Temporal
This is connected to Time. Merge or consider how to distinguish.
Scales of Histories
- cosmology
- natural history
- species history
- community history
- family history (history across several generations)
- organism history (biography)
- event history
Types of Temporal Rhythms
- solar cycle
- year
- day
Dependent patterns:
- seasons
- weather Weather
- biotic events such as insect plagues
Examples of Creatures Living at Different Scales and Speeds
- Aspen forest
- Fast- and slow-living bacteria
- Old trees
- Coral reefs
- Mangroves
There is a relationship between scale, for example deep time, and value. That is humans find it hard to care about things that are too different from their habitual scales. This is also connected to the notion of the responsibility to those yet unborn.
Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.
The Age of Things
There is no programmed death in lichens or fungi, they are more likely to survive the older they are. This is different from most eukaryotic organisms and from the popular imagination.
This is interesting to acknowledge that most living creatures have evolved to self-destruct or self-harm.
- It is actually complicated in fungi, but still interesting: Hardwick, J. Marie. “Do Fungi Undergo Apoptosis-Like Programmed Cell Death?” MBio 9, no. 4 (2018): e00948-18. https://doi.org/10/gfxhzz.
Time and Innovations
These diagrams are useful because they do not distinguish between human and nonhuman innovations while also putting them onto temporal scales, making the need for the focus apparent. Cf. Innovation
The time between major innovations versus how long ago the innovation happened, plotted logorithmically
The same, plotted semilogarithmically
West, Geoffrey B. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. New York: Penguin Press, 2017.
Long-Term Reserach
Long-term ecological studies often lead to surprises:
- Populations, ecosystems and/or ecological might not accumulate meaningful change for a while.
- Time in the forest leads to observations that are not attainable by desk-bound scientists and policy makers.
- Greater experience with an ecosystem make it more likely that researchers will pose appropriate ecological questions and obtain new insights.
- Over time, research programs expand to different strands of research such as new taxa or ecological processes.
Lindenmayer, David, David Blair, Lachlan McBurney, and Sam Banks. Mountain Ash: Fire, Logging and the Future of Victoria’s Giant Forests. Clayton South: CSIRO, 2015.
Lindenmayer, David B., and Gene E. Likens. Effective Ecological Monitoring. London: Earthscan, 2010.
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