Science Daily recently published a piece titled “Study challenges ecology’s ‘Field of Dreams’ hypothesis”. The hypothesis, put simply, is if you build a habitat, the animals will come.
The article references a paper [1] where lead author Peter Guiden was quoted as saying:
“We found that the effects of management strategies like controlled burns and bison reintroduction on animal communities were six times stronger on average than the effects of plant biodiversity”
If ecologists thought about ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More in terms of thermodynamicsThermodynamics are at the heart of our understanding of ecosystems and not an altogether difficult concept to grasp but one that isn't widely taught to ecologists. Basically, all life on Earth, is derived from the Sun's heat. This renewable energy source constantly bombards ecosystems with energy but they would overheat, if it wasn't for the absorptive capacity of food webs. More, it would be easier to understand why this is the case.
Managing plants does little to alter an ecosystem’s ability to absorb free surplus energyThe energy of a system that is emitted as waste and is not part of ecosystem processes. There is always some free surplus energy as this creates the basis for evolution where new species exploit gaps in the ecosystem where free energy becomes available. Surplus energy can occur as a result of disruption or disturbance. When free surplus energy reaches More because plants are the primary producers … the source of free energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More. They are the front line in converting the Sun’s heat into chemicals and when these pour, unmoderated, into our landscapes, the chemistry they produce, becomes polluting.
All this powerful, surplus chemical energy, lays about causing havoc with ecosystem stability, flowing down our storm drains, clogging up rivers, muddying estuaries and the ocean. In this state, the land on which plants grow, only benefits a few invasive plants at the expense of the biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More processes, that would reduce their negative impact. Introducing more plants can make matters worse. Changing the layout of plants or applying management techniques e.g. to remove an invasive species, only ameliorates problems as long as you can afford to keep intervening. When you stop, the chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More quickly returns.
I was thinking about this the other day in relationship to a lawn I use to own. Each year I’d mow it and no matter what I tried, every season, different grasses or weeds would dominate. Nothing I could do, would be able to stabilise the system. If, however, I walk through remote Australian dry eucalyptus woodlands, as I used to through certain farmland in the UK Cotswolds, I can find vegetation communities in a steady state. Not permanent, but stable-enough to last millennia. The difference? These environments are super-saturated with animals of every shape and size, from nematode worms to insects, butterflies, birds and grazing mammals. The only things usually missing are the larger predators.
Ecologists who assume systems are linear, are making a mistake. You’d be wrong if you thought you could plant trees, create forests, provide nest sites for birds, and contribute to biodiversity, in that order. The field of dreams hypothesis is incorrect, in the same way as a web designer will tell you, the “build it and they will come” philosophy doesn’t work for online businesses. For that, you have to position yourself within the internet economy connect with other players and merge into the environment around. If you’re not the most likely to surviveDarwin’s theory how species are formed, where those that stand in closest competition with those undergoing beneficial modification and improvement, will go extinct faster. Natural selection is by survival of the likeliest, not survival of the fittest. The fittest are only likely to survive because they happen to be most suited to the environment into which they are born. The More, you’ll pointlessly invest loads of time and money, trying to maintain a loss-making venture.
The real way ecosystems work is not linear … I wish it was but it’s more complex than that. Animals and plants need to be regrown together at the same time, because that’s how they existed in the first place. They developed in parallel over millions of years. It happened for a reason, because the energy that passes into ecosystems, cannot stabilise unless there are animals to absorb the excess.
This is the reason it’s easier to reintroduce an animal into habitat from which it recently disappeared, than to try and create new habitat or bring back a long-extinct animal. The longer animals are absent, the more plant-based systems fall into chaos and the further we get from the chance to reverse this. Animals are essential to all habitat restoration. Without them, we are randomly shooting in the dark.
To understand more about the role of chaos in complex systems, take the work of mathematics professor Karl Friston of University College London during the COVID-19 pandemic. Friston’s team found that the variation between countries, due to a bewildering number of unknown variables was so great, that any single-country management intervention was unlikely (in the absence of a magic-bullet cure) to change the overall mortality outcome. Let’s take a specific example. Masks definitely work on an individual or even state-based scale but from a global outcome perspective, COVID-19 simply created too much “free energy” for its impact to be changed by singular actions. In this case, free energy is a metaphor for the complex disordering of society due to the sudden introduction of a chaos-forming entity. Or if you like, the massive increase in human population combined with huge ecosystem destruction, has created a huge “gap in the market” for a virus that then disrupts everything. It’s like an invasive weed or the way online search and social media disrupted global business.
When you move from order to chaos in a complex system, it becomes infinitely hard to describe what’s happening or influence it, because the rule book changes and the patterns that might once have led to a theory of change (how you are going to act to create an outcome), no longer exist.
Reversing chaos is our biggest challenge in ecosystem management, because it is a symptom of free energy in degraded systems. It renders management intervention a temporary solution, until there is some semblance of stability restored through animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More.
Remember, plants are awesomely powerful at capturing the Sun’s heat but they also create a huge amount of waste. They impact their environment on a phenomenal scale, even locally, and without something to moderate that waste and bring some order back into the system, it gets messy very fast. Management ideas will only be a microcosm of the huge number of known and unknown influences that determine the overall outcome. Change one or two and it hardly affects the others, unless of course, you can afford to change the entire system and continuously manage it. That’s an unachievable objective, when you’re talking about a whole planet. So you’re left with the question, what are the conditions you need, to recreate stability?
The simple starting point is not to destroy the oldest and most species-rich habitatsWhat is habitat for animals and people? Habitat, hence the word "habitable" describes the natural surroundings in which any animal (or human) lives, that houses basic needs, such as food and shelter. Vegetation, for example, is habitat for animals. On its own, habitat is not necessarily stable or sustainable, which is why it differs from an ecosystem. Habitat in disrepair More, be they individual trees or whole landscapes.
The next part of the answer is more elegant than the solution. You need to rebuild animal populations. Everything from nematode worms to insects, butterflies, birds, grazing mammals and predators. Each has to be present in roughly the right proportions to absorb all the free energy and bring the ecosystem back into a steady stable-state(of an ecosystem) where free surplus energy is minimised, where there is maximum entropy production and minimum waste. In such a system, there is expected to be relatively small fluctuations in atmospheric and other chemistry and where disruption or disturbance occurs, the resulting changes can be absorbed quickly by a succession of new plants and animals that enter to fill More.
An absence of wildlife is the reason why your lawn changes every year. It’s the reason why Guiden and his colleagues, found that recreating biodiversity was harder without animals and it’s even the reason why we have no hope of addressing climate change, global fisheries, soil fertility and feeding a human population, unless we learn to build animal-led processes back in simultaneously to habitat restoration.
- Peter W. Guiden, Nicholas A. Barber, Ryan Blackburn, Anna Farrell, Jessica Fliginger, Sheryl C. Hosler, Richard B. King, Melissa Nelson, Erin G. Rowland, Kirstie Savage, John P. Vanek, Holly P. Jones. Effects of management outweigh effects of plant diversity on restored animal communities in tallgrass prairies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021; 118 (5): e2015421118 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2015421118
- 212. Friston, K., A Free Energy Principle for Biological Systems. EntropyThe degree of disorder or chaos in a system, most often used to describe thermodynamic energy but also used the behaviour of information. All else being equal, physics determines that all matter and energy moves towards chaos, therefore biological systems are in a continual state of battling against entropic forces in order to remain stable. The most stable ecosystem is More (Basel, Switzerland), 2012. 14: p. 2100-2121.
