Seeing the Big Picture: Biocomplexity Grant Helps Put the Pieces Together
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The new word on the block is “Biocomplexity,” a word used to describe the many layers that make up an ecosystem and how those layers interact with and affect each other.
A new $1.4 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation will allow researchers to unravel the complexities of dynamics created by interactions between humans and Lake Erie. Further, it will allow them to make more sophisticated predictions about various outcomes at a level and in a way never before possible.
David Culver, professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, is the principal investigator on the grant, which involves 16 researchers in diverse disciplines, including, in addition to biology, agricultural economics, civil and biological engineering, physics and geography.
Culver is no stranger to the complexities of Lake Erie dynamics; he has studied food web/nutrient input interactions for years. He was also the first to spot zebra mussels and had the wisdom to known what that might mean for the long-term health of Lake Erie.
An initial $100,000 NSF grant funded a three-year Incubation Project, whose purpose was to bring groups together to do preliminary studies. Culver relates that an important goal has been figuring out ways and approaches to working with each other, as well as structuring the work in a way that will yield meaningful results.
“Prior to this, of course, we were in our own worlds. Part of our challenge has been to come up with a common language as we all tend to have our own very specific language that is tied to our disciplines. Forging a common language is critical to creating the complex mathematical models needed to deal with the work we will be doing, as well as helping us to formulate what questions to ask.”
The strength of such a team approach is that each discipline brings a level of expertise that enhances the problems that are being tackled as a whole and allows for more of a “big picture” view. For example, Culver is interested in the way nutrients affect productivity of the fish dependent on the food web, civil engineers are looking at things like light, wind stress and movements, while agricultural economists view the lake as a product or commodity that has an actual dollar value.
All have pieces of the puzzle. This grant is the key that will allow them to put those pieces together in a meaningful way. “We have begun to see that an interdisciplinary project better answers our questions of how things work,” Culver says and elaborates, “The idea of this initiative is to look at the kinds of processes involved that are affected by complexity in general, processes that tend to happen on different scales. For example, the physicist might be collecting heat input data on an hourly basis, I may only collect plankton samples every two months and the economists are probably only looking at land value every 10 years, while typically developers work in 20-30 year cycles. Feedbacks often generate surprises because of time lags.”
It is a given that the dynamics are always changing, but the goal of this project is to more precisely predict those shifts in dynamics, which will ultimately protect the lake while allowing people to enjoy what it offers.
The basic issue is this: when the lake improves, it becomes more attractive to the public--they want to live near it, boat and fish on it; that, in turn, can cause environmental impacts that affect the lake in a negative way making it less attractive; then another cycle begins. As Culver succinctly puts it, “people love it to death,” and adds, “Our primary focus is to pay particular attention to specific points where humans interact with the lake and vice-versa.”
One of the values of this project is that it can be used as a model for virtually any large lake. Changes associated with human activities are issues common to every large lake, which is typically viewed as a significant resource; access to a vast area of freshwater just naturally causes humans to gather for food, transportation and recreation. The advantage of using Lake Erie is that studies have been done on Lake Erie for more than 30 years, so a lot of data is readily available to serve as a base.
Originally published Autumn 2004
