At the annual British Ecological Society conference in 2015, the ECT ran a workshop on ‘Building an Ecological Time Machine: Learning How to Engage the Public with Experimental Ecology’. A competition was run for the best blog or vlog following a mock press conference in which attendees role-played journalists. Katie Murray from the University of Stirling won the competition with the following blog.
VWORP VWORP VWORP: The noise of an arriving Tardis, could that be the Doctor, here to save the planet in time for the end of the episode?! Alas, if only it were really possible to pop into the future and save the world or to nip back to the past to let us know where we are going to go wrong.
Communicating the peril of the planet is pretty tough and unfortunately there isn’t someone we can call on to come along and fix it all (or do we have number for the Tardis somewhere??). So how can we address the issue? How about some climate change predictions? This is all fine and well but when you have to know the outcome as close as possible for X, Y and Z, wouldn’t it be better to also have some ecological data to assist in the predictions? So maybe we can combine future predictions with long-term experiments that provide long-term data. This is what the Ecological Continuity Trust (ECT) aim to support, and maybe we can see this as building a kind of ecological time machine, allowing us to gaze into the future and see what it might be like under current rates of change (climate, pollution, etc.).
Getting philosophical for a moment, each of us is only present for a fraction of time on this planet, however ecosystems can be affected by many factors over a much longer timescale than we can see in a single human generation. Therefore, experimental data collected over just a few years may not be enough to see what effect something will have on an ecosystem over time. Supporting long-term data collection, the ECT can aid in stitching together generations of scientists, passing on data and experimental sites as if they were precious heirlooms (which in a sense, they are).
The ECT supports multiple projects that are conducting just this kind of research across the UK, for example at the Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory (BCCIL), which has been running since 1993. Research at Wytham (alongside Oxford and the Open Universities) includes the new ‘Millennium Experiment’ where future predictions of climate (for change in 50-100 years’ time) are being applied to grassland plots right now. Pretty cool, especially when you think that this allows for a comparison to current grassland, not exposed to changes in temperature or rainfall, and thus showing the effect of severe drought and raised temperatures to such an environment. Additionally, the setting up of projects like the Millennium Experiment allow extra treatments to be added to an ongoing set up. This could be investigating the effect of land management, pollution or even grazing.
In December 2015, I attended a workshop run by the ECT at the annual conference of the British Ecological Society to discuss their work with long-term projects like the one mentioned above. The workshop was designed to take on the role of a press conference that might be arranged to brief the British press on the important work supported by the ECT, following which we would all represent different media outlets and present a short news bulletin. Although fairly hysterical when comparing stereotypical broadcasts from the BBC and the Daily Mail, it was clear from playing Devil’s Advocate that it is quite hard to justify the usefulness of long-term data. It was obvious that a solution is wanted right now (with a stamping the proverbial foot!) and waiting for data is not necessarily always going to be popular. However, slow and steady wins the race they say, so maybe we need to wait and listen to data being collected by many different long-term studies that will allow us to make a more thorough prediction from multiple different environmental aspects.
It may be hard for some to link experiments assessing plant diversity on grassland with floods, tsunamis, unbearably hot summers and daffodils flowering in December (I’m looking at you UK December of 2015!). However the more evidence we can gather only adds more knowledge to allow us predict the future responses to many different man-made pressures on the environment (pollution, CO₂ release etc.).
By now, the Doctor would have restored calm, settled down the daffodils until the springtime and be putting away his sonic screwdriver ready for the next episode. However back on Earth and away from the fantasy world of science fiction, we are pushing forward with our long-term experiments, building our own ecological time machine and hoping we can get an answer, influence policy and slow down the inevitable change. And maybe, eventually, we can delete the number for the Tardis (wherever it may be stored).
