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Landscapes are migrating faster than ever in times of the Anthropocene. They have never been static, but instead moving, mutating and transforming. Only now the

Landscapes are migrating faster than ever in times of the Anthropocene. They have never been static, but instead moving, mutating and transforming. Only now their migration is greatly accelerated by climate change and other anthropogenic factors. To complicate things even more, we currently lack a good concept of migration that could be used to describe the migration of landscapes. Even in great old stories of migration and climate catastrophe like that of Noah's Ark, only the animals were ever collected and saved, as if their bodies with the clear physical boundaries were the only thing needed in order for them to survive. As if the landscapes they inhabited would magically reappear after a climate catastrophe. Nobody ever built a Noah's Ark for landscapes.

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yosito 5y ago
> Only now their migration is greatly accelerated Just curious, do you have data that backs up this claim?
- spython 5y ago
  How do you imagine such data to be formatted? Landscape and ecological niches are hard to quantify, as they are so permeable and often lack clear borders. Not easy to put them into an excel spreadsheet. I find this article on the topic really helpful: https://placesjournal.org/article/landscape-migration/ https://placesjournal.org/article/landscape-migration/ And the project by the same author quite inspiring: http://www.resilientbayarea.org/unlock-alameda-creek http://www.resilientbayarea.org/unlock-alameda-creek
  - yosito 5y ago
    If you can't quantify it, then you can't make a quantitative claim about it.
    - spython 5y ago
      Just read the linked article, man.
      - yosito 5y ago
        The entire linked article is a claim that things are accelerating, with anecdotes of changing landscapes. But as the article itself says: > processes within them are subject to distortion, to variable slowing and acceleration It's normal for specific landscapes to slow or accelerate. There is no quantifiable evidence that landscapes on a global scale are changing any faster than usual, and anecdotes of specific changes aren't enough to indicate a trend. For every example of a changing landscape, there are several landscapes that have barely changed in millions of years. But you only hear about the changes. Lack of change goes unnoticed. A news story claiming "mountaintop is exactly the same as it was a million years ago" doesn't grab your attention.
        spython 5y ago
        Strangely enough, the mountaintops change quite often due to erosion and plate tectonics. They shrink [1] or even gain in height like the Everest did recently [2]. We get to know it only because we are extremely interested in mountaintops. My question on how to format the data on changing landscapes was a serious one. It is so complicated, just to measure the signals of life processes in even one small region. There's so much data. There are now Critical Zone Observatories being built, in order to monitor these processes to the fullest extent on a local scale.[3] I visited one such observatory in Aubure, France. There are dozens of people working there, just to monitor the vitals of a small watershed. They do a great job, but even they don't capture the data on living beings, animals, insects that are arguably also part of the landscape, or of a force that shapes the landscape through pollination, consumption, destruction or regulation of other living beings that have an effect on the landscape. As hard as is it to define the borders and contents of a landscape, even harder question seems to me of how to represent changes. How to talk about changes on a global scale. Sure, the animation used in the article [4] shows quite clearly the change of planting zones over time, but this is just one data point. And a very abstract one, since one sees it, says 'yes, wow, it's changing' and then goes on to make a coffee and forget about it. The closer to the global scale we go, the more abstract the story telling becomes, the less personal the story becomes, the less likely it is to reach the reader. In the last years in the Rhine region where I live, the Asian tiger mosquito was introduced. It is an invasive species that is able to survive in the new landscape because of climate change. It's just one anecdote of a changing landscape, but one that people are talking about since, well, the mosquito is biting them, forcing them to pay attention. No one is talking about the other changes. So my question still stands – if you are asking for quantifiable evidence on changing landscape, please define how it would look like so that you would be satisfied with it. Define the formatting of such data, of what constitutes a landscape, of what constitutes change. And how to gather such data on a global scale. And even harder, how to present the huge amount of data in a human readable way. By doing so, you would do an immense service to our understanding of the earth and the processes of life on it. Because, while the news of a new mosquito or a mountain growing in height spreads like wildfire, hardly anyone is paying attention to the small but significant changes around us. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/swedish-mountain-shrinks-by-two-metres-in-a-year-as-glacier-melts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/swedish-mounta... 2. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a34910714/why-mount-everest-and-swiss-alps-are-getting-taller/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a349107... 3. https://www.czo.wzw.tum.de/home.html https://www.czo.wzw.tum.de/home.html 4. https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/milligan-landscape-migration.gif https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/milliga...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yosito 5y ago

> Only now their migration is greatly accelerated Just curious, do you have data that backs up this claim?

spython 5y ago
How do you imagine such data to be formatted? Landscape and ecological niches are hard to quantify, as they are so permeable and often lack clear borders. Not easy to put them into an excel spreadsheet. I find this article on the topic really helpful: https://placesjournal.org/article/landscape-migration/ https://placesjournal.org/article/landscape-migration/ And the project by the same author quite inspiring: http://www.resilientbayarea.org/unlock-alameda-creek http://www.resilientbayarea.org/unlock-alameda-creek
- yosito 5y ago
  If you can't quantify it, then you can't make a quantitative claim about it.
  - spython 5y ago
    Just read the linked article, man.
    - yosito 5y ago
      The entire linked article is a claim that things are accelerating, with anecdotes of changing landscapes. But as the article itself says: > processes within them are subject to distortion, to variable slowing and acceleration It's normal for specific landscapes to slow or accelerate. There is no quantifiable evidence that landscapes on a global scale are changing any faster than usual, and anecdotes of specific changes aren't enough to indicate a trend. For every example of a changing landscape, there are several landscapes that have barely changed in millions of years. But you only hear about the changes. Lack of change goes unnoticed. A news story claiming "mountaintop is exactly the same as it was a million years ago" doesn't grab your attention.
      - spython 5y ago
        Strangely enough, the mountaintops change quite often due to erosion and plate tectonics. They shrink [1] or even gain in height like the Everest did recently [2]. We get to know it only because we are extremely interested in mountaintops. My question on how to format the data on changing landscapes was a serious one. It is so complicated, just to measure the signals of life processes in even one small region. There's so much data. There are now Critical Zone Observatories being built, in order to monitor these processes to the fullest extent on a local scale.[3] I visited one such observatory in Aubure, France. There are dozens of people working there, just to monitor the vitals of a small watershed. They do a great job, but even they don't capture the data on living beings, animals, insects that are arguably also part of the landscape, or of a force that shapes the landscape through pollination, consumption, destruction or regulation of other living beings that have an effect on the landscape. As hard as is it to define the borders and contents of a landscape, even harder question seems to me of how to represent changes. How to talk about changes on a global scale. Sure, the animation used in the article [4] shows quite clearly the change of planting zones over time, but this is just one data point. And a very abstract one, since one sees it, says 'yes, wow, it's changing' and then goes on to make a coffee and forget about it. The closer to the global scale we go, the more abstract the story telling becomes, the less personal the story becomes, the less likely it is to reach the reader. In the last years in the Rhine region where I live, the Asian tiger mosquito was introduced. It is an invasive species that is able to survive in the new landscape because of climate change. It's just one anecdote of a changing landscape, but one that people are talking about since, well, the mosquito is biting them, forcing them to pay attention. No one is talking about the other changes. So my question still stands – if you are asking for quantifiable evidence on changing landscape, please define how it would look like so that you would be satisfied with it. Define the formatting of such data, of what constitutes a landscape, of what constitutes change. And how to gather such data on a global scale. And even harder, how to present the huge amount of data in a human readable way. By doing so, you would do an immense service to our understanding of the earth and the processes of life on it. Because, while the news of a new mosquito or a mountain growing in height spreads like wildfire, hardly anyone is paying attention to the small but significant changes around us. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/swedish-mountain-shrinks-by-two-metres-in-a-year-as-glacier-melts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/swedish-mounta... 2. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a34910714/why-mount-everest-and-swiss-alps-are-getting-taller/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a349107... 3. https://www.czo.wzw.tum.de/home.html https://www.czo.wzw.tum.de/home.html 4. https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/milligan-landscape-migration.gif https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/milliga...