New fields of knowledge emerging

Illuminating the connection of ecology, water, and climate

1.Fields that have been emerging - Ecohydrology, geobiology, geobiochemistry, astrobiology

2.Fields that may emerge/blossom - population hydrobiology, fire water ecology, water infrastructure climatology, scaling approach to atmospheric science, earth nonlinear dynamics

Fields that have been emerging

Science is a vast network of inter-stitched paradigms and subdisciplines. At times there will be rapid growth of research activity in a sub-discipline, with the paradigms developed from that sub-discipline then infiltrating into the wider network of knowledge. The emergence of a sub-discipline can happen when the state of knowledge or experimental methodologies reaches a critical state in the larger field, and it can happen when key insights and connections are made by a researcher that then opens a plethora of possibilities. In the last few decades we have seen the vibrant development of the fields of ecohydrology, geobiology, biogeochemistry, and astrobiology.

Its not always easy going in the early stages of a sub-discipline, as people are ridiculed for their visionary paradigm-shifting ideas, grad students and professors alike are misunderstood as they begin work in these fields, researchers are cautioned away from these topics, and which concepts will turn out to be important are not yet established. Then, as concepts clarify, as crazy ideas seem more plausible, as results start coming in, more researchers and more grant money will flow into these fields. Findings are then followed by more findings.

The recent rapid development of ecohydrology, geobiology, biogeochemistry and astrobiology have helped us conceptualize the workings of the earth better, and have directly and indirectly, aided us to understand more fully the connection of ecology and climate change.

In ecohydrology, researchers have been tracking water as it infiltrates into the groundwater, flows in streams, evapotranspires and moves with the wind. They have been studying the water cycle with chemical analysis and computer models. This has helped illuminate the importance of ecology to a healthy water cycle. The field has paved the way for more nature-based solutions in the field of water resources engineering (see the previous article “23 unsolved questions of water, the evolution of hydrology).

Geobiology is the study of how organisms have affected the earth, and how the earth has affected organisms; its the field of how life and earth co-evolve. It studies how how bacteria created oxygen for the atmosphere, how organisms sequestered carbon to stabilize the climate, how megafauna affected fire through their eating of flammable grasslands, and how dinosaurs breeched river levees and caused flooding. Its very much a detective field, as researchers piece together billions of years of earth history by studying geological formations and utilizing knowledge of topics like, how termites overturn sediment, how microbial mats affect the landscape, and how animal diets leave a record in the rocks.

Biogeochemistry is the study of how the pathways of different chemicals, such as carbon, water, nitrogen, and oxygen, cycle through living organisms, the atmosphere, the oceans, and the rocks, thus shedding light on how ecology couples with its environment. It overlaps significantly with geobiology, with the difference that geobiology looks more at these shifts over long periods of earth’s history.

Astrobiology is the study of the origin and possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Its an interdisciplinary field that draws from microbiology, extremophile studies, exoplanet research, origin of life work, geology, biochemistry, nonlinear thermodynamics, spectroscopy, and cosmology. Astrobiology may seem tangential to what happens on earth, but it can seed many ideas to understand our planet. James Lovelock, while working for NASA pondering the possibility of life on Mars, developed his Gaia hyptothesis in the 1970s. The Gaia hypothesis in turn influenced a lot of work studying the connection of ecology and climate, and played a part in emerging the fields of biogeochemistry and geobiology.

The sub-disciplines of ecohydrology, geobiology, biogeochemistry, and astrobiology have made a lot of progress, so much so, that the states of these fields are radically different than they were at the turn of the millenia. The emergence of them have helped us get a hold on the deep connection of ecology and climate.

Fields that may emerge/blossom

There are also some other sub-disciplines that can emerge to help further understand this connection, and to illuminate how land-use change can affect climate.

Here are my thoughts on what these sub-disciplines could be. (Note: this is by nature very speculative, and the speculation is done from a place where I still have much to learn about many fields. I think it can be useful to make a draft of the map of the scientific possibility landscape, even when there is much to still to know. The draft can be altered as it gets feedback). These new sub-disciplines are not independent of each other.

Population hydrobiology. Population biology is a well developed field that uses mathematical models to study how populations of organisms change and evolve with time. The most famous model being the Lotka Volterra predator-prey model. Population biology also employs game theory models where the ecosystem evolves to a set of evolutionary stable strategies.

Population hydrobiology is population biology that includes the effect of how species affect the water cycle, and how the water cycle affects species population. So lets say we have a herbivore-plant model. It is then possible that as herbivores increase, plants decrease, rain decreases (this can happen if precipitation recycling decreases), which leads to an animal and plant decrease. The system can oscillate through different states. Now lets say we have a carnivore-herbivore-plant model. As carnivores increase, herbivores decrease, plants increases, rain increases (if precipitation recycling increases), which lead to an animal and plant increase, and so on in dynamical evolution. A spatial component can be added to these simplified/toy models, where the rain comes back down in different places than where evapotranspiration happened. Various attractor states can arise depending on initial and environmental conditions. Game theory which takes into account rain in the payoff matrix can show what characteristics organisms develop (eg. characteristics that affect evapotranspiration rate, or which type of plant with a given evapotranspiration ability they prefer to eat) as they evolve to evolutionary stable states. Population hydrobiology can thus give us a dynamical systems and game theory perspective to help us understand the coupling of ecology, water, and climate. Simpler models allow one to explore archetypal behaviors. More realistic simulations can be done by coupling more sophisticated biome models with climate models. (See my article “Web of water” for more discussion)

Fire Water Ecology - Fire Ecology studies the effect fires have on the ecosystem, and the effect ecosystems have on fire risk. Fire Water Ecology, is a subset of Fire Ecology, which would study the effect the water cycle has on fire. While there is already research going on in this field e.g. looking at how drought affects fire risk, my hunch is that there is room for expansion of the subdiscipline to look at various other aspects of the water and fire interaction that are potentially significant. This sub-discipline would study questions of how fire risk is affected by macro water infrastructure moving vast amounts of water around the continent. So a question would be if water is removed from countryside and piped to cities via aqueducts, how does the loss of soil moisture in the countryside and the subsequent effect on precipitation recycling and wind humidity, affect fire risk. The field of Fire Water Ecology would also study how draining groundwater affects how much water trees can bring up in the dry season to hydrate the landscape, which would then affects wildfire risk. This field studies the impact of beavers, bison, earthworms, salmon, wolves, etc on fire risk, via their impact on the water cycle. It would include, for example, research work being done to look at how the large scale reintroduction of beaver, accompanied by dismantling of dam structures, would significantly lower fire risk via their effect on wetlands, riparian vegetation, and river flow.

If the effects posited above turn out to be correct, the growth of this sub-discipline may affect how fire departments and governments approach wildfire management in the future, so that they put more emphasis on restoring the water cycle, through restoring nature.

Water infrastructure climatology - This looks at the effects of shifting vast amounts of water via dams, aqueducts, and drainage infrastructure. Atmospheric scientists and hydrologists have studied this for for awhile, but its possible a much deeper systems understanding of their impact is yet to come. When macro water engineering projects shift vast quantities of water, there should be a resultant impact on surface heat fluxes, evapotranspiration and rain patterns. For instance, when a trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river are diverted yearly to cities in seven states theres a wide range of impacts to be researched. When water is diverted to coastal California towns, a signficant amount of that water finds itself going to the sea, without first entering into the ecosytem, and being evapotranspired into the air to create precipitation recycling. What would happen if that Californian city bound water was not diverted, and instead flowed down the Colorado river, overflowed the banks into floodplains, where it would help grow vegetation, and where some of it would turn into evapotranspiration? How much affect would that have on rain and drought in the USA? How much would it affect the rain that the Colorado river itself gets? How would heat fluxes and wind patterns be different? What impact would these hydrological changes have on fire risk?

This field would take into account the vast amount of greenhouse gas being generated to move the water around through aqueducts (a fifth of California’s energy is used to move water around), and look at its effect on global warming and the subsequent impacts on the distribution of floods and droughts, which in turn affects the demand for more macro water infrastructure solutions.

Scaling approach to atmospheric science - High energy physics and condensed matter physics have been revolutionized by the concepts of phase transitions and the scaling laws these transitions exhibit, with renormalization theory has been a tool to study these scaling laws. Geoffrey West, a high energy physicist, along with ecologists James Brown and Brian Enquist, have helped expand the scaling law and critical phenomena approach to biology, ecology and cities (see West’s popular book “Scale”), so much so that one could say there has been the emergence of a new subdiscipline, as an explosion of research work by many followed. This approach has brought a new rigor, found new explanations, and caused a mini-paradigmatic shift to the larger fields they are embedded in.

In atmospheric science, there are scaling laws around cloud size, precipitation, drought frequency, tornadoes, hurricanes, ocean-atmosphere coupling that are not yet explained. There’s been some attempts to derive these scaling behaviors by the likes of Roberto F.S Andrade, Suani Pinho, and David Neelin for precipitation, but for the most part there has not been too much effort to derive atmospheric scaling laws like there has been in biology, ecology, cities and physics. The scaling laws can be a way to quantify extreme weather. Researchers can investigate whether global warming affects the scaling exponents of various phenomena e.g. cloud size, precipitation rate, drought frequency, and flooding. I think its possible there will be scaling laws found that shed light on how ecology and climate couple, putting that relationship on a more rigorous basis. These scaling laws may shed light on how the earth self-organizes. Researchers may be able to put a scaling exponent on how ecological destruction, land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions will affect extreme weather. Some researchers have found macro water infrastructure projects like dams, can take scaling law behavior away, which may have an effect on earth’s ability to self-regulate itself.

Earth Nonlinear Thermodynamics - At a more foundational level, the atmosphere and the earth are nonlinear thermodynamic systems. One could thus argue that ideas and theorems from nonlinear thermodynamics and statistical mechanics should apply to the atmosphere and earth. There have been some successes in applying this, like Garth Patridges work calculating how heat is transported from the equator to the poles on earth, Ralph Lorenz’s calculation of this same effect on Titan, and Axel Kleidon’s calculation of aspects of the water cycle and various earth phenomena. All were done with the use of nonlinear thermodynamics, which allowed the calculations to be done in much simpler ways than they more traditional climate models, while getting the same results. They provide a different perspective on what is happening than traditional models. Kerry Emmanuel used such a nonlinear thermodynamic calculation to place a limit of the behavior of hurricanes. Because the field of nonlinear thermodynamics is itself nascent, and still trying to figuring out its own fundamental theorems and laws, (unlike basic thermodynamics which has its laws figured out), its been harder to make progress in the discipline. There may be a step or two of theoretical development needed before we can use nonlinear thermodynamics theorems to explain something like the Madden-Julien Oscillation or Rossby wave blocking. Fields can stay hidden underground for awhile, before they explode e.g. after Poincare discovered chaos, the field remained pretty silent for half a century before rapid progress happened.

One could argue ecology should also eventually be modelled with nonlinear thermodynamics also. Howard Odum’s work is some of the foundational work in the field. Progress has been even slower than in atmospheric science. Ultimately though, because ecology and climate are both physical systems, it may be possible to develop a theory that shows how ecology and climate couple thermodynamically. (For more thoughts on this see my article “Unifying ecology and climate with the fourth law of thermodynamics”.)

Science is ever evolving. This essay has been a discussion of sub-disciplines that have been emerging, and some speculative guesses about which sub-disciplines may grow more rapidly in the future. Its a draft of a map of scientific possibilities, a collection of connected of postulates and hypotheses. Discoveries from these sub-disciplines may help us to understand, shift, and adapt to the oncoming environmental and climate crises.

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