 Hi, I'm Oliver Gauchet and I work as the Restoration Coordinator for Ecosystem Restoration Camps as well as the host of the Abundant Edge Podcast. In today's presentation, I want to give a broad overview of some of the cycles, relationships and connections that govern life in the ecosystems around this planet so that we can better understand how to interact with them in a beneficial way. Alright, so let's go through a quick introduction to Earth's ecologies. Now obviously this is a very broad topic and I'm only going to be skimming through some of the most important things that illustrate patterns and relationships in the forces that govern life on our planet. So let's take a look at macro and micro forces. Macro being the larger ones, the bigger patterns that are sort of outside of our control and these include climate, gas and water cycles, weather events, all of which are very closely interrelated. And then we'll take a look at smaller or micro cycles and relationships like micro climates, life cycles and food webs and compare and contrast some of the similarities and patterns that repeat at these different scales. So let's take a quick look at the Copping Geiger climate classifications. Now the reason why we're using this as references is because it's one of the most common references for climate classification used around the world and it's broken up into different groups. Number A is tropical climates, B dry climates, C temperate climates, D continental climates and E polar climates. And you can see on the map here these very large swasses of red and those are the dry kind of tropical deserts. And this is where you'll have the least amount of rainfall and the highest temperatures even though some of the places that are actually the driest are your polar climates like in the Arctic and the Antarctic. In between your dark blue is your wet tropical climates and things start to move out from there and are determined by all kinds of things including proximity to water, wind patterns, the topography of the land, mountains, valleys, low points, flatlands, hills and such and the vegetation that is predominant in those areas. There's a lot of things that sort of determine this. My own climate classification on the eastern side of Catalonia near Barcelona is between a CSA and a CSB, these kind of subcategories of the larger climates which would be a hot or a warm summer Mediterranean climate. And you can find exactly the classification for your climate by looking this up. There's a great resource on Wikipedia for Copping Geiger climate classifications that can help you find your own. Now though climate is not something that we can really influence on an individual basis, as a species we've been influencing the climate for about 50 to 60 years since the industrial revolution. And in this graph you can see it illustrated the way that things have changed over the last 800,000 years long before humans were even in influence on the planet. And the parts per million in our atmosphere of CO2 have mostly stayed balanced in this time period between about 300 parts per million down to about 160 parts per million. And this is a fairly short range and represents very small overall temperature differences over time and goes from sort of a warm period of interglacial at the higher ends and the ice ages down at the lower ends of parts per million. At the very end at the far right you can see since 2018 we are now up to about a 407 parts per million average and this has occurred over just about the last 50 years. The highest previous concentration was 300,000 and now that we're well outside of the range that humanity has thrived in over this time there's a lot of things that are changing as a result. This graph illustrates that since 1950 there has been a huge increase in climate related hydro meteorological disasters. Now this doesn't count geophysical disasters which are the ones in gray at the bottom it's the blue that we're looking at and of course the economic damage which is represented by the red line that correlates pretty closely to this. Obviously these types of disasters do a huge amount of damage to our infrastructure and our built environments and are extremely costly. This is just one of the impacts of this climate change. Now climate change on land is actually a small fraction of what is being felt globally all over and more than 90% of the heat from this global warming is being absorbed by the oceans and up to 25% of the CO2 is also being absorbed by the seas. This results in warmer oceans that have less oxygen and are increasing in acidity which lead to things like sea level rise as the polar ice caps melt, bleaching due to acidification of coral reefs, toxic algae which can also be contributed by the increase in nitrates and nutrients in runoffs from streams and agriculture, loss of habitat with lower oxygen levels, acidification which is detrimental to the shells in a lot of marine life, and decrease in fisheries and general fish populations. And since we talk about carbon so often it's worth taking a look at the carbon cycle and exactly how it affects different aspects of life on earth. Now carbon is stored in a number of different places around the earth including the atmosphere, the terrestrial biosphere which is land base, the ocean and sediments in the earth's interior. Now CO2 is just one of the greenhouse gases but is the most prominent but it also includes methane. And CO2 is removed through process of photosynthesis as plants inhale or respire CO2 and exhale oxygen. CO2 is also dissolved in water and forms carbonic acid in water bodies including the ocean, rivers and lakes. The terrestrial biosphere or all of the organic carbon represented in life both above and inside of the top layer of the soil is cycled through the atmosphere through combustion and respiration. Photosynthetic life breathes in carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen for the most part. Now the ocean holds 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere especially in the layers of the deeper ocean and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is also dissolved in the water like I mentioned earlier. Photosynthesis in the earth's interior include things like fossil fuels. 80% of the carbon in the earth's crust is held in limestones while 20% of the earth's crust carbon is held in carogens which we often call fossil fuels and come in different forms like coal and petroleum. Naturally these can be released in geologic events like volcanoes or hotspots. Obviously more recently we've been extracting them artificially through mechanical means and burning them as fossil fuels which has contributed to the huge explosion of percentages in the atmosphere at the moment causing climate change. Now let's take a look at the oxygen cycle. Oxygen is a very abundant element in our world. Mostly it's found in things like silicates and oxidized minerals in the earth, iron and things like that. Over 20% of the atmosphere by volume is oxygen. It's also present in a lot of other atmospheric gases like ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapor and others. Photosynthetic life produces most of the free oxygen in the air while producing sugars from CO2, water and sunlight. Some oxygen is produced by solar radiation when it breaks down water vapor in the air. Keep in mind solar radiation is quite corrosive to a lot of different gases and in breaking apart H which is the hydrogen molecule and the two oxygen it creates free oxygen. The main way that oxygen is lost from the atmosphere is through respiration, from terrestrial life and through natural decay. Now the nitrogen cycle is often overlooked but is a huge portion of our atmosphere. 78% of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. Now nitrogen is fixed in the soil when it's converted by bacteria or during lightning storms. A lot of lightning storms actually create 5 to 10 billion kilograms per year of nitrogen into the soil. Now these bacteria are essential for making nitrogen available to plants. Most of the atmospheric nitrogen is actually turned into ammonia by bacteria in exchange for carbohydrates from plant root exudates. Soil bacteria oxidize ammonia which is otherwise toxic to plants into nitrite and other bacteria process the nitrite into nitrate. Denitrification is the process of conversion of nitrates back into nitrogen gas which is done by anaerobic bacteria often in swamps and wet soils. Now human interference into the nitrogen cycle via nitrogen fertilizers and applications has caused damage to many waterways and our oceans by overloading them with nutrients that cause algal blooms and a reduction of oxygen that is available to the other life forms in the water. And lastly let's talk about the water cycle. Now I'm sure all of you learned about the water cycle back in primary school and is mostly related to the transformation of different stages from water vapor into condensed liquid water that falls as rain, runs into rivers, lakes and oceans and is evaporated back again as water vapor as it cycles. The transformation of water from a solid to a liquid to a gas represents large energy exchanges often a lot of water is held and kept out of this cycle when it freezes and is stored at the poles or in glaciers. From there it can take hundreds if not thousands of years for it to cycle back into the system. Evaporation purifies water and replenishes fresh water to sources back on land so this process is essential for all of our terrestrial life. Water in the form of both ice and in its liquid form are erosive forces that help to deposit minerals across the land through the process of erosion. So now that we've taken a look at some of the macro cycles and relationships on this planet let's scale it down and take a look at some of the micro. So we've looked at some of the cycles that form our climates and govern the patterns of weather. The difference between climate is that it's a longer time frame of measurement of weather. Weather is what's happening in the moment or in a couple of days and weeks and climate is the overall pattern of what usually happens in an area. Microclimates can be different from the macroclimate even though they are still subject to the same forces. Things like sun and shade, either windy or sheltered areas, reflective or absorptive surfaces, humid or dry micro areas and vegetated or bare landscapes can affect microclimate. So let's take a look at an example. In this picture you see a mountain or a large hill and let's say it's in the northern hemisphere for the sake of angles. When you're in the northern hemisphere the sunny side of a hill or a mountain will always be the south side. The further away from the equator you go the more that this angle is pronounced. The north side is the shaded slope and in this image you can see the obvious difference of how solar radiation is affecting the sunny side and it's going to be cooler and probably a bit wetter because it's not subject to as many forces of evaporation on the shaded side. Other things like vegetation can change this. Angles and exposure to solar radiation such as eastern morning sun versus hotter western evening sun can also create microclimates within that. Here's another graph that shows the relationship between vegetation and the built and urban environments and how it can create what's often referred to as the urban heat island effect. With the shelter of vegetation and the evapotranspiration that comes from forests you get lower temperatures and this can all be in the exact same climate in fact very close to one another. Whereas in downtown or suburban areas it can start to climb because those are filled with concrete and asphalt and metal and there's very little vegetative life in comparison to the rural areas where that starts to accumulate those things absorb heat and they're not transpiring water back into the atmosphere. The process of evaporation sucks a lot of energy and reduces a lot of heat and so in the same climate you can get much hotter conditions in downtown commercial areas or even urban residences. So let's take a look at identifying microclimates. What are some of the things that we can look for in order to tell what the microclimate in an area is going to be like in comparison to the overall macroclimate that we're subject to. I mentioned how dense forests and lots of vegetation mulching over the ground preventing evaporation of water in the system can help to create a cooler and more humid microclimate. When an area is bare and the topsoil is started to erode there's little vegetation you're going to get evaporation very fast and it's going to dry out the landscape it's not going to be sheltered from the sun and those areas can be much hotter so vegetation can do a lot for microclimates. Down in the bottom right you can see from the way that these trees and shrubs have grown that there is a lot of wind probably very constant in this area. Now these could all be areas in a very similar climate if not identical that have been changed due to all these different factors mostly vegetation. Vegetation can also prevent or shelter from wind influence and if you were to plant something on the downwind side at that bottom picture you can grow a lot more than on the front side where it's going to be hit by wind constantly and is going to be difficult growing conditions for those plants. Now microclimates are nothing new and people have been leveraging these for hundreds not thousands of years to increase the growing conditions of things that they want in their environment. This is a great example a picture from I believe France or Belgium in around the turn of the century and in those times it was very common to have orchards that were walled off. Now why would you do that? Well these walls were often kept fairly close together to create microclimates within them where wind was not such a factor and they were painted white in order to maximize the solar reflection that helps the photosynthetic process of these trees and so they could grow things that would not otherwise make it in their climate by creating microclimates that supported those conditions. You can see how this fruit tree has been trained to grow flat along this white wall that maximizes the photosynthetic effect and helps this tree to grow out of its natural climate by creating a microclimate that's more conducive to its growth. We've been doing all kinds of manipulations of microclimate since then and you can see more technological ones in the case of a greenhouse that helps to concentrate solar energy on the inside, prevents it from being moved around by a wind and kept dry from the rain that creates specific growing climates for plants that can start earlier in the season, grow later in the season or completely out of the climate that they were meant to. And even for a long time we've been planting things like hedgerows that help to shield from the wind, create habitat for all kinds of biodiverse members of the ecology and help to protect the cultivars that are in the major fields. There are also a lot of microclimates that are undesirable. We already talked about the heat island effect in major urban areas but also in agricultural areas when we get rid of all of the vegetation in the area and the soil starts to dry out. The connections of micro-risal fungi that feed the soil food web on the inside are killed and it actually makes us a lot harder to grow in that area over time. Most of this is propped up by synthetic methods of petroleum-based fertilizers, chemicals and herbicides. But now how we talked about the larger cycles of elements within our climate. There's a similarity these cycles in life cycles at the micro level. I'm sure all of you learned in grade school about the life cycle of a butterfly from an egg hatching into a caterpillar which forms a cocoon and undergoes metamorphosis in order to turn into a butterfly which repeats the pattern. And the important thing here is that these are not closed-loop cycles and that there are emergent properties from them. Obviously a life cycle can be cut short at any stage where either the eggs are eaten or the caterpillar is eaten or the butterfly is eaten before it's able to reproduce whereas it's able to reproduce many many times over and create multiple multiple life cycles that emerge from a single being. And so these can all kind of verge off and grow exponentially or die off depending on the outside influences. As we grow in complexity we can start to look at entire webs which have life cycles included within consumption and degradation cycles of a whole bunch of different life forms interacting at once. Now the base of all of these food systems and food webs are photosynthetic life. Your plants, your algae in the case of the oceans, and the life inside of the soil that depends on them as well things like fungi, decomposers, and detrovores. As they begin to get eaten you grow up into the higher ends of the coniferous food web and this is an example from probably a temperate forest in North America if I'm going by the grizzly bears and the deer. And the only part that's missing from this graphic is that the bear at the end and actually all of these end up going back into the decomposers and the detrovores and returning to the soil life which feeds the photosynthetic life and repeats the cycle all over again. Ocean ecosystems are very similar starting with one celled life that is you know micro plankton and micro plants that hang out at the surface of the water and absorb sunlight to grow which are eaten by other invertebrates, shimplite creatures in this in this image, consumed by small fish, moving up the chain to mackerel, tuna, and a large shark which could eat the tuna in this image. But it also cycles back into the decomposition more at the floor level of the ocean and returns the nutrient cycles back to the beginning. The soil food web is a great example of this and is mimicking all of these different web cycles and life cycles but has only been kind of better understood and researched in the last handful of years. A lot of this is very new understanding. So plant shoots and roots put off root exudates. They communicate with the life inside of the soil by offering up simple carbohydrates and sugars produced by the plant which different bacteria and protozoa and fungi will consume and trade off the nutrients the plants need to grow healthily. Now fungi and those protozoa and bacteria are eaten by nematodes and anthropods and birds and animals all the way up the chain and of course when they die and decompose they are eaten once again and their minerals and vitamins and nutrients made available to those plant roots and the cycle repeats itself. Now all of these cycles are important to the health of the entire system. They're all dependent on one another and when we're talking about restoration of ecosystems we want to look at how we can influence these cycles to repair any areas in which they are broken or when which they've been displaced. Now there are passive methods and there are active methods to doing this. Passive methods usually refer to removing some kind of disturbance from the cycle. In our case it's often pollution or degradation of a landscape whether it's destroying soils or removing a member from a food chain. We have to start by stopping the detrimental activity. Active reparation or restoration of an ecosystem involves putting something in or taking an active measure to repair something. So introducing another life form or actively repairing the health of the soil through adding compost or soil organic matter or essential microbes whatever it might be. Now again this was a very brief overview and there's so many other ways of going much further into the details and the complexities of the relationships and the elements that make up healthy ecosystems. They're much more complex than I will ever understand and we're still learning new things about them all the time like I mentioned in the study of soil food webs and soil health. The important things to understand are that everything is connected. Everything is connected at the micro and the macro level. They are dependent on one another in these processes and cycles and they also contribute to them as well. Through the understanding of cycles and processes we can learn to impact them in beneficial ways. Without this understanding which has kind of governed our interaction with nature for a long time we've been making blunders and destroying processes without realizing exactly how they all fit together. Now the abundance of life correlates to how energy is used and the cycles on the site are sort of processing and recycling energy constantly. If energy is coming into an area and is lost immediately that's a very inefficient and degraded cycle. If it is passing through plants and entering into food webs and being recycled into decomposed material while water is being held on site and facilitating other life forms the more concentrated energy can be reused and recycled on a place. That's what we call ecological abundance. Now in the next presentation I'm going to talk about a lot of different ways that have been proven effective in restoring ecosystems and just some ideas to hopefully inspire you as to the type of active work and passive work that has been shown effective to bring some of these ecosystems back to life and back into abundance. And so for more information you can go to EcosystemRestorationCamps.org and for weekly interviews on regenerative skills and solutions you can listen to the Abundant Edge podcast with over 160 interviews and new episodes every Friday. I hope you enjoyed this simple introduction to ecological functions at the micro and the macro levels and I'll see you on the next presentation.