are being forced to adapt to increasingly early first blooming dates in spring, according to a study by a Coventry University academic which is shortly due to be published in the journal Climate Research.

Professor Tim Sparks, an environmental science expert, focused on the changes made to the timing of the popular Thriplow Daffodil Weekend in Cambridgeshire since it started in 1969 and compared them to the dates of first bloom, concluding that it has been forced to bring its dates forward by 26 days over its 46 year history.

The early flowering phenomenon is caused by the UK's increasingly mild springs, specifically a mean rise in March and April temperatures of 1.8 degrees Celsius since 1969.

The study follows a report earlier this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which details the impacts of climate change - identifying vulnerable people, industries, and ecosystems around the world.

Thriplow's daffodil festival - which this year takes place on April 5th and 6th - attracts around 10,000 visitors each year to the village, and is one of many events making up the UK's fruitful flower and tree tourism trade.

Over £300,000 has been raised for charity since the daffodil weekend started in 1969, but it has faced its fair share of challenges over the years - such as in 1979 when just a single daffodil was in flower.

Unusually, the date for the 2014 festival was recently rearranged backwards by two weeks in response to the abnormally cold and late spring of 2013, which the Met Office labelled the "coldest March since 1962".

Professor Sparks said:

"Plant tourism in the UK and around the world is pretty big business, ranging from smaller nature reserves to globally-renowned, country-wide cherry blossom festivals that have significant economic implications.

"This study represents one of the first solid pieces of evidence of flower tourism having to adapt to climate change. The issues faced by Thriplow are a microcosm of the wider picture, and hopefully this research will raise awareness of the need for the industry to change to meet the challenges of rising temperatures across the world."

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Climate change forces flower festival forward a month since 1960s

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Thriplow's daffodil festival. Credit: Nick Tischler (CC) Organisers of flower festivals are being forced to adapt to increasingly early first blooming dates in spring, according to a study by a Coventry University academic which is shortly due to be published in the journal Climate Research. Professor Tim Sparks, an environmental...

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Interesting research group working on various aspects of Nature Connectedness. Links btwn findings in doing more than just spending time in nature, but connecting and being part of - watching, recording, seasonality links for mental wellbeing.....seems recording phenology fits perfectly in these.

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Professor Miles Richardson @findingnature, researching our connection with nature and ways to improve it. In May 2013 I formed the Nature Connectedness Research Group at the University of Derby. Ou…

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Policy: will have to adapt to shifting phenology. Example of how NC records were (amongst others) used for re-assessment of agri-env. schemes (the timing of key land management operations was reassessed given the potential -and in some cases proven - shift in timings)

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DEFRA_Adaptive capacity of AES two page summary Draft.v3

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Mountain hares are a well researched and publicised example

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Overall vulnerability

Feature(s) assessed:

Mountain hare (Lepus timidus)

Special qualities:

Internationally important and locally distinctive wildlife and habitats

Feature description:

The mountain hare is the UK's only native lagomorph. It is easily recognised by its small ears with black tips, white tail, grey-brown coat in summer and a white coat in winter. Found in upland habitats, particularly heather moorlands, it was reintroduced to the PDNP for hunting in the late 1800s. The current population is divided by roads and river valleys into three main subpopulations. The PDNP is an important stronghold for this species, containing the only surviving reintroduced mountain hares in England.

How vulnerable are mountain hares?

Mountain hares in the PDNP have been rated 'high' on our vulnerability scale. This score is due to high sensitivity and exposure to climate change variables, coupled with a moderate current condition, and with a moderate adaptive capacity.

Currently with a declining population, mountain hares are particularly vulnerable in winter as energy demands are high. Healthy habitat for shelter and food are vital for the continued survival of this species. While this is an isolated population, the high population growth rate of mountain hares gives them a good chance at recovery from climate change events.

##Current condition: The PDNP mountain hare population has increased significantly since re-introductions in the 1800s. However, recent surveys by Sorby Natural History Society and other organisations suggest there has been a decline over the last decade. This is possibly due to the culls that are sometimes carried out in an attempt to minimise louping ill virus transmission to red grouse. While mountain hares themselves are no longer hunted for sport, culling is still taking place in some areas under game management laws. Populations are known to be cyclic, with losses of up to 90% every 5-15 years, but experts suggest the current decline is beyond this normal cycle. Total population estimates are difficult as they are extrapolated from a limited number of sightings that are used to calculate habitat density estimates. A 2018 study estimates 1,500-5,000 individuals in the PDNP. Other studies indicate it is likely to be at the lower end of this.

Land management such as heather burning and grazing can affect mountain hare populations. Heath and cotton-grass habitats containing a range of food plants are favoured over grasslands. While mountain hares show a preference for young heather growth, they can also survive on old heather stands and birch or willow scrub. A mixture of heather growth created through controlled burning may enhance foraging habitat. On the other hand, eroded areas of bare peat lack vegetation for food and shelter. Wildfires continue to pose a threat to the upland habitat needed by this species.

Other risk factors for mountain hares are predation and disease. Foxes and stoats are the main known predators, while birds of prey may take some young. Diseases such as louping ill virus and intestinal parasites may cause body condition to deteriorate and lead to the loss of some individuals and poor fecundity in others. Some individuals are also lost as road casualties.

Overall potential impact rating

Direct impacts of climate change

Wetter winters with cold snaps and persistent heavy rain pose a threat to mountain hares. While they do well in the current climate in England and Scotland, their fur is poorly adapted to being wet making them prone to increased heat loss when they are exposed for long periods. Mountain hares have limited cover to shelter in on cold wet days, which further increases their mortality risk. Extremely wet winters could lead to the loss of some mountain hares. Data Certainty: Moderate

Hotter, drier summers on the other hand are likely to benefit mountain hares. Increased temperatures have been associated with higher breeding success. Coupled with the possibility of an extended breeding season, it seems probable that mountain hare populations will increase in the PDNP during the warmer months. Data Certainty: Moderate

The predicted rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and longer, warmer growing season may lead to increased plant growth rate in some areas. Increased vegetation that provides additional shelter and foraging is likely to benefit mountain hares right across their range. Shelter that protects them from extreme weather and predators along with the increased food availability could lead to a population increase. Data Certainty: Low

Human behaviour change

Land use changes and management decisions would affect mountain hare habitat and local populations. Dependent on certain food plants such as heather, changes to this vegetation mosaic could have both positive and negative impacts on mountain hares. Where there is increased grazing and loss of vegetation cover, population decline is likely. However, where there is favourable land management that optimises shelter and food options, populations are likely to remain stable or increase. Data Certainty: Moderate

Mountain hares are sensitive to disturbance, particularly during the winter months. With increased tourist numbers anticipated year-round in the PDNP, mountain hares are more likely to be disturbed by people out on the moors. One European study has shown that increased disturbance causes increased stress and creates higher energy demands as mountain hares are flushed out of their resting spots interrupting key activities such as grooming and the re-ingesting of faecal pellets. Higher energy demands in winter when food is already limited may be detrimental to the survival of frequently disturbed individuals. Data Certainty: Low

Other indirect climate change impacts

Warmer winters with reduced snow cover may increase the predation risk for mountain hares. The white winter coat is the perfect camouflage in a snowy landscape, but it stands out against exposed vegetation leaving them more vulnerable to predation. Temperature regulation in warmer winters may also be a challenge with their winter coat. Population decline in areas with little or no snowfall is probable. Data Certainty: Moderate Mountain hares and their habitat are sensitive to wildfire. Hotter summers with increased drought events create a higher risk of wildfire in the uplands, especially in areas dominated by heather. Large areas of mountain hare habitat are at risk and mountain hares may be lost in fires. Data Certainty: Low

Invasive or other species interactions

Disease outbreaks and predation levels may increase with year-round warmer temperatures. Lagoviruses that affect rabbits and hares have the potential to spread quickly as populations overlap in some areas. Pockets where both rabbits and mountain hares are present have a higher infection risk that could negatively affect local populations. Survival rates of ticks, pathogens, and predators may all be increased by the warmer temperatures. An increase in disease outbreaks and predation is likely to lead to population decline in affected areas. Data Certainty: Moderate

Sedimentation or erosion

Vegetation cover is vital for mountain hares as shelter and as a food source. Erosion caused by heavy rain poses a threat to this habitat as areas of vegetation and peat may be washed away leaving only exposed ground. As mountain hares are less comfortable using areas of bare peat, their habitat size may be reduced. In areas of extreme erosion populations may become more fragmented or even lost. Extreme events such as flooding and drought would worsen the situation, further altering the habitat extent and possibly causing the loss of some mountain hares. Data Certainty: Low

Overall adaptive capacity rating

The mountain hare is confined to three main subpopulations in the PDNP. Reintroduced to several places in England and Wales, the PDNP population is the only one that survived. The population is isolated in this upland environment and depends on specific habitat conditions in both summer and winter in order to survive. There is limited space to expand. However high population growth rates give them good resilience in recovering from population crashes. Disease and harsh weather events may be overcome if remaining individuals have a successful breeding season. Damage to or loss of habitat is likely to affect adversely their recovery and may even make it impossible in some areas. Data Certainty: Moderate

Mountain hares are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981), where killing, injuring or taking in the closed season are an offence. They are listed in Annex five of the EC Habitats Directive as a 'species of community interest whose taking in the wild and exploitation may be the subject of management measures'. They are also a priority UK Biodiversity Action Plan (UK BAP) species. This gives them additional protection and encourages conservation action by relevant local authorities. Data Certainty: High

Land management and habitat availability play a significant role in determining mountain hare distributions and population survival rates. Various organisations such as the National Trust and PDNPA manage and restore moorlands with the aim of increasing vegetation cover and reducing erosion. While funds are not specifically designated for mountain hare conservation, habitat maintenance and improvements are likely to help mountain hares partially overcome climate change effects. Mountain hare sightings data may help with long-term population monitoring and management responses. Data Certainty: High

Improve current condition to increase resilience

The current condition of a feature is an important factor alongside its sensitivity and exposure, in determining its vulnerability to climate change. These recommendations are aimed at improving the condition of the feature at present, therefore making it better able to withstand future changes to climate.

Work with partners to reduce or end culling of hares in PDNP.

Continue moorland restoration work to reduce bare peat and improve mountain hare habitat.

Continue to gather mountain hare sightings data and encourage the public to report sightings. This will help inform future adaptation planning.

Set up a mountain hare monitoring plan: to better understand local population dynamics and to identify risks, opportunities and key areas. Further research is required.

Predator control could be a useful tool in high predator density areas, but may inadvertently increase predator populations and disrupt other species interactions. Research is needed to determine if a more natural system would be a better option for the future.

Develop fire contingency plans, and ensure management of habitats reduces fire risk e.g. rewetting and increasing species or structural diversity. Influence visitor and behaviour management plans and practices to minimise ignition risk.

Encourage further uptake of environmental land management schemes by farmers within the PDNP.

Improve current condition to increase resilience: Targeted conservation efforts for important sites and at risk areas

The current condition of a feature is an important factor alongside its sensitivity and exposure, in determining its vulnerability to climate change. These recommendations are conservation measures aimed at those sites that will have the biggest impact for this feature - either because they are particularly important for the feature or because they are most at risk from climate change.

Limit disturbance at known sites: particularly in areas with high visitor numbers.

Install wildlife corridors, such as underpasses, to increase connectivity between populations and decrease road casualties.

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Mountain hare | Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment

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Overall vulnerability Mountain hare (Lepus timidus) Internationally important and locally distinctive wildlife and habitats The mountain hare is the UK's only native lagomorph. It is easily recognised by its small ears with black tips, white tail, grey-brown coat in summer and a white coat in winter.

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Plants are flowering a month earlier in the UK as the climate heats up, a study has found.

The researchers examined 420,000 recorded dates of first flowering for more than 400 species, dating to 1793. The average date for the first blooms was about 12 May up to 1986, but since then the date has been pushed forward to 16 April.

Herbaceous plants saw the biggest advance, producing flowers an average of 32 days earlier. Trees blossomed 14 days sooner and shrubs advanced by 10 days. The researchers think faster-reproducing herbaceous plants can more easily adapt to the warming climate.

During the most recent recorded year, 2019, spring arrived 42 days earlier than the pre-1986 average. The difference between flowering times in the north of the UK, above Stoke-on-Trent, and the south has shrunk from nine days before 1986 to four days afterwards. In the period after the mid-80s there has been accelerated global heating caused by fossil-fuel-burning and other human activities.

First flowering dates in the UK have shifted forward by a month since the late 1980s

"The results are truly alarming, because of the ecological risks associated with earlier flowering times," said Prof Ulf Büntgen, at the University of Cambridge, who led the research. "When plants flower too early, a late frost can kill them - a phenomenon that most gardeners will have experienced at some point."

But the even bigger risk is "ecological mismatch", he said, when plants and hibernating or migrating insects, birds and other wildlife are no longer synchronised. "That can lead species to collapse if they can't adapt quickly enough." Such mismatches are already being seen, for example, between orchids and bees and great tit chicks and their crucial caterpillar food.

The researchers concluded that if plants in the UK continued to flower earlier, and climatic extremes increased further, then "biological, ecological and agricultural systems will be at an unprecedented risk". Farmers could suffer, for example, if fruit trees were flowering early and then a late frost killed the entire crop.

While it could be difficult for people to see the significance of average global warming of 1C, Büntgen said, plants flowering a month early showed a clear change. "It is not abstract anymore. We all have a feeling for a month, particularly if you have to wait for your next salary payment," he said.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal, examined first flowering dates from the Channel Islands to Shetland, and from Northern Ireland to Suffolk. The study did not highlight specific species, because the data available for individual plants were very variable over time and in geographic coverage. "You have to be very cautious," said Büntgen.

But the study did note that there were now hundreds of records of snowdrops and hellebores flowering before New Year's Day and dozens of such records for primroses, winter aconites and lesser celandines.

The scientists found that the earlier flowering dates correlated strongly with the average daily maximum temperature from January to April, which rose from 7.8C from 1952-1986 to 8.9C from 1987-2019. The researchers did not find a link with the length of the day, but they said this cue used by plants might become important if average flowering dates are brought forward into February in the future.

The researchers found that their data showed flowering had advanced by 15 days more than the UK Spring Index used by the government, which includes only two species, hawthorn and horse chestnut.

John David, at the Royal Horticultural Society, said: "The main focus of this study is on native plants and so we don't yet have a clear picture of the full impact of these changes on garden plants, but we would expect a similar pattern and have seen indications of this in our own gardens, such as the apple flowering times in our orchard at Wisley."

"The UK's 30 million gardeners have an important role to play therefore in supporting our native biodiversity and counteracting the effects of any mismatch between flowering times and dependent wildlife. Our Plants for Bugs research, for example, shows what plants you can grow that will support biodiversity all year round."

The flowering date records used in the study come from Nature's Calendar, a collection of 3.5m observations of seasonal change and maintained by the Woodland Trust and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. Many of the records are provided by citizen scientists and anyone in the UK can submit data.

"It is the world's largest dataset and it's superb, but it's not enough," said Büntgen, who called for more people to participate. "Updating the dataset every year is extremely valuable, because this is the only tool we have to really understand how climate is affecting our ecosystems. This is not something we can model."

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Flowers arriving a month early in UK as climate heats up

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Plants are flowering a month earlier in the UK as the climate heats up, a study has found. The researchers examined 420,000 recorded dates of first flowering for more than 400 species, dating to 1793. The average date for the first blooms was about 12 May up to 1986, but since then the date has been pushed forward to 16 April.

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18831689/

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Abstract

Under temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), temperatures experienced by embryos during development determine the sex of the offspring. Consequently, populations of organisms with TSD have the potential to be strongly impacted by climatic warming that could bias offspring sex ratio, a fundamental demographic parameter involved in population dynamics. Moreover, many taxa with TSD are imperiled, so research on this phenomenon, particularly long-term field study, has assumed great urgency. Recently, turtles with TSD have joined the diverse list of taxa that have demonstrated population-level changes in breeding phenology in response to recent climate change. This raises the possibility that any adverse impacts of climate change on populations may be alleviated by individual plasticity in nesting phenology. Here, we examine data from a long-term study on a population of painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) to determine whether changes in phenology are due to individual plasticity and whether individual plasticity in the timing of nesting has the capacity to offset the sex ratio effects of a rise in climatic temperature. We find that individual females show plasticity in the date of first nesting each year, and that this plasticity depends on the climate from the previous winter. First nesting date is not repeatable within individuals, suggesting that it would not respond to selection. Sex ratios of hatchlings within a nest declined nonsignificantly over the nesting season. However, small increases in summer temperature had a much stronger effect on nest sex ratios than did laying nests earlier in the season. For this and other reasons, it seems unlikely that individual plasticity in the timing of nesting will offset the effects of climate change on sex ratios in this population, and we hypothesize that this conclusion applies to other populations with TSD.

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national center for biotechnology information

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Climate change and temperature-dependent sex determination: can individual plasticity in nesting phenology prevent extreme sex ratios? - PubMed

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Under temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), temperatures experienced by embryos during development determine the sex of the offspring. Consequently, populations of organisms with TSD have the potential to be strongly impacted by climatic warming that could bias offspring sex ratio, a fundam ...

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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fatherless-mice-raise-possibility-of-virgin-births-in-humans-d08djcb86

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The prospect of women conceiving without men has moved a step closer after Chinese researchers produced a baby mouse from an unfertilised egg for the first time.

Parthenogenesis, the Ancient Greek term for a virgin birth, is used by scientists to describe a process where eggs spontaneously divide, without fertilisation by sperm, to form an embryo.

Some lizards and honey bees can procreate like this and it was recorded last year for the first time in a bird. However, in humans and other mammals, such embryos invariably die.

An important reason for this is that a mammal needs to inherit two sets of genetic information, one from the father and one from the mother.

An embryo that comes only from an unfertilised egg and

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Fatherless mice raise possibility of virgin births in humans

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The prospect of women conceiving without men has moved a step closer after Chinese researchers produced a baby mouse from an unfertilised egg for the first time. Parthenogenesis, the Ancient Greek term for a virgin birth, is used by scientists to describe a process where eggs spontaneously divide, without fertilisation by sperm, to form an embryo.

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https://terra0.org/

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terra0 is a scalable framework built on the Ethereum network that provides automated resilience systems for ecosystems.

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How do cities affect nature?

Our actions are changing the world around us in unprecedented ways, including changes in climate, pollution and habitat.

One of the main ways we have modified our world is through the construction of cities, which replace natural surfaces and canopies with tarmac and tall buildings. One impact of such a change is the creation of urban heat islands, where our cities absorb large amounts of heat, raising temperatures in cities by up to 4°C compared to the surrounding countryside.

Covering over the ground with water-impenetrable materials such as tarmac also increases the risk of flooding, with heavy rain overwhelming drainage systems and running into roads, stations and homes.

These impacts can also cause changes in wildlife living in cities. While urban areas can be beneficial for some species, such as foxes and hedgehogs, their impacts can harm others, with air pollution found to 'confuse' insects searching for plants to pollinate.

Air pollution also takes a toll on human health, with air pollution ruled to have contributed to the death of nine-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah in London, and estimated to cause around nine million deaths a year.

As a result of these many impacts, cities can influence the way life itself evolves, and have done for hundreds of years. Industrial pollution from coal in Manchester led to selection for the dark form of the peppered moth, as it better camouflaged against soot-stained trees than the lighter form. Since the introduction of clean air laws, the white form has been staging a comeback.

Meanwhile, the eastern water dragon, a species of lizard found in Australia, was found to be undergoing different selection for traits such as head width and limb length depending on which park in the city of Brisbane an individual lived in.

However, these studies have focused on smaller areas, which may not be representative of processes around the world. As a result, scientists turned to the globally distributed white clover plant as a way of replicating selection pressure on a grand scale.

They found that similar adaptations were being repeated across the world.

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Cities are affecting plant evolution globally

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Our actions are changing the world around us in unprecedented ways, including changes in climate, pollution and habitat. One of the main ways we have modified our world is through the construction of cities, which replace natural surfaces and canopies with tarmac and tall buildings.

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'Unseasonably warm weather has fooled a great deal of species'

I saw this young palmate newt emerging on the evening of 1 January. Newts should be overwintering in leaf and log piles, compost heaps and other suitable refugia from November until late February or early March, when they start moving toward breeding pools. It is troubling to spot this individual within the overwintering period. The unseasonably warm weather fooled a great deal of species into early emergence: it places them in great peril if they expend energy in an attempt to feed out of season, burn fat reserves and expose themselves to short daylight hours and cold nights that could result in their deaths. Jonathan Davies, 32, certified passive house designer, St Fagans, Cardiff

'We've seen butterflies early in previous years but never daisies'

One of several daisies in my garden, photographed on New Year's Day. I've never seen this before. The part of the garden where the daisy is growing doesn't get much light as it's shaded by a tall hedge to the south and west. Usually the grass is all that's on show until much later (March). I'm curious about the early appearance of this species - we've seen butterflies very early in previous years, but never daisies. I don't know what to think about this occurrence in relation to the health of the environment. We have had an exceptionally mild winter, the soil is not especially cold or hard, but the absence of activity in other species seems strange. Anonymous, Redlynch, Wiltshire

'The bees are using up their winter stores'

This photo was taken in my garden on 29 December. Usually in winter the bees form a cluster around the queen while flexing their flight muscles, without beating their wings, to generate adequate heat. With minimal movement their stores of honey and nectar are usually sufficient till the weather warms up in spring. It's mid-winter in Ireland and yet the bees are surprisingly busy and returning to the hives with pollen and nectar. It's more like what one would expect in mid-spring at the earliest.

This level of activity unfortunately leads the bees to use up their winter stores too quickly, and if late spring brings cold and frosty weather right into May (as happened here last year), then starvation becomes a serious threat to the bees. Of course, as beekeepers we can intervene by providing food for our bees to help them along. Unfortunately this can't be done for bees of all kinds in the wild who are struggling to survive as the climate changes. All of this is concerning as pollinators of all kinds are in decline and this has huge negative implications for food production worldwide. Niall Keogh, retired teacher, Killarney, Ireland

'I've never seen daffodil shoots this early'

This picture of a daffodil shoot was taken at a sheltered spot under a bay window in our front garden in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham. I'd just been on my traditional New Year's Day walk with friends in Sutton Park and I spotted these exceptional shoots of spring on our return. I was very surprised to see the shoots. I've never seen them this early; they usually appear in March. As an active member of our local Eco Sutton group, my surprise was undercut with a deep concern at what is happening to the environment in front of our eyes. Antony Whitehead, retired architect, Sutton Coldfield

'Coming across a bee this early is part of a pattern'

In the Duke's Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, we saw this bee, on 3 January, tucking into a winter flowering shrub. Snowdrops and narcissi were coming out last week, the magnolias are in bud, but a bee? Elsewhere in Kew we could see buds and catkins, much earlier than in previous years. Most walks in January see us muffled up against a biting chill, but today was very pleasant with a little sunshine. Last year, I recall seeing goslings in February on a snowy morning. So, yes, seeing a bee at this time is not normal, but it is part of a pattern. While any sign that the winter is coming to a close is welcome, the implication that this is evidence of climate change - a process which appears to be accelerating - is worrying. Tony Hutchinson, 67, working in social housing and regeneration, Brentford, London

'I was expecting them to sprout much later'

I planted some bulbs and seeds in pots on our terrace in November, and to my surprise they had already started sprouting by New Year's Day. I suppose I was expecting them much later, perhaps in a few weeks at the earliest. The funny thing is I have no idea what I planted, so we'll be looking out for a surprise display of flowers in a couple of months. I'm a bit worried they might not do so well if there's a frost later in the month or in February. Vita Moltedo, 48, Islington, London

'I was worried the ducklings might not survive through cold and lack of food'

On 28 December, I saw ducklings at Bingham's Pond in the west end of Glasgow. Last year, the ducklings hatched in April. I was surprised to see so many in winter and worried that they might not survive due to lack of food and low temperatures. I wonder if it was the very mild weather that prompted the early laying and hatching. If the milder winter becomes more common, or the temperature drops later into winter, will it have an impact on duck and wild fowl numbers? Hopefully she'll have another clutch in the spring anyway. Mhairi Maclennan, Glasgow

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'The ducklings might not survive': readers' concerns over early spring

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I saw this young palmate newt emerging on the evening of 1 January. Newts should be overwintering in leaf and log piles, compost heaps and other suitable refugia from November until late February or early March, when they start moving toward breeding pools. It is troubling to spot this individual within the overwintering period.

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Phenology Clock by Tega Brain, visualising the temporality of ecosystems in urban environments

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The Phenology Clock

Modified clocks, archival ink on paper rag.

The Phenology Clock project sees the creation of annual clocks that show the timing of life cycle events for species in specific urban ecosystems. Shown are two clocks prepared for the ecosystems of Sydney and New York and that explore a relation in time and space.

They are part of a project developed at the Environmental Health Clinic with Natalie Jeremijenko, Jake Richardson, Blacki Migliozzi and others. To see more information and a detailed clock for London phenology data, visit the site here. The Phenology Clock is also accompanied by a workshop that is documented here.

The Phenology Clock has been supported by the Australia Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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Modified clocks, archival ink on paper rag. The Phenology Clock project sees the creation of annual clocks that show the timing of life cycle events for species in specific urban ecosystems. Shown are two clocks prepared for the ecosystems of Sydney and New York and that explore a relation in time and space.

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Possible Topics:

- perception of seasons & time within society,

impact of phenology in society

- impact on mental and physical health

- will traditions surrounding certain phenological events change

-religions and spirituality

- will acess to food change becasue produce will have different times

Inspiration:

- people living in vulcanic rythme

- changes of national symbols

extinction/ movement of actual

inconsistency of which species

- new symbols every few decades?

- changes of holidays because of missmacht of time and event

- calendar and phenology: chinese/gregorian

- humans inclination for sex higher during winter, as in summer (weather based): change of population rise during the year > education, pension

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Possible Topics:

- will species adapt to new surroundings, sensing

- nutrition storage

- mimicry, change of body parts

- other actors take over part from extinct species

- Spread of population (pollination)

Inspiration:

- Birds predicting hurricane season

- Reptiles Gender

temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD)

Links:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fatherless-mice-raise-possibility-of-virgin-births-in-humans-d08djcb86

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18831689/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28302-3

https://academic.oup.com/conphys/article/8/1/coz102/5685793

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Possible Topics:

- governmental structures

- policies (rewilding, protected areas, infection control, quarantine)

- regulations (farming, gardening, human environment, fishing)

- commons

- economic interests

Inspiration:

- Antarctica as a global common, none right, all protect

- non-tragedy of the commons / cultural norms, Elinor Ostrom

- seabed fragmentation for extraction

- terra0

Links:
https://terra0.org/

https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/policy-insight/species/beaver-reintroduction-in-the-uk/

https://wle.cgiar.org/news/elinor-ostrom-“non-tragedy-commons”

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Possible Topics:

- changing seasons

- unreliable weather patterns

- extreme weather

- extinction and beneficiants

which species will thrive new conditions

- new collaboration between humand and non-humans

-movement and travel events

exodus of species

- Umbrella Species

inspiration:

- mountain tree line pushing to the top.

- animal finding their way through pressure and needs

- flooding changes marine environment into human scape

Links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44188-1