Narrator: The following presentation
is part of the Agronomy and Horticulture Seminar Series
at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
Caleb: My name's Caleb Roberts.
I'm the Assistant Unit Leader
at the Arkansas Cooperative Fish
and Wildlife Research Unit, a USGS employee.
And I was a former Post-Doc
and student at Nebraska
and the agronomy department.
And I'm happy to introduce Dr. Dan Uden today.
Who's speaking about teaching landscape systems.
Dan Uden is a Nebraska native
and he got his BA Concordia
and his master's and PhD at Lincoln
and a UNL and Ecology
and he has published many papers.
For instance, one that I've cited a million times
is in journal of applied ecology.
Quantifying spatial resilience
is passed that hundred citation mark.
We're excited to hear his talk today
and with that we'll take it
but Dan take it away.
Dan: Great.
Well, thank you Caleb
and thanks very much to all of you
joining me on a beautiful Friday afternoon
if you're here in Nebraska.
I'm very honored to be here
to be part of the Seminar Series
and to be sharing some of my ongoing efforts
around the development of my teaching program.
And really, I hope not not just sharing about it
but also continuing to make connections
and to learn from,
and even perhaps strategize
with many of you around it, moving forward.
And along those lines
that the title of the talk
you see on the slide is Teaching landscape Systems.
But it just as easily could have been learning
to teach landscape systems
or strategizing about teaching landscape systems
or finding my niche in teaching landscape systems
because I very much view this as an ongoing process
and work in progress.
In this position I taught my first course
during the January three week session a few months ago
that was a undergraduate level course
called Resilience Thinking in Landscape Systems.
And that was brand new something I developed.
Then right now I'm in the middle of my second one
which is great Plains ecosystems.
Of course, I've inherited for a few years
and that's 400/800-level.
And then in the fall 2021 semester
I'm looking forward to graduate Level Landscape Ecology.
So that's, what's on the, you know kind of the docket
for right now.
And as I work on rolling these classes
out the first time during the day to day
I find myself very much concerned
with getting the next thing done,
getting the next lecture recorded
or the next assignment or activity designed.
But I'm also trying to be very intentional about
thinking about and strategizing
and having conversations about the long-term.
And so I think in this talk today
you'll probably see elements of both of that.
And I hope that's something I can continue
to do going forward.
So this is, you know, a great way
to continue that growth, I think,
but before I get any deeper into that process
and content
I want to step back
and give a few highlights broad scale about myself
and my position and my work.
So who am I, and what do I do
and what do I want to do,
where do I want to contribute
and or hope to contribute and to accomplish.
So, as I think Caleb mentioned,
I'm an Assistant Professor
in my title is Resilience Spatial Scientist.
And my position is shared between two departments.
I'm in the school of natural resources
and the department of agronomy and horticulture
with SNR being the primary.
And on the SNR side,
I'm nested within the the applied climate
and spatial sciences program area.
And then on the Ag-Hort side
I'm in the range and forges group.
And then addition to those two departments,
I'm also, my position is affiliated
with UNL new center for resilience
in agricultural working landscapes.
And then I'm also increasingly involved
with the center for grasslands studies.
So as I move forward in this position
and think about teaching
and think about research, whatever it is.
I'm always trying to center myself
on that cross departmental mission and cross centers.
And so that's just a little bit about me
and my position background.
And as far as, as what I do,
what does it mean to be a spatial
or resilient spatial scientist?
Well, it means that I study
and I teach about systems very broadly,
but more specifically about landscape systems.
And I do that through the lens of spatial science
as well as systems thinking and resilience thinking.
So we're thinking about landscape systems
and how they're able to
or not able to maintain their functionality
their essential structures and functions
when they experienced shocks
or change or other forms of disturbance.
And so I do that as I mentioned
through the lens of spatial science.
So work has been very in my training
very heavy on remote sensing and GIS
and statistics and spatial modeling
and that sort of thing.
So in my lab, my students
and I are working on projects like some of the,
what you see in this side
where we're linking a state-of-the-art land cover data
with geospatial cloud computing
and resilience inspired metrics
that we've developed to detect and track,
and really provide early warning
for transitions in range on vegetation
throughout the Western US.
And we're doing this at a variety of scales
and in a variety of locations.
And on the teaching side,
things are distilled down a little bit more
to the fundamental concepts and ideas,
and in thinking about landscapes as systems
and as complex systems, really
and about identifying sources
of complexity in those landscape systems.
Whether that be positive
or negative feedbacks interactions
against different variables, external forcings,
these types of things,
they all influence the trajectory
and ultimately resilience of these complex systems,
these landscape systems.
And so I'm working on that in my teaching,
but I'm also, I'm taking on existing courses
like I mentioned, as well as what I'll call dormant courses
courses that are have been taught
but haven't taught for awhile
and I'm developing new courses
really around these ideas
about system thinking in landscape systems.
So that's then a little bit about what I do
as a resilience, spatial scientist,
but as far as what I want to do with that,
where do I hope to contribute
and what do I hope to contribute broadly.
That's a lot of it.
I want to contribute.
I want to contribute to efforts
to solve complex challenges
and grand challenges and landscape systems.
And to do that through the land grant mission
and the mission of the university
and the mission of the departments, I'm part of
where you see their mission statements here.
So that's all very kind of high level stuff,
especially from this perspective of that I have
where I'm just starting out on this journey.
That's where I hope to go
and what I hope to do.
But in the rest of the talk
I'm really going to get a little bit more concrete
about teaching and about teaching,
about landscape systems.
I'm gonna try address issues
like what the potential utility
or contributions of a systems approach is
when thinking about landscapes.
So, why systems thinking, why do it?
And then going to look at opportunities
that I see for linking what I'm doing
and linking that pursuit
to specific student learning outcomes
and content learning outcomes
within the Ag-Hort department in particular,
and especially related to the new plant
and landscape systems major.
And I'm gonna provide a couple of examples
of how I've done that,
or how I'm doing that
or would like to do that in my courses so far
how we're integrating systems,
thinking and systems approaches there,
whether it's looking at at ecological systems
or you know more of a social ecological systems
or even economic systems in some cases.
And then finally
I think that is a big piece that I'm interested in
and this is where the future discussion comes in
is thinking about future opportunities
and collaborations.
How I can fit in to what's already being done?
How can I build on that?
That's something I'm continually asking.
And then how can I bridge
to what comes later for students
whether it's future coursework, career, whatever?
But before I do any of that,
I think we need to back up
and talk about definitions a little bit
because I've been throwing around a lot of terminology
and might even call it jargon words
like landscapes and systems and resilience.
And I'm have very specific definitions
of each of those things,
but those things can mean different things
to different people
and even to different disciplines
in different departments.
So I think it's good to give an overview
as I do students in my courses,
a very foundational look at.
What do I mean when I say things like landscape systems?
And so hopefully that's an area
that can be productive as well.
I know I've had conversations with folks
who use the word landscape a lot
like Kim Todd here in the department.
And she's been so kind to me as someone who,
doesn't just necessarily use the word landscape
in the landscaping sense.
But I think there are a lot of connections to be made.
The same is true on the systems side.
And that's actually where I'll start
very fundamentally, foundationally.
What is a system?
Well, in the most fundamental sense,
a system is a collection of parts or components
that are interacting
and interdependent on one another.
And through these interactions and interdependency
they come together to form a broader whole
and that's the system
we could think of individual ants,
forming in a colony.
We could think of an ecological system being a system
a group of interacting organisms
and their environment
as we see here on this slide.
But I think when we need and we can
and we need to get a little more specific
when we use the word systems,
because there are a lot of different types of systems
out there.
And when I talk about ecosystems, for example
what I'm really talking about is a complex system.
And there are complex systems
and some even differentiate this out further
to complex adaptive systems.
But when we're talking about complex systems
we're talking about systems,
a special class of systems
that display hallmarks of complexity.
So a lot of complexity science places
like the Santa Fe Institute
and historically important work on complexity of systems
and some classic examples of complex systems
are social insect colonies
like ant colonies,
the human brain markets,
the internet
these are all complex systems
they exhibit hallmarks of complexity.
And so when we think about complex systems
and I'll be arguing really
that landscape systems are complex systems.
When we start thinking about complex systems
we start asking questions about,
how the components of that system work together
to produce complex behavior.
For example, how do ants
which are on their own individually
they're only capable of sending
and receiving a few signals
maybe at the most up to 15 or 20 signals?
But an entomologist can correct me on that.
But there are relatively few signals.
How do those interactions among individual ants
give rise to this larger complex behavior of the colony?
Where they're doing things like patrolling
their borders and working in the nursery
and collecting food,
and even doing things like building bridges
with their bodies,
that the rest of the colony can move across
or fire ants building rafts with their bodies
and floating in the water,
that sort of behavior.
How how does that complexity emerge
from those simple interactions?
The same question applies to brain activity.
How does a firing of synapses give rise to the complex
and creative behavior we see in the human brain
or how does the buying
and selling of stock shares produce this market system
that even complex algorithms
are incapable of fully predicting or understanding?
These are the sort of questions
we start to ask when we think about complex systems
and as I'll get to in a little bit
landscape systems actually contain all these things.
And in many cases,
they contain lots of human brains
making decisions about markets
and in various species interacting with one another.
And so there's a lot of complexity
in landscape systems at various scales.
But to get a little bit more explicit
about complex systems
and what sort of things we should expect
from complex systems.
There are a long list of characteristics,
or hallmarks of complexity.
Some people call them
that we should expect things like hierarchical structure
and in feedback loops
whether those be positive or negative.
And emergent behaviors where
we say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
is kind of the same that goes along with that.
Thresholds in these systems
where at some point along an important system, variable
a system crosses a point due to a feedback
or some other region where it flips
to an alternative state.
And so complex systems can alternate
between alternative States with different structures
and functions and feedbacks
that govern that behavior.
And so all these things give rise to complexity
and in complex systems.
And we don't have time to talk about them all here
but I do wanna go over a few.
And the first of those is hierarchical structure.
And we can start thinking about
how we see these things in landscape systems
because that's where we're eventually headed here.
But we gave the example of the ant colony
and the ant colony being a system
that's comprised of components of interacting
and interdependent ants.
And, but when we talk about hierarchical structure
we're talking about the fact that systems
are nested within systems
that are nested within systems.
So at one level of the hierarchy
is the individual ant
and it's a system in itself.
It contains, made up of interacting
and interdependent Oregon's
like we see the ant brain here in the lower left.
But then as you move up
the system of the aunt itself becomes a component
in the system of the colony.
And then of course there are various ant colonies
and other species plants
and organisms interacting with one another
in what makeup the ecosystem
in this case, a prairie ecosystem.
And we see this sort of similar hierarchical structuring
and all sorts of systems,
whether those be social systems
or economic systems or whatever.
But that's something
if we think we have a complex system on our hands
that's something we should expect from it.
Similarly, and very important
and something I like to focus on quite a bit
in my courses is feedbacks.
Complex systems, exhibit feedbacks.
And feedback is in the basic sense
where some change in a variable
in this case variable A
that causes that has an effect on variable B
and that change in variable B
that was experienced as a result of the change in A
somehow circles back to affect A again.
And so you have this reciprocal relationship here
and we can have both negative
and positive feedbacks and systems
and they're both important in different ways.
You can have a negative
or dampening also known as stabilizing feedbacks,
where in this case a change in say an increase in A
causes an increase in B
which circles back to actually decrease A.
So that's why it's stabilizing
because it kind of balances itself out.
And often negative feedbacks
tend to keep systems closer to equilibrium,
tend to keep them in balance.
On the other hand, positive feedbacks
they're also often known as amplifying
or destabilizing feedbacks.
This is more of the runaway train vicious cycle effect
where an increase in variable C
increases D which increases C
and so on and so forth until, some sort of limit
is imposed or another feedback
mediates this increase
or runs out of space of it's a species or whatever.
But the positive feedbacks
tend to often push systems away from equilibrium.
And so this is you can see some complexity emerge
as a result of feedbacks.
If we talk about a landscape system
that I'm more familiar with
in my research and background
that would be ecological systems
and rangelands systems.
And so you could have an example
of a negative feedback
in the tall grass prairie ecosystem
which surrounds us here in Lincoln.
But this image is a grazing bison
in the tall grass prairie.
It's from Allen Knapp and company down at Kansas State
and in Manhattan, Kansas
And what you have going on
in the tall grass prairie here is a tendency
for several grass species to dominate
in the tall grass prairie.
Especially oftentimes if there's fire
but if there's not grazing these
they often call them the big four grasses
Big Bluestem, Little Bluestem,
Switchgrass, Indian grass.
They become the dominant species
and especially certain species like Big Bluestem.
Often you almost get a monoculture
and but
bison in the system,
they favor these grasses.
They selectively graze on them.
So if you have an increase in these grasses
it can be met with increase grazing pressure from bison
which actually then kind of dampens
that the dominance of that grass,
and it opens up space in the prairie
or other less competitive species,
Forbes, Wildflowers, that sort of thing.
So in this way, you know
the bison grazing in the system
increases diversity
in the the species composition.
And this relationship
gets even a little bit more complex
when you introduce fire into the system
because it turns out
that where bison Grey's influence
where the fire burns
and you get a lot of complexity
that emerges from that as well.
But we're gonna talk a little bit more
about that sort of feedback.
We talk about pattern, process,
feedbacks and landscape systems.
But that's just one example
of a negative feedback in a landscape system,
one that I'm familiar with.
You can also have positive feedbacks
and positive feedbacks
in the tall grass prairie system.
And this could happen
through encroachment of shrubs
maybe eastern redcedar trees,
various other shrubs.
But you have a positive feedback
and I just described it a bit ago
where a part of it a bit ago
where you have increased grass biomass
in the system
and that is fuel for fire,
which can result in an increase in fire frequency.
And so you have this well-known
well-documented relationship between fire and grass.
And this is something we know that
where we tend to have frequent fire,
where also grass follows the fire,
especially in systems like the Great Plains.
And they have in this diagram of this positive feedback
they actually have it all being decreases,
but that's just, that's fine.
The point is that all the signs
are in the same direction.
So in this system,
you have a decrease in biomass
due to a variety of external factors,
which means less fuel for fire,
which means less fire
and that what this does then
is less fire means more shrubs.
And eventually you cross a threshold in this system
where the system flips from one
where it's no longer really being governed
by this feedback between grass and fuel and fire
and the systems structures change
and its functions change,
and its feedbacks are different
and it flips to an alternative state.
So that's also kind of bringing in
some of that complex system behavior
about how a feedback,
in this case a positive one
can push a system across a threshold
and into an alternative state.
Just another example of a complexity.
And when we, I mentioned this a bit before,
but we often talk about emergent behavior
and complex systems and self-organization.
And the quote that is often used to pull greater
than the sum of the parts
due to things like feedbacks and thresholds.
You can have simple interactions
between components that give rise
to complexity at the system level.
And so that's something that we keep in mind
when we think about landscape systems
and that really takes us.
So that was systems and complex systems.
And so when I'm talking about systems
thinking in my courses,
I'm also often talking about complex systems,
systems thinking,
and looking for feedbacks
looking thresholds for emergent properties
in these complex systems of the world.
But that really still leaves the second half
of landscape systems, the landscape part.
And this is another great question.
Is what is a landscape?
Is a landscape a garden?
Is a landscape a range land, or a crop land
or even a city, or maybe a wetland complex?
These are landscapes here in Nebraska
that we see all around us.
And I would argue that these are all landscapes.
I have a very, I guess, broad definition of landscape.
Landscape being
any heterogeneous area of interest.
So it contains some sort of variability
and you of course see that in these images
whether it's species composition or typography,
or the bare ground and vegetated ground.
All these sorts of things are our heterogeneity
in these landscapes systems.
But I will add and this is another important thing
that scale is very important to talk about
when you're talking about landscapes.
And I would argue that
there is no correct scale
at which to view a landscape.
And in fact, the multi-scale perspective
is often what enhances our understanding of landscapes
and landscape systems.
To give an example of what I'm talking about
there a little bit, I have four images here
and they're all of the same location
but they're taking it dress scales.
I like to show this to students to illustrate this.
These are actually photos from out at Mead
at the East Nebraska Research and Extension Center there.
This is from a few years back,
Rob Mitchell was showing me around
some of the switchgrass bioenergy plots there.
And within one of these plots and lower left
you see an individual partridge pea plant.
And on that you can of course see the crab spider.
I'm not sure which species
and I'm not sure which species of bee that is either,
but there's a crab spider preying on a bee.
And from the perspective of this crab spider
that individual partridge pea plant
really could qualify as a landscape
because that's where he spends most of its life probably.
And there's heterogeneity.
There's all sorts of structure there to interact with
and for where it can interact with other species too.
But if we take a step further out to more,
we would in ecology called the plot scale,
or maybe the patch
we can see partridge pea flowers blooming there
but we can also see...
I see mayor's tail and I see switchgrass.
And so you have heterogeneity
in the form of plant species composition there
and diversity.
And if we go further out to,
I'm trained as a landscape ecologist.
So when we get to the third and fourth images
those are what I'm used to looking at.
When I say landscapes
we can see some aerial imagery,
probably NAIP imagery
where you can see all those switchgrass plots
lined up next to one another,
and they're surrounded and maybe a field,
maybe that's a surrounding
kind of a another switchgrass field or something.
And then finally in the upper, right
we get all sorts of heterogeneity in land cover.
We have crops, we have developed areas.
We have, you know, they're building sites in there
and it looks like small grains
and corn soybean and center pivot irrigation.
And so, these are all really of the same location
but just at different scales.
And I would argue that when you talk about landscape
that can mean just about anything,
but it's important to talk about the scale
or scales that you're viewing the system at.
And this is something I'm really striving to do
in my courses is bringing a multi-scale perspective
to things.
So that finally gets us to landscape systems.
We've talked about systems
in complex systems and now landscapes
and it really raises this fundamental question.
And that is our landscapes systems.
And I've hinted around enough about it by now
that I do think they are systems,
but it's really an interest thing one.
And it's one that you see this book here
by Graeme Cumming, who's a ecologist
and resilience scholar currently based in Australia.
He poses that question in this book of his,
his 2011 book,
Spatial Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems.
Landscape systems.
Which is an important question.
And any reasons that they are
they do display that cohesion.
You have different components
in landscapes interacting with one another.
And if they are systems, are they complex systems?
And if they're complex systems
are they complex adaptive systems?
And again he says, "that they are."
We of course know that landscapes
contain all sorts of complex systems.
But are they complex systems in their own, right?
Can we consider them that?
And the reason that that's an important question
is because if they are,
then it stands to reason
that there are all sorts of things
that, all sorts of things
about complex systems
that we know from complexity science
that could in theory be brought over
into landscape systems.
You know, thinking about again regime shifts
or state shifts
and adaptation and learning
and landscape systems
and all sorts of emergent properties.
We should be able to bring this knowledge
into our study of landscape systems
and use it to address challenges.
And at the same time, we should be able
to take understanding
from landscape systems
and have that contribute to the broader theory
in science of complexity science.
So that's a little bit about
really going into depth about landscape systems.
And we do indeed this whole kind of list of traits
of complex systems.
We do see landscapes exhibiting these.
And I don't have time again, to go through them all.
But I would like to talk a little bit more about feedbacks
because that's something I do a lot of in my courses.
And so, first of all, I did mention
I'm trained as a landscape ecology
so when I think about landscapes
I really like to think about pattern and process
and the relationship between those two things.
And specifically as I'll get
to in a little bit feedbacks between pattern and process.
So this is very much about thinking
about landscapes spatially
and doing it at multiple scales.
And, you know, in our minds,
we often view this as a one-way relationship
that we can observe a pattern.
Maybe it's something like the fact
that all these cedar trees are growing
along this fence line,
but they're not growing out in what looks like a Hade,
a Hade, Meadow.
And that's a pattern it's very clear.
And then we say, what's the process driving that?
What's probably the fact that
those trees aren't getting sheared off
every year when they Hade
or maybe it's the fact that birds perch on that fence.
And they disperse cedar berries
and they happen to grow right there.
And maybe it's both of those things.
And so we, but we usually
we often stop it right there and say, okay
there's the pattern.
What's the process of driving it?
But it's important to note,
I'll get to actually let me back up for a minute
and talk a little bit more about pattern.
So when I say pattern
that's a little bit ambiguous,
but there's a lot of work done
on what is pattern at its fundamental level.
And it turns out there a few,
fundamental components of pattern
and two of those are composition and configuration.
So composition talks about what it is that's there.
This can be the what's present,
or how abundant is it.
Whereas configuration is about how it's arranged
how connected is the thing that's there,
how dense is it.
And so you could also,
you can think about the importance of this
in the sense of, for example furniture in a room,
the functionality of a room
is very much determined
by the furniture that's in it
but not only what furniture is in it,
but how it's arranged.
And you can do a lot to a room
by rearranging the furniture.
We do it all the time in my house.
And so this kind of matrix here
shows some of the different possibilities
that you can have
in kind of a theoretical landscape systems,
but different combinations
of composition and configuration.
So on the X axis you have configuration
how something is arranged.
You can also think of that as connectivity.
And so you could have something
that doesn't display very much connectivity.
So it's very, it's not clumpy at all.
It's sparsely distributed all the way up
to something that has a high degree of connectivity.
So it's all gathered in this clump, in the corner here.
And so all of these
every single box is a different combination
but then you also have on the y-axis you have composition
or the amount of something.
So you go from having not very much down at the bottom
upto a high abundance at the top.
And so we had all these different combinations
where you have the lower left
is not very much of something
and it's very dispersed.
It's not very connected
all the way up to the upper right
where you have a lot of something
and it's very densely connected, very patchy.
And so when we think about pattern in landscapes
we're often cuing in to one of these things
or a combination of them.
And so back to the pattern process relationship,
a lot of times we see a pattern
and we explain it with a process
But when we're talking about landscape systems
and especially as complex systems,
we really observe that
this is a reciprocal relationship
that not only does process drive pattern,
but pattern drives process.
What's there affects what happens there.
And then what happens there affects what's there.
And there are a lot of examples in of this.
One of them is in this paper
you see this relationship between flowering plants
and pollinators in a landscape.
And maybe you have a certain density
of those flowering plants
and it attracts pollinators.
And then what you get is cross-pollination
which is in theory good for the population
of those plants to not have
as opposed to having a lot of self pollination.
And so this is all good until maybe
that density starts to decrease
and you start to get reduced visitation from pollinators.
And that leads to increasing self pollination
which decreases the appeal of the four resources.
And at some point
you can basically erode the resilience
of this population of flowering trees in this case.
And some disturbance in the system
pushes it across a threshold
and into an alternative state.
Here it has the degraded state of the system.
But you can see how hat relationship
that really spatial relationship
between landscape pattern
and process kind of regulates that system
and sets it up for being resilient to that disturbance
as opposed to experiencing in a transition.
That's just one, one example.
We can also talk about our previous example
I mentioned the relationship between grazing bison
and grass and fire.
So where the bison graze influences,
where there's a burn
and both of those things influence where,
which species have room to grow
and which are dominant.
So it produces this complexity in the system
and in that case, by creating diversity
through that interaction of fire and grazing.
So that was, kind of a lot of,
we're still on that definition phase I talked about,
but I think it's important and it's distinctions.
I tried to make in my courses
that really a landscape is any area
you can call almost any heterogeneous area landscape,
but we should be explicit about the scale
at which reviewing the system.
And whenever possible
we should really strive for a multi-scale perspective.
We talked how landscapes do meet
the criteria of being a system
and really being a complex system.
They exhibit characteristics
like hierarchical structure
and positive and negative feedbacks
and emergent properties.
And we just saw an example of some of that
and for example, pattern, process relationships.
Caleb: Okay. So all of that is some background on
I guess the world, the landscape system
according to Dan, which I'm always interested
in discussing more and broadening.
But I wanna get back to systems thinking.
And what's the utility of systems thinking
and how can we use it?
And specifically, how can it contribute
to our teaching programs?
Dan: One reason for using systems thinking
is that the world is a system.
The world is full of systems
and those systems are often complex systems.
So when we work to engage these grand challenges
such as, having productive, sustainable
and resilient landscapes.
I think a systems level approach
and multi-scale approaches
where we bring expertise together
from different areas.
And think about, at this scale.
What's the context?
What are the externalities?
What are the feedbacks?
What are the critical feedbacks?
Maybe they're even missing feedbacks
that we would like to have in our systems
that aren't there.
I want to train my students to be asking
and thinking these sorts of questions.
And it really is just using
what they already know
and what they already learn about.
In many cases, a systems thinking foundation
that's already being established in other courses
I want to find opportunities
to build on that sort of thing.
And when I do that,
I've had a lot of discussions
and I've been very encouraged by those discussions
that I guess the way I've been engaged
by the teaching faculty
and encouraged to ask these sort of questions
of where I can fit in.
And in talking with Dan and Sam even in recent weeks,
I've started looking at some of the SLOs
and the CLOs specifically related to the new major.
And I've picked out just a few of them here
that they seem to ring a bell
a little bit more related to my background
and in particular, in regard to systems thinking.
So, how can I, and these are the areas I'm looking,
I'm trying to hone in on areas
to where I can contribute and add something.
And so thinking about things like plant systems
being complex networks systems,
being more than the sum of the parts
that's emergence that we talked about
and then systems alternating between stable states.
We talked about that with a,
for example, a tall grass prairie system
flipping to woodland, for example,
and feedback's driving that.
So these are all things that I think,
yeah, I can contribute here.
And if we get to go to the content learning outcomes
we have, get a little more specific here
different kinds of ecosystem interactions,
plants are part of in natural and agroecosystems.
And we talk about land use and an ecosystem services
which is also something I'm,
we're talking about that right now
and in Great Plains Ecosystems actually.
And we're talking about agroecosystems
and tall grass prairie ecosystems and these sort of things.
So I see some opportunities here
to really contribute here.
Again, this is an overview
of some of my current courses
that I've either M teaching
I've recently taught or plan to teach in the future.
And I have a good mix here of undergraduate level.
This new one I developed was purely undergraduate.
And then Great Plains Ecosystems is 440/840
and then landscape ecology at this point
is an 800-level course for graduate students.
where we really get into
the theory of landscape ecology
and those sort of analyses.
But it's something I'd like
to diversify a little bit
with different types of landscape systems.
But I just wanna give one example here
of project that a class activity,
whereas, it's kind of an experiment,
but it was from LA Great Plains Ecosystems
a few weeks ago.
Where, I was encouraged by Dan
to hone in on a SLO and maybe a CLO
and look at how it's being addressed in my classes.
And that made me think about,
how I could get to a higher level
of understanding on that.
So in this activity from a few weeks ago,
we just met in class.
They didn't, this wasn't a sign beforehand,
but we assigned this, given this paper by Alan Nap.
This is that same 1999 paper.
We saw the bison grazing on the burn prairie.
And this is just a great description.
It's talking about the bison having this Keystone role.
So it's describing the tall grass prairie system.
And the challenge for the students
was to go into breakout rooms to get this paper.
They hadn't seen it yet.
And then to develop a model
with some modeling software
to represent the tall grass prairie landscape system
And then to identify feedbacks.
And I didn't give them a scale here
and I didn't tell him to do multiple scales
just wanted to see what would emerge.
And I was very impressed
with some of the things the groups came up with.
I just took a screen shot of one of the groups projects
and they shared and went around
and talked about this group was talking about,
that grass fire or the fire grazing cycle.
I was referring to there,
they were talking about carbon in the system
and how carbon was flowing
and whether it's being stored below ground or above ground
and how the bison were interacting with that.
And it looks like kind of a spaghetti monster right now
but when they step through it,
I was really impressed by that,
the systems level thinking
and their knowledge of
of the rangelands system.
And so I'd say it went pretty well,
but we're in reflecting on this a little bit,
here's some more outputs from that
where you can see what the most connected variables
in the system are
and how many in connections
and out connections there are
these sorts of things.
But you know and this is a 400-level class.
And I know that they're getting some systems
in some systems thinking in other classes,
I know HORT 100 they're getting a lot
on vegetable systems and SAMs
and we have the range land systems major,
and they're engaging with that sort of material there.
So, I think it's clear that they,
they're have some systems thinking going on
and they're capable of putting these pieces together
in thinking about landscape systems.
When I looked at that activity,
I think I was, if we look at Bloom's Taxonomy,
I was probably still down here
in the understand and apply,
they're basically taking that paper
and modeling the system.
And some kind of triangulating
where they're maybe but especially
when we talk about the graduate students.
My goal is to get them here,
to be thinking about systems
to be more analyzing systems and evaluating systems.
So building systems models
and then not only identifying feedbacks
but looking at how an increase in one variable
could influence another variable
three connections down the line.
Or maybe what are the thresholds in the system
and what sort of alternative States
could these systems exist in.
And I think there are lots of options for doing this,
even within the software.
There are options for doing that
for turning the knob up and down on different variables
and seeing how other variables respond
given, how you've weighted things in that system.
So, but that's just an just one idea.
Other software
I'm really been impressed
by how students have interacted with
this is the rangeland analysis platform
which Dereck and I have collaborated a lot
on providing some products
that are hosted on here related to transitions
and in range on systems.
And you see here this analysis of trends
and landscape systems.
How of the vegetation and these landscapes
changed over time.
You can do this analysis at different scales,
but students are very interested in
going to that place that they know in the Great Plains
and they have that detailed expert knowledge
of that location.
And then looking at the trends that were there,
for a lot of them even,
decades before they were born.
So, and of course, thinking
about things like precipitation and drought effects.
And so these are just some of the tools
that I'm starting to integrate
into my teaching moving forward.
And wanna leave plenty of time for questions
and discussion here,
but I'll just end by saying that
what I'm really interested in is continuing
to think about a diversity of landscape systems.
If I'm teaching landscape ecology,
I'd like to to bring in case studies
from different systems, from a diversity of systems.
Maybe that aren't as often
included in landscape ecology textbooks.
The same thing for the resilience thinking
and landscape systems
to be able to define landscape systems broadly
maybe according to the student's major area of interest.
And then for them to use those same principles
of systems thinking to analyze that system
that think at different scales
to think about what's around the system,
what are the externalities
and ultimately maybe to get a gauge
on what the resilience of that system is
and what sort of disturbances it might experience.
So I guess that's mostly an invitation to,
or something I view as an opportunity to collaborate
because I don't obviously don't have detailed knowledge
of all these systems.
I'm very interested in,
maybe developing a repository of case studies
that I could introduce into my courses,
and then maybe even could contribute
to other courses as well.
So again to find where this sort of thing
can fit in not only in AG-court but in SNR as well.
So with that, I think I'm probably about
at a good time to wrap it up here
and I'm happy to review anything
or answer any questions or write them down
and think about them, but, yeah, again.
Thank you for your time and for joining today.
Caleb: That was a great presentation, Dan.
Thanks.
I'll ask you a question, Dan.
So how, what's your experience
with getting students to think at multiple scales?
What are the barriers to the cross scale thinking?
Dan: Yeah, well, you bring up a really
another layer of complexity.
I think there, because and we do a lot of this.
In resilience thinking
is to not just think at multiple scales,
but to think cross scale
to sort of think about how components
are not only interacting within their scale.
But with other scales that you can think of that
with other levels of that heart hierarchy.
Because that is in theory,
one of the greatest sources of complexity
in systems, we're used to thinking about
top down pressure in systems,
from a higher scale.
But you also have interactions going the other way.
Although we all there aren't always as noticeable.
So I will just say that that is a good question.
And I haven't really, you know, even scale
I've taken a more gentle approach to introducing it.
And so cross scale is still on my list
of complexity giants to tackle.
(laughs)
So, but that's a essential question.
So you a good one.
Caleb: That's a tough one,
so but good that you're working in there.
So it looks like Sam Wartman has raised his hands.
Sam: Thanks Dan, for a good presentation.
I'm looking at this slide here
and I see, next to the, you know, kind of the aerial image
of the Midwest and the top left there
we've got that next kind of a raised bed, urban garden.
Dan: Yeah.
Sam: So that's a good parallel there
because I'm thinking, we've got people
and we've got students in our department
that work at both those scales are there.
And I liked what you were talking about
with pattern and process.
Are there patterns and processes
that you see in that top left image
that could inform patterns
and processes and even a backyard garden?
And if not, then are there things
that you could teach a student
who works at that backyard scale
about pattern and process
and how to go about
like a similar problem solving process I guess?
So I guess my general question is,
how do you communicate with students
who are working at these two very different scales
and teach them similar skills?
Dan: Well, that's a good question.
And I don't have any,
I guess I haven't explicitly thought about that before
but the first thing that came to my mind
was when you said that was to try
to think about processes
that are operating at both of those scales.
You know, we could think of,
I was thinking of nutrient cycling
was the first thing that came to my mind,
which again is not my area of of in-depth expertise,
but if we could look at...
Again, you did bring in you said the Ray is bed.
So there is the topography element to that too.
And so I think that there would be some potential there
to think about flows of things within the raised beds
as well as flows of things within the,
you know kind of the agricultural matrix.
This is out by Utica Nebraska.
This is North Lake, that's a town of Utica there
and this is North Lake basin.
It's a game and parks property.
And so it's this wetland complex
but then there's some of these wetlands
that are farmed through, of course, as we see.
And so, the flows issue is very strong there too,
as far as where the water's flowing
and the nutrient flows.
And that's probably sounding a little bit elementary
to someone, you've thought in-depth
about these vegetable systems.
But that's I guess where I'd start
is trying to look for some commonalities
across those scales that we could start comparing
because that's, I think,
you can always compare across scales
and you can always compare.
(laughs)
Making the comparisons,
I think are where the insights
come with this sort of thing.
So the first thing I'd do
is look for something to compare.
Sam: Yeah, and I think that there's something
to be said for just learning that the pattern
and process and systems approach.
I think it will just as a diagnostics tool, right.
So whether you're looking at patterns of the landscapes,
at the broad landscape scale
or the backyard scale.
I think there's a skill and an art to that
that students can benefit from practicing.
Dan: Yes, I agree.
And that when you were talking
it just one of the people I had discussions
with when I was just starting out was
I think it was Sidney Everhart
and she was talking about these patterns on a tree,
like, so she was working in three dimensions
talking about fungus and fruit,
I think, or something like that.
And so, it raises even the possibility
for bringing the increased dimension
that dimensionality into it too.
I'm used to thinking in 2D.
I have to admit from aerial imagery.
Sam: Thanks, Dan.
Dan: Yeah. Thank you.
Caleb: Great, great question there, Sam.
So Dan what do you think
that the Sam's question kind of made me
think about the comparison similarities?
What about the other hand where you see divergence
and these things and where you see
like that manifesting importantly for us
to learn for agricultural systems
and rangelands systems
Dan: You mean differences in different scales
or differences in systems?
Caleb: Yep.
Dan: Yeah.
That's, I mean, I think that's a good one.
I think there's a lot to be done
with thinking about context.
What's the context of the system?
And so, it take that example
of the wetlands in this picture
you have the wetlands that are within this.
This is a conservation property, that game and parks
and you have the wetlands that are not far away.
There probably are species dispersing
wetland dependent species in a wet here
dispersing back and forth
between these wetlands there.
Maybe even the flow,
they're connect the basins might be connected
during a heavy rain.
But the context of those systems is different.
And so we would have one,
we would call it a wetland system
and when we might even call it an agroecosystem
or something.
And so I'm again thinking of the role of space there.
The fact that they're very close to one another
same thing with these wetlands
on the other side of the road here.
They're connected in many ways to one another
and they're very similar systems
but their context is different.
And so again, I think I would go back to comparisons
and thinking about,
especially in an agroecosystem
some of the role of context
and interaction with processes in the Ag system,
whatever that would be.
I think I took that down the right direction.
(laughs)
Caleb: It was a pretty open direction,
so no wrong direction there.
I guess I will just point out that Dan.
I was kind of thinking of some of the others Dan's work
but with what you mentioned earlier
when he was doing boundary detection and ecosystems.
So I, and this wetland was making me think of the
how the boundaries manifest
and where they come apart and come similar
and then they kind of break apart there, so.
Dan: Yeah, boundaries is something I'm very interested in
in the sense of systems of trying to detect
where you can move from one system to another
and at what scale.
And, and so that's kind of the fundamental idea
behind a lot of my research in detecting changes,
not just over time
but changes in space
when you move from one system into another one
or from one regime into another one.
Caleb: Thank you Dan for this awesome talk.
Dan: Thank you.