The Low of Scale Independence has just been published in the journal Annals of GIS (vol. 28, p. 15-29). The article is open-source, and the full text can be obtained here. The abstract is shown below. This artiicle represents a summary and synthesis of my thoughts and research on scale linkage over a period of more than 35 years. 

This installment continues the story of my collaboration (along with fellow scientist Pavel Šamonil) with Czech artist Petr Mores in combining visual art and science to tell the story of landscape evolution of forests, topography, and soils in the Šumava Mountains, Czech Republic (part 1; part 2). Here, I take a crack at brief narratives for four key parts of the story—trees, water, soil, and landforms. All the accompanying illustrations are from Mores—closeups are detail from his Biogeomorphological Domination piece, shown and analyzed in parts 1 and 2. Others are from preparatory work Petr did for that piece, and other examples of his paintings and drawings in the forests of the Czech Republic.

Tree story (general time scale: decades)

In the first part of this thread I tried to show how artist Petr Mores collaborated with Pavel Šamonil and myself to depict certain landscapes of the Šumava Mountains in central Europe to show interactions among topography, geology, soils, and vegetation. In this installment I’ll get a bit more specific with respect to the story we are trying to tell.

The short version of the story is that Norway spruce (Picea abies) modifies its environment (ecosystem engineering), mainly through biogeomorphic effects, in a way that largely controls the development of landforms and hydrologic fluxes. In doing this, Picea abies helps maintain environmental factors that favor the success of spruce relative to competing trees.

Here’s the way Pavel and I depicted it in a scientific article (Phillips and Samonil, 2021; available here):

Biogeomorphic effects of Picea abies limiting the development of fluvial dissection and channelized surface drainage (Fig. 12 from Phillips & Samonil, 2021).

Over the past decade(!) I have worked off and on with Czech colleagues on various aspects of the coevolution of soils, landforms, and ecosystems in forests, particularly unmanaged forests of central Europe.  In the course of working on one of those projects, dealing with biogeomorphological domination of hydrology, geomorphology, and vegetation in high elevations of the Sumava Mountains, we began to think, not for the first time, about different ways to tell the story. The conventional scientific article version is described, and is available, here.

I recalled meeting, and being impressed by, the work of an artist friend of my research colleague Pavel Šamonil--Petr Mores, based in Brno, Czech Republic (yes, I know, there’s a vowel shortage in Brno). Pavel connected me to Petr, and we began thinking and working on scientific storytelling through Petr’s medium, painting.  I have previously blogged about these conversations: Pictures of landscape evolution, Underground art.

Catchy title, huh?

This is a story about scientific methodology and how experience, reasoning, and theory from quite different starting points (the consilience part) can lead to the same intellectual destination (equifinality). These starting points range from dialectical materialism, which is redolent of Marxism, to cybernetics, which smacks of computer science and robotics. 

The common destination is an approach to science—and I am focused on geosciences and ecosystem science—based firstly on recognition that our objects of study are interconnected systems of mutually adjusting components. This is straightforward to understand and explain. Certainly much has been, and continues to be, learned from reductionist science that seeks to isolate these interacting components.¹ But no ecologist, geographer, pedologist, geologist, etc. would argue that we can ultimately understand our objects of study without putting the pieces together; without at least considering contexts and interactions.