Nexus Notes – Shifting cultural rhythms, concerns for wildfire risk, and seagrass recovery
Nexus Notes #7
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Hi folks!
Hope you’re having a great week. Here is your fortnightly dose of Nexus Notes, a list of things I’m pondering and exploring.
Last week’s location
McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica. One of the driest places on Earth. This area is home to a lot of the terrestrial biodiversity in Antarctica outside of the Peninsula. We’re not talking big fluffy things like penguins and seals — much smaller and, some would consider, less charismatic — but equally important. Much of the rest of the continent is uninhabitable, being covered in a thick layer of ice. So they’re an important area to try to understand, particularly with regard to climate change. My lab has ongoing research as part of Aotearoa’s Antarctic Science Platform on understanding terrestrial biodiversity in Antarctica under climate change.
Paper I’m reading
Bremer, S., N. Klenk, M. Bastian, and D. Kwan-Lafond. 2024. Adaptation requires attuning to shifting temporal patterns. Nature Climate Change 14:8–10.
In our piece last week talking about our paper on seasonality change out in Science, we referred to humans adapting their behaviour in response to Earth’s changing rhythms. But this is not necessarily an easy task. This paper discusses how communal life is shaped by the shared timing of human and environmental events. But climate change is altering these shared timings, resulting in mismatches between human and environmental events. This requires a more adaptive approach to governance.
It’s a fabulous short paper discussing these issues and argues that climate change adaptation needs to consider these important human culture-environment temporal synergies/mismatches. When we sow crops, harvest, burn land, celebrate, set school terms, or even fix infrastructure is dictated by the timing of seasonal events — these risk falling out of sync. In much of the world, governments have already overlooked the rhythms of Indigenous Peoples and enforced their own temporal regimes. We need to recognise and support the diverse ways communities track time and help to manage the mismatches that climate change will now impose.
Conversation piece of the week
A great piece by the ecologist Laura Dee at CU Boulder on the need for controlled burns in Western US to mitigate extreme wildfire risk, and the threat to this by a reduction in funding. The Forest Service’s controlled fire programme has been thrown into turmoil with recent funding cuts. Last year’s record high global temperatures and early spring conditions suggest this year could be rough in terms of extreme wildfire risk.
As she nicely outlines, such fires have massive impacts on people (LA fires last year are just one example), the climate (they release tonnes of carbon back into the atmosphere), and ecosystems (when they are extreme, they can prevent regrowth; things have evolved to deal with low-level fires). This list could go on much longer, but you get the idea. Dig into the article for more.
Environmental news of the week
‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects.
Don’t read this if you want to feel uplifted! This article paints a depressing story of biodiversity loss. The story features the ecologist, Dan Janzen, and his long experience studying ecology in Costa Rican rainforests.
for two hours each evening, the site got power and a 25-watt bulb flickered on above the porch. Out of the forest darkness, a tornado of insects would flock to its glow, spinning and dancing before the light. Lit up, the side of the house would be “absolutely plastered with moths – tens of thousands of them”, Janzen says.
Inspired, he decided to erect a sheet for a light trap with a camera – a common way to document flying insect numbers and diversity. In that first photograph, taken in 1978, the lit-up sheet is so thickly studded with moths that in places the fabric is barely visible, transformed into what looks like densely patterned, crawling wallpaper.
Scientists identified an astonishing 3,000 species from that light trap
That was in the 70s. Now…
Today, some moths flutter to the glow, but their numbers are far fewer.
“It’s the same sheet, with the same lights, in the same place, looking over the same vegetation. Same time of year, same time of the moon cycle, everything about it is identical,” he says. “There’s just no moths on that sheet.”
Some positive environmental news
Seagrass is a key species for the health of coastal ecosystems and for the climate. It can absorb carbon dioxide faster than trees, making it a natural defence against climate change.
After the success of seagrass restoration projects in the south of the UK, a new one begins in the North. This project is aiming to restore 14 hectares around Scotland. Elsewhere, in the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast of the US, seagrasses continue to recover due to a number of interventions, including nutrient management.
Amidst the doom and gloom is news of people doing good things for the environment.
And from Bluesky
For something lighter, check out this epic shot of Aurora Australis from Ōtepoti Dunedin, NZ by Paul Le Comte!
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Have a fun week!
Jono