Questions drive the progress of science. They help provide a context, a map, a direction, helping us orient between the known and the unknown. Questions can open up new fields of knowledge, and the solving of them can connect seemingly disparate fields of knowledge. Sets of questions create research programmes, that influence the research efforts of many groups, organizations and universities.
“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
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 :-)
Thank you for this review. I’m just beginning to learn about water from an applied perspective (looking forward to starting Zach Weiss’s class the end of this month). I am looking forward to more of your podcasts. A couple of months ago I went to a cool lecture by Dr. Magali Nehemy who might be an interesting guest. See lecture abstract below:
Abstract: Forests cover about 30% of the world’s land surface and provide drinking water for billions of people. Despite their significance, forest ecosystems face rapid climate change and anthropogenic disturbances while we have little understanding of those impacts of long-term water availability and forest water use. Forest water use has been investigated through paired watershed studies. While providing insights at a watershed scale, paired watershed studies are a ‘black box approach’, offering limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms driving forest water use, transpiration sources, and their effects on streamflow. Natural tracers of water (stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen) provide unique opportunities to investigate forest water use mechanistically, providing understanding of transpiration source water and the age of transpiration. In this talk, I will provide new insights gained using stable isotopes regarding the hydrological coupling and decoupling between transpiration source water and streamflow. Through a synthesis of controlled experiments and field investigations across diverse biomes, I will emphasize the significance of incorporating tree hydraulic traits, storage dynamics, and topography in the exploration of forest water use. This holistic approach promises to enhance our comprehension of the intricate relationships governing water dynamics within forest ecosystems.
Bio: Magali Nehemy is an assistant professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University.
Very thorough and excellent summary of the 23 questions, of which only a handful I was aware and of those only a few I have more than a novice understanding. My background is civil engineering and although not specifically hydrology and catchment and containment structures and systems, I do have a healthy respect for water, both from the perspective of physics and ecology.
I believe Questions 7 and 8 regarding the critical zone are closely linked with Question 10 land use change impact.
“What controls the spatial pattern of the critical zone across different landscapes? Does the vegetation know what kind of bedrock lies beneath the root zone, and does the bedrock know what is growing on top of it?”
I believe further biological and soil science research will show vegetation does know.
“How will a climatically changed atmosphere and a land surface modified by human activities affect the deeper critical zone and vice versa? ….. Can landscape degradation be reversed?”
My suspicion is that landscape and soil degradation at current scale and pace is occurring much faster than the speed of current mitigation efforts and technological know how.
I have no training in this field, but if the answers to some of these questions function like some of the answers to Hilbert's ten, there will be unexpected connections discovered between the 23. Restacking.
“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
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 :-)
Thank you for this review. I’m just beginning to learn about water from an applied perspective (looking forward to starting Zach Weiss’s class the end of this month). I am looking forward to more of your podcasts. A couple of months ago I went to a cool lecture by Dr. Magali Nehemy who might be an interesting guest. See lecture abstract below:
Abstract: Forests cover about 30% of the world’s land surface and provide drinking water for billions of people. Despite their significance, forest ecosystems face rapid climate change and anthropogenic disturbances while we have little understanding of those impacts of long-term water availability and forest water use. Forest water use has been investigated through paired watershed studies. While providing insights at a watershed scale, paired watershed studies are a ‘black box approach’, offering limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms driving forest water use, transpiration sources, and their effects on streamflow. Natural tracers of water (stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen) provide unique opportunities to investigate forest water use mechanistically, providing understanding of transpiration source water and the age of transpiration. In this talk, I will provide new insights gained using stable isotopes regarding the hydrological coupling and decoupling between transpiration source water and streamflow. Through a synthesis of controlled experiments and field investigations across diverse biomes, I will emphasize the significance of incorporating tree hydraulic traits, storage dynamics, and topography in the exploration of forest water use. This holistic approach promises to enhance our comprehension of the intricate relationships governing water dynamics within forest ecosystems.
Bio: Magali Nehemy is an assistant professor in the School of the Environment at Trent University.
Mycelium and transfer of nutrients was my thinking when I read that. Microbes busy at work.
Very thorough and excellent summary of the 23 questions, of which only a handful I was aware and of those only a few I have more than a novice understanding. My background is civil engineering and although not specifically hydrology and catchment and containment structures and systems, I do have a healthy respect for water, both from the perspective of physics and ecology.
I believe Questions 7 and 8 regarding the critical zone are closely linked with Question 10 land use change impact.
“What controls the spatial pattern of the critical zone across different landscapes? Does the vegetation know what kind of bedrock lies beneath the root zone, and does the bedrock know what is growing on top of it?”
I believe further biological and soil science research will show vegetation does know.
“How will a climatically changed atmosphere and a land surface modified by human activities affect the deeper critical zone and vice versa? ….. Can landscape degradation be reversed?”
My suspicion is that landscape and soil degradation at current scale and pace is occurring much faster than the speed of current mitigation efforts and technological know how.
I have no training in this field, but if the answers to some of these questions function like some of the answers to Hilbert's ten, there will be unexpected connections discovered between the 23. Restacking.