Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Thorsten Arnold's avatar

Whow! Very nice article. I never came across these 23 questions!

Reading your article begs the question: How does Regenerative Agriculture, and Landscape regeneration, fit into this picture? What are the key critical hydrological elements that would help us understand our work better?

For example,

- How can we easily model the impact of biology on soil's hydrological characteristics ("soil health")? There most be some Kolmogorov-like scaling law that, on one end, starts with dead soil (properties defined by physics) and ends with a fully living soil (properties defined by biology). There will also be a "brittleness" parameter somewhere, as some landscapes create capping, others not.

- Or, how do we define and measure "landscape vibrancy" - like soil health at a landscape scale? Again, this will depend on some "brittleness" - grasslands are healthy in a different way than temperate forests.

- How can we measure "landscape resilience" quantitatively, and can we derive a "landscape-resilience indicator" that helps in management decisions (or at least in assessment)?

- And what do cows and ruminant herds have do to with all of that?!?

(Landscape is here a similar term for "critical zone", I guess)

This warrants a broader discussion, though ... sounds like a project :-)

Expand full comment
Amy Yates's avatar

“Complexity is a matter of how the observer specifies the system either explicitly or implicitly in the way questions are cast. What makes ecology complex is the challenge of the questions we dare to ask of nature…” T.F.H. Allen and David W. Roberts

This wonderful post reminds me of the above quote from the forward on Robert Rosens book “Life Itself”. Excited to see how these questions unfold

Expand full comment
18 more comments...

No posts