Struggling with stochasticity: metaphors, narratives and evidence

Struggling with stochasticity: metaphors, narratives and evidence

Struggling with stochasticity: metaphors, narratives and evidence (#2)

Leon A Barmuta ¹

University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia

Rather than bore you with my Greatest Decisive Datasets (I don’t have any) or my Most Influential Policy Document (an oxymoron), I’m taking the opportunity to revisit the Big Idea that excited me as a PhD student in the early 1980s: stochastic, ‘non-equilibrial’ ecosystems. Both lotic and lentic systems seem prime examples, but have we developed appropriate ways of thinking about them – both scientifically and culturally? In reviewing our progress, I will argue that we reach for metaphors rather more than we’d like to think we do. While this can generate novelty, it can constrain the narratives we spin and the types of evidence we pursue. I will illustrate by focussing on resilience and regime shifts because they are interesting ideas and have become prominent themes in our narratives about inland waters. Gathering evidence about these can be problematic. So have the metaphors that generated these ideas in the first place have outlived their usefulness? I have no pat answers, but I hope to reinvigorate our engagement with big ideas and stochastic systems, and I hope to reinvigorate some of you too.

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Authors contributing to this presentation.

Barmuta, L.A

I started in freshwater research in 1978 watching leaf packs rot at the University of Adelaide. After a stint writing management plans for NPWS SA, I completed a PhD at Monash supervised by P.S. ‘Sam’ Lake which exposed me to rather more diversity (of macroninvertebrates) than I’d bargained for. With my head still swimming with morphological differences between larval chironomids, I subbed for Richard Norris’s teaching role at the then Canberra CAE, before working with Jenny Davis at Murdoch on pre-impact monitoring surveys. Somehow this made me attractive to the University of California at Santa Barbara (acid rain in lakes and streams), after which I fell into threatened species policy in Victoria, more bug stuff at the Museum of Victoria, post-doc at Monash (near-bed fluid mechanics) before starting a lectureship at the University of Tasmania in 1991. All along I’ve been interested in far too many things, but three themes of research have sustained me: how habitat mediates biological interactions; better designs for monitoring and assessment of human impacts on fresh waters using biota; and, how do processes in variable systems like lakes and streams ‘work’? I confess to being a statistics tragic, a recovered bird twitcher and besotted by my children. In spite of all this, I was awarded a national teaching citation in 2013 and ASL chose to honour me with its medal. I am humbled. Thank you. It’s been a wild ride, and there’s lots more to come. I am looking forward to it.

Struggling with stochasticity: metaphors, narratives and evidence (#2)

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