As suggested at the end of this incredible essay, I'm sharing details of the work we are doing in South Africa. (I worked in Madrid for a year and travelled extensively across Spain every weekend.)
We have created a Small Language Model chatbot trained on every research paper I can find on restoring rainfall. Essays like this help with uncovering research I wasn't previously aware of.
While the chatbot is primarily for South African practitioners, you can still query the chatbot for any bioregion in the world. You can access the chatbot here: https://ai.servicespace.org/boerbot/ask
Here's an example of a query you can ask it: "Tell me more about efforts to restore rain in drought-affected areas in Spain."
If you decide to use the bot (it's free), please let me know of any limitations or areas for improvement. 🙏
One thing the bot could be super helpful for, Alpha, is that it is reasonably fluent in all European langue's, including Spanish. So, if you are dealing with Spanish-speaking individuals and you want to provide the summary of an English research paper, you can ask the bot to reply in Spanish. Alternatively, Spanish questions can be entered, it will find the relevant research paper (in English) and then provide a Spanish reply. Give it a try!
Micheal, I chatted with your bot for a while. Found it to be a great tool, gives general guidelines and explains concepts - and can be improved, particularly with respect to connecting phenomenon from the ground up.
Appreciate your feedback, Ali, and thank you for trying BoerBot. I should have mentioned in my original post that the chatbot is more for "newbies" i.e. people who are just learning about large-scale ecosystem regeneration. For people like yourself and @Alpha who have already read all of the research, the general guidelines it provides will no doubt be insufficient. Soooo, this is just a way of getting the research distributed to a wider audience. 🙏
A few more thoughts... When you want to find connections or linkages between different bodies of research, I find the following prompt approach can help:
1. Provide a summary of [specific title of paper 1]
2. Provide a summary of [specific title of paper 2] (repeat as necessary)
3. Now explain what the connection is between [paper 1 topic] and [paper 2 topic]
4. How would I apply this in [specific bioregion]?
What this does is it reads the entire research paper into your specific chat stream and reads each paper in producing the next result. It's important that all of these queries are done in the same chat string (don't start a new one). It's not perfect i.e. it can never replace a human, but it does sometimes provide new areas of exploration.
I'm excited for the rewilding regenerative efforts to come. It's high time that this important work continues. I lived in Almeria for a year, near Sorbas, and I've spent time in other parts of Spain and Portugal. Some places have been importing tanks of water. Great work has been done at Tamera, Portugal. More is needed because any denuded landscape will see attenuation of rainfall, for the reasons the article highlights. Examining the drivers for denuding landscapes is surely a most important topic to investigate, too. Let me know if there's any way I can be of service to this important work. Good luck!
It would be great to get more regenerative water projects going in Almeria. And it would be interesting to connect with Tamera on this restore Iberian rain project.
An amazingly informative essay. Water begets vegetation, vegetation begets water. Key is soil. One can moisten sand but still no plants will grow. Soil must be recovered before it is lost to desertification. Deserts can be restored to fertility but it's a slow project of step by step recreation of healthy, resilient, soil biomes. Kudos to you and your compatriots, Alpha. A masterly explanation of science research. I especially liked the idea of upwind/downwind treaties similar to the american Colorado River water use arrangements, but caution that climate changes may be altering some hithereto reliable seasonal winds patterns.
Excellent piece. I love how you describe watching clouds vanish over the heated plains of Algarve. It brings the science to life. And I think you make an important observation about Millan when you say he "was a meteorologist who took pride in his observational skills, and his ability to read the clouds to discern an atmosphere’s history and future." He had the scientific skills to delineate the meteorology, but he also had a knowledge based on direct experience and curiosity, which was part of his insight.
I imagine he would be pleased by the work you and others are doing. Really looking forward to hearing more about it in your future posts.
I've been following your work for some time now, it has been transformational learning through your posts about Dr. Millán Millán's findings and vision. I got really excited when you and Nick Steiner announced a collaboration to develop partnerships with hotels/land owners for ecosystem restoration in Iberia.
Personally, these plans arrive at a perfect timing as I'm finishing a 10-month Ecosystem Restoration Design course in December and I cannot wait to join efforts in regenerative projects, particularly those that build upon a holistic vision of watershed restoration and climate moderation.
I live in Northwest Portugal but, as a nation, we're very aware of the severe issues of desertification encroaching on the lands across the south and interior of Portugal/Spain.
I'd be very pleased to collaborate in any useful way with future projects to restore Iberian landscapes and watercycles!
As I work on moving to Portugal, I'd love to get involved in Iberian rain restoration projects. I also love the idea of working ecotourism into the strategy!
Excellent article. You have a great blog here. My friend mentioned that rabbits have had a large impact on the ecology of Australia causing erosion, etc. Perhaps they're contributing to that in Spain as well, leading to less rain.
I have cycled through most of mountainous Spain. Much of the mountainous lands above 1000 m have regenerated and become more dense than they were 50 years ago. You only need to look at the picture of pueblos and surrounds 50-100 years ago. Much of the forests were cut for firewood.
In some of the provinces now in Andalusia the lowlands are covered in olive plantations. You can still find occasional patches of oak forests below 1000 m.
I am more concerned about bare ground practices in olive and almond plantations. One can lose a lot of topsoil if a thunderstorm occurs say in Jaen.or Cordoba provinces. Just about all the land there in the lowlands below 1000 m has olive plantations.
Today I saw old oaks still surviving in a wheat paddock which is a miracle.
I am pretty sure that the jet stream doesn't go over the Iberian peninsula as much as it used to. It now goes most of the time over Morrocco and Tunisia or over northern Spain.
Whenever it does come with a borrasco into the gulf of Cadiz orographic storms occur in southern Spain. There have been more orographic storms in Almeria and Valencia this year. Something is shifting in seasonal weather patterns recently. It could be the 60-year cycle in the AMO - we are going to be a wetter phase is my hypothesis.
Your thoughts parallel to a degree mine. Something is happening to the late summer winds off western Africa and the Sahara. We need five more years of data at the minimum to even make a guess about cyclicity. In the meantime planners are going to have to be in reactive mode.
Alpha: Your recollection of that moment on what sounds like Foia peak of Serra de Monchique (yes?) resonates strongly w/ me. Down here in "Mud Valley" ( http://www.valedalama.net )- at the foot of that same watershed -watching the clouds up on Monchique dissipate, where they used to bring us copious rain (always >500 mm/yr) is an ever-growing frustration. Yet the seeds of a regenerative movement are being planted all around us here; on your next trip over, i hope you wll come and see for yourself!
I understand that this is kinda your gig, and I think there are a lot of good ideas and data points in this article, but I think it is a little premature to suggest treaties about water use with the implicit suggestion that building marshes in Valencia and Catalonia will alleviate flooding in Germany. To be perfectly honest, you don’t have enough data to make that prediction. While that may very well be true, I think the benefit should be locally focused because the associations and costs can be more easily shared. Meaning: Spanish locales almost assuredly will receive more needed summer rainfall (and marginally lower temps) if there are more green spaces and marshes.
A big problem of the entire sustainability movement is using models in place of science to determine courses of action. Carbon has an albido effect which traps heat from the sun. That much we know. What does that mean for humans? That is much less certain. We have produced models that rely on various assumptions that can “predict” with decreasing levels of accuracy as we extend outward in time.
Don’t let models determine policy. Regenerate coastal landscapes because it is good for local farmers and residents. We know that much. Its influence on the flooding of other parts of Europe is much less certain (as you move away from coastal Spain, the effects of coastal regeneration decrease).
Similarly we cannot rely on EVs and solar panels to remediate hurricane threats. I’m not saying that EVs and solar panels are bad (they may or may not be, that is a big question), but the timescale on which they could potentially have a meaningful impact is too long for humans to care about. Building codes and zoning have more to do with resiliency to hurricanes.
I am a big believer in regenerative farming, if you want to capture carbon, that is the way to go (instead of building giant fans and pumping sequestered carbon into gas wells so we can frack more burn juice), but maybe most importantly I want there to be soils for the future generations to thrive on. However I think a lot of the sustainability movement exercises magical thinking, it’s sort of a green Utopianism that says if we do x everything will be OK. I see some of that here. I think there are many valid reasons to restore coastal wetlands and greenspaces, but I think evidence for restoring watersheds to control flooding events in other parts of Europe is minimal. The idea of organizing an international treaty around that is immature and unwise. It may very well be that restored marshes and greenspaces in coastal Spain do not alleviate flooding.
Yes the coastal marshes/ forests of Spain to flood connection in Europe still needs more research work. Building a governmental atmospheric water network, can help fund research into such matters. There are some phenomena that are more researched, like how deforestation upwind can affect loss of rain downwind, those phenomena can be discussed in treaties and investment partnerships.
I repectfully disagree with your comment that it is "immature and unwise" to organize treaties that account for the the effects of land use on transnational water cycles. In fact, I think it is long overdue and the sooner it is attempted, the sooner we will stop destroying water cycles. This piece, by Fred Pearce, shows how global this issue is and how important it is we formally recognize it: https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-deforestation-affecting-global-water-cycles-climate-change
As suggested at the end of this incredible essay, I'm sharing details of the work we are doing in South Africa. (I worked in Madrid for a year and travelled extensively across Spain every weekend.)
We have created a Small Language Model chatbot trained on every research paper I can find on restoring rainfall. Essays like this help with uncovering research I wasn't previously aware of.
While the chatbot is primarily for South African practitioners, you can still query the chatbot for any bioregion in the world. You can access the chatbot here: https://ai.servicespace.org/boerbot/ask
Here's an example of a query you can ask it: "Tell me more about efforts to restore rain in drought-affected areas in Spain."
If you decide to use the bot (it's free), please let me know of any limitations or areas for improvement. 🙏
Ok thats interesting to have a bot trained on more regenerative knowledge. Looking forward as it learns more about how to restore rain in Iberia :)
One thing the bot could be super helpful for, Alpha, is that it is reasonably fluent in all European langue's, including Spanish. So, if you are dealing with Spanish-speaking individuals and you want to provide the summary of an English research paper, you can ask the bot to reply in Spanish. Alternatively, Spanish questions can be entered, it will find the relevant research paper (in English) and then provide a Spanish reply. Give it a try!
Micheal, I chatted with your bot for a while. Found it to be a great tool, gives general guidelines and explains concepts - and can be improved, particularly with respect to connecting phenomenon from the ground up.
Appreciate your feedback, Ali, and thank you for trying BoerBot. I should have mentioned in my original post that the chatbot is more for "newbies" i.e. people who are just learning about large-scale ecosystem regeneration. For people like yourself and @Alpha who have already read all of the research, the general guidelines it provides will no doubt be insufficient. Soooo, this is just a way of getting the research distributed to a wider audience. 🙏
A few more thoughts... When you want to find connections or linkages between different bodies of research, I find the following prompt approach can help:
1. Provide a summary of [specific title of paper 1]
2. Provide a summary of [specific title of paper 2] (repeat as necessary)
3. Now explain what the connection is between [paper 1 topic] and [paper 2 topic]
4. How would I apply this in [specific bioregion]?
What this does is it reads the entire research paper into your specific chat stream and reads each paper in producing the next result. It's important that all of these queries are done in the same chat string (don't start a new one). It's not perfect i.e. it can never replace a human, but it does sometimes provide new areas of exploration.
I'm excited for the rewilding regenerative efforts to come. It's high time that this important work continues. I lived in Almeria for a year, near Sorbas, and I've spent time in other parts of Spain and Portugal. Some places have been importing tanks of water. Great work has been done at Tamera, Portugal. More is needed because any denuded landscape will see attenuation of rainfall, for the reasons the article highlights. Examining the drivers for denuding landscapes is surely a most important topic to investigate, too. Let me know if there's any way I can be of service to this important work. Good luck!
It would be great to get more regenerative water projects going in Almeria. And it would be interesting to connect with Tamera on this restore Iberian rain project.
I recommend connecting with Sunseed Desert Technology, an hour north of Almeria 😀 Ans Zach Weiss, who helped install Tamera's lakes.
An amazingly informative essay. Water begets vegetation, vegetation begets water. Key is soil. One can moisten sand but still no plants will grow. Soil must be recovered before it is lost to desertification. Deserts can be restored to fertility but it's a slow project of step by step recreation of healthy, resilient, soil biomes. Kudos to you and your compatriots, Alpha. A masterly explanation of science research. I especially liked the idea of upwind/downwind treaties similar to the american Colorado River water use arrangements, but caution that climate changes may be altering some hithereto reliable seasonal winds patterns.
Hi, thanks........... yes the earlier we help soil recover the easier it is.....
Excellent piece. I love how you describe watching clouds vanish over the heated plains of Algarve. It brings the science to life. And I think you make an important observation about Millan when you say he "was a meteorologist who took pride in his observational skills, and his ability to read the clouds to discern an atmosphere’s history and future." He had the scientific skills to delineate the meteorology, but he also had a knowledge based on direct experience and curiosity, which was part of his insight.
I imagine he would be pleased by the work you and others are doing. Really looking forward to hearing more about it in your future posts.
thanks Rob, glad you liked it. And I think your piece on Millan has really helped ignite more interest in his work....
Thank you Alpha, as always that was a great read!
I've been following your work for some time now, it has been transformational learning through your posts about Dr. Millán Millán's findings and vision. I got really excited when you and Nick Steiner announced a collaboration to develop partnerships with hotels/land owners for ecosystem restoration in Iberia.
Personally, these plans arrive at a perfect timing as I'm finishing a 10-month Ecosystem Restoration Design course in December and I cannot wait to join efforts in regenerative projects, particularly those that build upon a holistic vision of watershed restoration and climate moderation.
I live in Northwest Portugal but, as a nation, we're very aware of the severe issues of desertification encroaching on the lands across the south and interior of Portugal/Spain.
I'd be very pleased to collaborate in any useful way with future projects to restore Iberian landscapes and watercycles!
Would be great to get your collaboration!
As I work on moving to Portugal, I'd love to get involved in Iberian rain restoration projects. I also love the idea of working ecotourism into the strategy!
Cool you are going to Portugal. I will get you involved...
Excellent article. You have a great blog here. My friend mentioned that rabbits have had a large impact on the ecology of Australia causing erosion, etc. Perhaps they're contributing to that in Spain as well, leading to less rain.
http://casestudyofrabbits.weebly.com/case-study-of-rabbits.html
Alpha - Superb article as usual. Looking forward to chatting with you soon.
thanks Ali!.... And for those reading this comment, while in Spain, I asked Ali if he could do some calculations about restoring the rain to Valencia. Here is his article about it https://medium.com/@ecorestorationalliance/proposal-for-enhancing-bioprecipitation-in-valencia-strategic-interventions-and-detailed-182717afae3c
Thanks. Based on that I will probably subscribe to his substack.
Ali writes incredibly detailed substacks and I have discovered many research papers I didn't previously know about - highly recommended!
I have cycled through most of mountainous Spain. Much of the mountainous lands above 1000 m have regenerated and become more dense than they were 50 years ago. You only need to look at the picture of pueblos and surrounds 50-100 years ago. Much of the forests were cut for firewood.
In some of the provinces now in Andalusia the lowlands are covered in olive plantations. You can still find occasional patches of oak forests below 1000 m.
I am more concerned about bare ground practices in olive and almond plantations. One can lose a lot of topsoil if a thunderstorm occurs say in Jaen.or Cordoba provinces. Just about all the land there in the lowlands below 1000 m has olive plantations.
Today I saw old oaks still surviving in a wheat paddock which is a miracle.
I am pretty sure that the jet stream doesn't go over the Iberian peninsula as much as it used to. It now goes most of the time over Morrocco and Tunisia or over northern Spain.
Whenever it does come with a borrasco into the gulf of Cadiz orographic storms occur in southern Spain. There have been more orographic storms in Almeria and Valencia this year. Something is shifting in seasonal weather patterns recently. It could be the 60-year cycle in the AMO - we are going to be a wetter phase is my hypothesis.
Your thoughts parallel to a degree mine. Something is happening to the late summer winds off western Africa and the Sahara. We need five more years of data at the minimum to even make a guess about cyclicity. In the meantime planners are going to have to be in reactive mode.
Alpha: Your recollection of that moment on what sounds like Foia peak of Serra de Monchique (yes?) resonates strongly w/ me. Down here in "Mud Valley" ( http://www.valedalama.net )- at the foot of that same watershed -watching the clouds up on Monchique dissipate, where they used to bring us copious rain (always >500 mm/yr) is an ever-growing frustration. Yet the seeds of a regenerative movement are being planted all around us here; on your next trip over, i hope you wll come and see for yourself!
I understand that this is kinda your gig, and I think there are a lot of good ideas and data points in this article, but I think it is a little premature to suggest treaties about water use with the implicit suggestion that building marshes in Valencia and Catalonia will alleviate flooding in Germany. To be perfectly honest, you don’t have enough data to make that prediction. While that may very well be true, I think the benefit should be locally focused because the associations and costs can be more easily shared. Meaning: Spanish locales almost assuredly will receive more needed summer rainfall (and marginally lower temps) if there are more green spaces and marshes.
A big problem of the entire sustainability movement is using models in place of science to determine courses of action. Carbon has an albido effect which traps heat from the sun. That much we know. What does that mean for humans? That is much less certain. We have produced models that rely on various assumptions that can “predict” with decreasing levels of accuracy as we extend outward in time.
Don’t let models determine policy. Regenerate coastal landscapes because it is good for local farmers and residents. We know that much. Its influence on the flooding of other parts of Europe is much less certain (as you move away from coastal Spain, the effects of coastal regeneration decrease).
Similarly we cannot rely on EVs and solar panels to remediate hurricane threats. I’m not saying that EVs and solar panels are bad (they may or may not be, that is a big question), but the timescale on which they could potentially have a meaningful impact is too long for humans to care about. Building codes and zoning have more to do with resiliency to hurricanes.
I am a big believer in regenerative farming, if you want to capture carbon, that is the way to go (instead of building giant fans and pumping sequestered carbon into gas wells so we can frack more burn juice), but maybe most importantly I want there to be soils for the future generations to thrive on. However I think a lot of the sustainability movement exercises magical thinking, it’s sort of a green Utopianism that says if we do x everything will be OK. I see some of that here. I think there are many valid reasons to restore coastal wetlands and greenspaces, but I think evidence for restoring watersheds to control flooding events in other parts of Europe is minimal. The idea of organizing an international treaty around that is immature and unwise. It may very well be that restored marshes and greenspaces in coastal Spain do not alleviate flooding.
Yes the coastal marshes/ forests of Spain to flood connection in Europe still needs more research work. Building a governmental atmospheric water network, can help fund research into such matters. There are some phenomena that are more researched, like how deforestation upwind can affect loss of rain downwind, those phenomena can be discussed in treaties and investment partnerships.
I repectfully disagree with your comment that it is "immature and unwise" to organize treaties that account for the the effects of land use on transnational water cycles. In fact, I think it is long overdue and the sooner it is attempted, the sooner we will stop destroying water cycles. This piece, by Fred Pearce, shows how global this issue is and how important it is we formally recognize it: https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-deforestation-affecting-global-water-cycles-climate-change