Directors' Blog
Introducing our first guest artist: Sione Faletau
28 November 2024
At Te Pūnaha Matatini we value the opportunity to work with artists to explore how art and research come together to tell stories about our world. Eager to bring new perspectives to our research, and to create opportunities to engage new audiences with complex systems, we were equally delighted and daunted to receive over 40 applications from some immensely talented artists across Aotearoa New Zealand to be a guest artist with us.
It brings us great pleasure to introduce Te Pūnaha Matatini’s first guest artist: Dr Sione Faletau. Sione is a multidisciplinary artist of Tongan descent, who often translates soundscapes into visual kupesi (patterns) by extracting and manipulating the audio wave spectrum into intricate designs. During his six-months with Te Pūnaha Matatini, Sione will use a talanoa approach to develop site-specific installations in close collaboration with researchers that align with his artistic practice.
To introduce himself, Sione answered a few questions:
Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in art?
Si’oto’ofa Malo e lelei. My name is Sione Faletau, and I am a New Zealand-born Tongan. My roots trace back to the villages of Taunga, Vava’u on my father’s side and Lakepa, Tongatapu on my mother’s side. I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Ōtara, South Auckland. For me, art is a vehicle for creative research and self-discovery – it has become a way to delve deeper into my Tongan heritage and engage with the broader world.
I pursued my studies at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, where I honed my skills and began shaping my practice.
Image: Sione Faletau’s doctoral project explored Tongan masculinity from an Indigenous perspective.
What themes or concepts do you explore in your work, and how do they relate to complex systems?
My work often revolves around sound – specifically the audio wave spectrum – as the foundation for visual creation. By translating sound frequencies into visual patterns, I create kupesi (Tongan motifs) that bring talanoa (cultural dialogues) into a visual language. This process embodies complexity, as it intertwines cultural narratives, environmental data, and visual art into cohesive, layered works.
How do you approach the process of creating your art? Do you have any specific techniques or methods you prefer?
My creative process begins with research. I immerse myself in reading, gathering information, and engaging in talanoa. This research phase allows me to deeply understand the subject I’m exploring. From there, I use sound recordings, audio spectrums, and digital tools to create visual patterns. The talanoa often informs both the conceptual and aesthetic aspects of the work, ensuring that it is grounded in cultural and contextual meaning.
Can you share a particular project or piece that you feel best represents your artistic vision and why?
One project that stands out is my commissioned work for The Lightship on Quay Street in Auckland. For this piece, I recorded the sounds of the Ports of Auckland, the surrounding Auckland CBD, and the Waitematā Harbour. These audio recordings were transformed into visual kupesi and displayed as large-scale light led art works. This work encapsulates my artistic vision as it marries site-specific data, cultural storytelling, and a dynamic visual language to engage both the environment and the audience.
Image: The Lightship sparkles across the water in downtown Auckland.
What inspired you to collaborate with Te Pūnaha Matatini, and how do you see your art contributing to the understanding of complex systems?
The potential for collaboration and innovation inspired me to work with Te Pūnaha Matatini. Art and science share a foundation in curiosity and exploration, and both engage with complex systems in unique ways. I see this partnership as an opportunity to explore interdisciplinary connections and uncover new ways of understanding. Through my art, I aim to visualize these complex systems, making them accessible and engaging to a broader audience.
What do you hope audiences will take away from your work, especially in the context of its connection to complex systems research?
I hope audiences come away with an appreciation for the interconnectedness of cultural, environmental, and scientific systems. My work invites viewers to experience the unseen or unheard elements of our world in a tangible, visual form. By highlighting these connections, I hope to inspire curiosity, reflection, and a deeper understanding of the intricate systems that shape our lives.
PhD scholarship on predicting and monitoring lake health using spatio-temporal early warning signals
25 November 2024
Applications are invited for a PhD scholarship to study the health of shallow coastal lakes across Aotearoa, which are mostly in a state of decline.
A number of interventions have been trialled to improve the health of shallow coastal lakes, with mixed success. We need novel approaches to better understand lake health and identify appropriate natural solutions or human interventions to reverse these declines.
Wairewa, a shallow polymictic shoreline lake on the southern side of Te Pātaka o Rakaihautū Banks Peninsula, has had a troubled history. The water is turbid and prone to toxic algal blooms. The customary, highly productive tuna (eel) fishery has been the verge of collapse due to the highly degraded state of the lake.
You will use spatio-temporal early warning signals analysis to develop methods to predict and monitor the health of Wairewa. Shallow lakes are an example of bistable systems with tipping points. This project will develop both temporal and spatio-temporal models of Wairewa, to apply the theory of critical transitions to develop an optimal monitoring regime for lake health.
Eligibility
This scholarship is open to anyone who can be in New Zealand and meets the requirements to enrol in a PhD at the relevant institution. We are happy to consider students from a diverse range of fields including applied mathematics or a similar quantitative discipline. Interested students should have at least some background in differential equations, bifurcations and numerical methods.
No particular knowledge of lake biology is required, though you must at least be willing to learn! The project will also involve significant interaction with groups invested in the health of the lake, including local iwi and environmental agencies. The successful candidate will hold, or expect to complete soon, an honours or masters level qualification, with a significant research project.
Applicants from all countries and backgrounds are actively encouraged to apply. Members of underrepresented groups are very welcome, as are students with families. Our research group aims to achieve work-life balance within a productive scientific environment.
Location
You will be based at the University of Auckland and will work with Associate Professor Graham Donovan and Dr Matiu Prebble.
You will be part of Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence for Complex Systems. Te Pūnaha Matatini brings together ‘many faces’ – different disciplines, ways of thought, methods, and crucially, people – to define, and then solve, society’s thorny interconnected problems. Te Pūnaha Matatini has an active whānau group which supports early career researchers, committed to the Te Pūnaha Matatini values of manaakitanga and whakawhanaungatanga, offering supportive tuakana / teina learning environments.
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact Graham Donovan at g.donovan@auckland.ac.nz.
Financial details
- Full tuition fees
- Stipend of NZ$35,000 per year (tax free)
Start date
The start date is flexible, but would preferably be in the first half of 2025.
How to apply
Send an email expressing your interest, along with a CV, academic record, and list of three potential referees to g.donovan@auckland.ac.nz
Due date
Applications will be considered until the position is filled.
Making change in complex systems
25 October 2024
This is the final post in our series on complexity. We’ve explored some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Change happens all the time. Humans grow and age, days shift from light to dark, and people move between cities and jobs.
Some changes are expected and natural – like human growth and ageing. Some are cyclical – like the seasons. And some are the outcome of complex circumstances – like a global financial crisis. Some changes can be anticipated, but others are unpredictable. And some changes are desirable, while others might need to be prevented or reverted.
Sometimes we want to create the conditions for change through human intervention. We can do this as individuals, communities or through other organised efforts of society such as our governance and policy systems.
Our big global problems can seem overwhelming, but by recognising how systems are related, we can create meaningful solutions.
Human intervention within complex systems
Understanding complex systems helps us to figure out how to make the changes we want, and prevent the ones we don’t. Recognising that systems have behaviour – like emergence and feedback – can show us how and where to intervene to create change.
Approaching something like health as a complex system allows us to identify interventions that are more likely to succeed. Doctors often tell people to eat better to improve their health. But choosing what to eat is not the same for everyone. The type of food available to people, their budgets, the amount of time they have, and how much they know about nutrition all affect the food they eat. Because of this, trying to treat health issues like heart disease or diabetes by focusing on individual behaviour will have limited success.
Instead, a complex systems approach to health shows that solutions also include better job opportunities, increasing incomes, creating fairer rules on the type and location of stores where people buy food, and strengthening how much say the community has in local and national government decisions. These interventions create the conditions that make it easier for people to choose healthy food that nourishes them.
Scales matter for making change
Different scales and the relationships between them are important when acting within complex systems. In health, evidence and treatment options will be different when focussing solely on individuals, rather than considering communities. Medications and behaviour changes help to treat and control disease in individuals, but treating the clustering of diseases in local communities requires changes in social and physical environments to prevent individuals from becoming sick in the first place.
Seeing problems from a whole system perspective provides information about what solutions might need to look like. We saw this during Cyclone Gabrielle. In Tairāwhiti and Hawkes Bay, the loss of telecommunications, power outages, and damage and destruction to roading and bridges caused many difficulties for evacuations, and made health services inaccessible. The elderly and people living with disabilities were particularly affected as they could not easily move around, which meant they had difficulties evacuating and getting the help they needed. Without telecommunications, doctors and pharmacies struggled to access patient medical records, and people could not pay for essentials such as medicine, food or petrol with their Eftpos cards.
The consequences of this cyclone crossed different communities, organisations and areas. But not all communities were affected in the same ways, and the evacuation, health and social support needs varied within and across the regions. Multiple and connected social actions were needed to address the impacts as they evolved, and to support those communities and groups most affected in the days, weeks and months following the cyclone.
Learning from the past and adapting to a changing future
Complex systems are open and interact with their environments, which means they have the capacity to adapt and learn.
With repeated extreme weather events in Tairāwhiti over the past 18 months, many parts of the community have been learning and adapting. Lessons have been captured and are helping us become better prepared for future events.
Land use is now a key priority for communities, and there is much stronger advocacy for policy changes – particularly recognising the responsibilities of forestry companies. Others have been adapting in smaller ways by planting up land alongside waterways, or on their own properties. Many whānau, neighbourhoods and communities now have clear plans in place for future extreme weather events.
In the months since Cyclone Gabrielle, a learning system developed through local community groups and organisations working with researchers to help capture the lessons and make changes. The benefits of these lessons will be felt right across the country. As we face more frequent extreme weather events due to climate change, the lessons learned in Tairāwhiti show that we need to be ready with improved infrastructure, and better planning for community resilience.
Understanding complexity supports better interventions
Social, economic and health systems are built by humans, and we can change them.
Instead of only focusing on change to isolated parts of the system, complex systems approaches focus on whole system change. They help us to identify levers like cultural norms or money flows that cross scales, or increasing the ability to adapt through better data and information linked to flexible resource use. We can also design and construct new systems so that they better meet the needs of our rapidly changing world.
We live within complex systems which interact with each other through feedback and emerge from local conditions. And there are ways to design our systems that recognise this – something long understood by many Indigenous cultures with knowledge systems and practices embedded in the relationships between humans and the environment.
There is an increase in social movements that advocate for human-influenced systems to be regenerative. These include: economies that take account of our finite resources; food systems that respond to local needs and their environmental impact; and governance systems that give power and agency to communities to improve local conditions and adapt to changing environments.
In the face of problems like climate change or inequality, it can be challenging to know how best to intervene or contribute towards change. Complex systems approaches can help identify strategies to effect large scale change, whilst acknowledging the power of small local acts that can reach across the boundaries of scales to influence the bigger picture.
This focus on relationships has potential to increase the speed and effectiveness of our responses to large-scale emergencies. A focus on complexity can help us to shift away from isolated, hierarchical action and mindsets.
If we make systems visible and understand how they are connected, we can change them.
A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Anna Matheson, Holly Thorpe and Markus Luczak-Roesch, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
Read more about the foundations of complex systems
Spreading: How something travels across a network
2 October 2024
This is the fifth of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.
On a Thursday afternoon in June, a power pylon toppled over in a small rural area in Aotearoa New Zealand, cutting power to most of the Northland region.
This happened after contractors removed too many nuts from the bolts securing the pylon during cleaning. The seemingly mundane act of removing these nuts led to catastrophic effects: the three unsecured legs of the pylon lifted, the tower toppled off its base, and the resulting electricity outage affected 100,000 properties.
Electricity is distributed through a network, and this particular pylon was crucial to the network. The removal of the pylon had a massive impact on the transmission of power between communities.
Things spread through networks
Networks are made up of nodes and links. Electricity networks are easy to imagine, with power stations and substations the nodes, and power lines the links that connect them.
Not all networks are as visible as power grids. For example, we can think of people as nodes in social networks, and their interactions as links between them. Information, ideas and disease travel through these networks as power may flow through an electrical grid.
When we talk about “spread”, we’re looking at how something travels from one node to another across a network. Sometimes we want things to spread through networks with as little difficulty as possible, such as electricity or food. In other cases, we want to prevent things spreading through the network, like disease or extremist ideologies.
In the 21st century, understanding how things spread on networks is vital for the world to thrive. The Covid-19 pandemic made this very clear. Knowing that the virus spread through close contact with infected individuals, governments were able to make policies and give advice on the most effective way to sever networks to prevent spread. Just like that downed power pylon in Northland, removing links prevented spread on the network.
The networks that spread information fundamentally shape our experience of the world
Information is another thing that spreads on networks. This happens over many scales – from talking to your neighbour over the fence, to reading online news from the other side of the world.
Even in our digitally-connected world, information is still closely related to geography. We still prefer to interact with people who share our worldview, which in turn influences where we choose to live and work, and the kind of information that we access – nodes can often choose which links are created which, in turn, influences the nature of future links.
Companies that depend on producing and implementing new knowledge depend on these networks. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley developed around Stanford University and continues to be a hub for the high tech sector. These environments make it easy for information to spread between like-minded people and are often constructed intentionally – as in the case of science parks. In short, the dissemination of information within networks can profoundly affect the design and growth of physical spaces.
Important nodes in information networks that spread information between communities are often referred to as `brokers’ or `structural holes’. These brokers are an important part of how societies reach consensus. One example of brokerage in the context of information spreading is how iwi and other communities are represented in governmental bodies through elected representatives. These people act as bridges between communities and the broader political system, facilitating the flow of information between them. They relay the community’s concerns to the government and bring back key updates, ensuring both sides stay informed and engaged.
The structure of networks affects how things spread
The structure of the network, including how densely connected it is and whether it contains distinct groups or isolated nodes, plays a crucial role in how quickly and widely information spreads. Communities within the network may facilitate rapid sharing within their group but slow the flow to others. Additionally, the strength and frequency of connections between nodes can impact the speed of diffusion – strong, frequent interactions often lead to faster spread, while weak or sporadic ties may slow it down.
Different things can simultaneously spread across a network. This was highlighted during Covid-19 as the spread of disease and information between people interacted in complex ways – such as misinformation influencing behaviour – with tangible effects on the health of people across the world.
Food and values spread like electricity
Thinking in networks shows how different phenomena, both tangible and abstract, spread in remarkably similar ways. The simple example of electricity supply failing due to a fallen pylon can give us insight into seemingly unrelated things, like the distribution of food – or values and beliefs.
The food that we depend on for survival is distributed through a network. This was made starkly clear by the disruption of Covid-19, which restricted the flow of food between food producers and household consumers. Food producers, retailers and restaurants – or, nodes in the network – were affected by unwell workers working at reduced capacity, or closed as non-essential businesses, and the links between these nodes were disrupted.
However, while the usual regular food supply chains were constrained, local communities self-organised to decentralise the network. Alternative food networks were established to get food to people who needed it, through informal and voluntary efforts by communities. That is, new links sprung up organically and at a more local scale to compensate for disruption at the national scale. Communities saw the value in these emergent experiments, which has meant that some of these novel and innovative networks have persisted. This new coexistence of food distribution networks at distinct scales has improved the resilience of aspects of the spread of these vital, and delicious, components of our daily lives.
This example demonstrates how seemingly different things like food and values can spread through networks and interact with each other in unexpected ways. While food moves through a physical network, values hitch a ride and shape the way in which these networks form and persist—the values that led to informal food networks being set up have also helped sustain them, as their success reinforced the underlying beliefs that keep them going.
Qualitatively different but quantitatively similar
Electricity, ideas, values, food, disease – many different things spread across networks. Although they are different in character, these networks often have the same universal underlying architecture, and behave in quantitatively similar ways. This means that by studying networks, we can gain insight into the spread of seemingly very different phenomena.
If a power pylon can fall over and cut power to 100,000 properties, what does this mean for other things that spread across networks?
A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Kyle Higham and Emma Sharp, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
Read more about the foundations of complex systems
Saved from extinction? New modelling suggests a hopeful future for te reo Māori
18 September 2024
Written by Te Pūnaha Matatini PhD candidate Michael Miller.
Just four years ago, experts warned te reo Māori was on a “pathway towards extinction” unless resources were put into teaching young Māori.
But a new mathematical model combined with recent data suggests the future of Māori language is not as grim as it once was.
My ongoing research looks at the future trajectory of Māori language acquisition over the next few decades. Based on recent data, my model suggests the Māori language could be on a path to recovery.
For over 50 years, revitalisation efforts have played a significant role in supporting the language’s resurgence.
The progress of te reo Māori provides hope for campaigners working to save the 55% of world languages destined to be dormant, doomed, or extinct by the end of the century.
Rescuing te reo Māori
Māori revitalisation efforts began in earnest in the late 1970s. The first kōhanga reo was opened in 1982, and te reo Māori was made an official language under the Maori Language Act 1987.
Despite these efforts, there have been ongoing concerns about the sustainability of the language. According to the 2018 Census, just 4% of New Zealanders reported they were fluent speakers of te reo Māori, up from 3.7% in 2013.
In the General Social Survey (also based on self-reported data), the number of people able to speak te reo Māori, at least fairly well, increased – from 6.1% in 2018 to 7.9% in 2021.
This was the first time there was a significant increase in this level of te reo Māori proficiency.
In 2019, the Labour government committed to the revitalisation of te reo Māori by setting a national target of one million speakers (at any level of proficiency) by 2040.
Modelling the future
My research is based on several sources of data – including the Census, the General Social Survey and the Te Kupenga survey of Māori wellbeing. The goal is to model how many speakers of te reo Māori we can expect in 20 or 30 years.
To understand this future path, I use my model to create different possible trajectories and compare them to these data sources. After finding the trajectories that best match, I extend these trajectories into the next few decades to estimate how many people might speak te reo in the future.
Some of the data, particularly from the more recent General Social Survey and the number of students learning te reo in schools and at university level, pointed to growth in te reo Māori acquisition. For example, enrolments in tertiary te reo courses have increased by 93% over the past ten years.
According to the model and current data, achieving one million speakers by 2040 is within reach, but it will take an increased commitment from the government and communities to make this future more likely.
Developing policies to help
The next step of the research will be to better understand the role of government policy, iwi and the public in encouraging the adoption of te reo Māori.
Such policies include more te reo Māori in schools, providing more access to university-level te reo courses, encouraging fluent speakers to become teachers, increasing the use of bilingual signs, and promoting the use of te reo Māori at home.
But these are not the sort of policies we can expect from the current government, which has actively discouraged the official use of te reo Māori and is working to reduce incentives for public servants to learn the language.
This year’s Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) also comes amid an ongoing debate around the constitutional role of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi).
There is likely enough momentum within the reo community to keep the language growing in the short term. But if these policy settings were to continue (or worsen) over several years, it could have a negative effect on the future trajectory of te reo.
There are a lot of Indigenous languages being lost at the moment. Research has shown this can cause irrevocable harm for the communities they belong to.
It is important for the wellbeing of Māori that their language and culture are preserved. And it benefits all New Zealanders to have an understanding of one of the foundational languages of the country.
Based on the modelling, the future is looking hopeful in this respect.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Scaling: Relationships across size, space and time
4 September 2024
This is the fourth of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.
The microbiome is the community of trillions of microorganisms living in, and on, the bodies of complex organisms – like people. In human beings this microbial community aids the digestion of food, supports the immune system, and protects us against pathogens – the infectious microbes that cause sickness and disease.
Do you think of yourself as a walking community of trillions of microorganisms? Probably not. Thinking of ourselves as individuals rather than a collection of microorganisms is an example of how we can classify the world into different scales.
Our knowledge systems tend to order everything into different scales to help us organise and understand our universe. These scales are typically used for convenience as well as having some meaning. It is useful to distinguish the individual from a population of people, just as it is helpful to differentiate days from years when we think of time scales.
The different levels at which a system can be observed or analysed
In complex systems, the concept of scale refers to the different levels at which a system can be observed or analysed. These levels can be thought of as micro, meso and macro. In the example of human beings, the microbiome is at the micro scale, the human individual at meso scale, and the natural and built environment that we inhabit at the macro scale.
These scales are groupings of size, but they are also sets of complex relationships which may be nested within each other. For example, interactions occur between the microbiome, the individual, and the environment. The composition of our microbiome is influenced by the food we eat, our habits and behaviours, which in turn are influenced by the natural and built environments we live in, in turn influencing those microbes themselves, which influences our health.
Understanding relationships between the system scales of the microbiome, the health of a person, and external environments is essential for knowing what to do to improve human health and prevent disease.
From the microscopic to the global, from the quantum to the cosmos
The planet that we live on is made up of interacting systems encompassing differing scales. These scales may be about size, place, organisation or time.
Spatial scales range from microscopic levels, like individual organisms or microhabitats, to broader landscapes and global ecosystems. Our universe ranges from the smallest known quantum scales to the entire cosmos.
Time scales encompass moments, seasons, years, and geological epochs, reflecting the dynamic nature of ecological processes over time from nerve impulses to annual seasonal changes in forests to the rise and fall of the large dinosaurs.
Organisational scales range from genes and individuals to populations, communities, and whole ecosystems.
Relationships between scales
Scales of any type do not have rigid boundaries. They are open systems that can be nested, interact with each other, and bonded by relationships that feed back and lead to emergent properties and adaptation.
A disruption at one scale can cause a cascade of interactions. For example, a pathogenic bacterial infection within a gut microbiome that causes disease is in reality a population of reproducing bacteria all interacting with other communities of viruses, bacteria and microorganisms – as well as the host’s own immune cells, and the non-living material inside the digestive system. The gut is an ecosystem within wider ecosystems.
Improving the health of human populations requires recognising relationships between scales. Even a very specific risk to health – like an infectious disease – has causes and impacts that will span multiple scales from the microscopic to the global. Think of the spreading and harm caused by SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of Covid-19. The resultant pandemic showed that ignoring the ecosystem of relationships around individuals or communities not only reinforces existing patterns of harm, but reproduces harms over time.
Social scales also matter here. At the macro scale, the effectiveness of national health policies depend heavily on how they are implemented at the meso scale of local communities. Local health services that lack sufficient resources or fail to adapt to their local conditions can undermine national policy intentions. We saw this relationship in action through the Covid-19 pandemic where feedback from local Māori, Pacific and other community-led organisations – through advocacy and protest – influenced the national policy approach. This led to a faster reallocation of resources and development of more responsive and locally adapted communication strategies and health service delivery.
To understand our world, we need to look across scales
Understanding scales as systems of complex relationships helps to identify causes of phenomena such as, infectious disease spread, animal behaviour, human health or environmental degradation – but it also provides information about how we can intervene more effectively to create system change through human action that focuses on the relationships that link scales together.
To prepare for, respond to and learn from things like financial crises, natural disasters, systemic challenges to population health, or changes in the research system, we must look across the scales that influence individuals, communities, and all of humanity. This includes the connections between history, the present and the centennial and millennial time spans of collective memory.
To understand our world, we need to look across scales.
A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Anna Matheson and Dave Hayman, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
Read more about the foundations of complex systems
Helping the lungs of an ancestor to breathe freely once again
19 August 2024
The sun is setting at Te Mata Hāpuku. The eelers of Ngāi Tahu have been hard at work digging kōawa, drains that stretch across the cobble flats between Te Roto o Wairewa and the ocean. Beside these drains sit pārua, pits dug into the earth waiting to be filled with the annual harvest of tuna, the eels that are the customary fishery for whānau members.
After sunset, the eelers settle in to wait. As the tide rises saltwater percolates through the beach cobbles reaching the kōawa. The smell of this saltwater sends a signal to the tuna in the lake. For them, it’s time to begin a remarkable journey, the tuna heke.
Te Roto o Wairewa is an ICOLL (Intermittently Closing and Opening Lake and Lagoon) on the southern side of Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū, Banks Peninsula. Each summer tuna depart from here on their heke, a migration across the ocean to the Tongan Trench to breed. But like almost all of the coastal lakes around Aotearoa New Zealand, Wairewa is in bad shape, but has been improving in recent years. It is a very shallow lake, averaging only one to three metres in depth. Forest clearance, wetland drainage, pest and weed incursion and intensification of land usage have all degraded the lake and its catchment.
When the shallow waters of Wairewa are warm, stagnant and overly rich in nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from fertiliser runoff or septic tank overflows, cyanobacterial blooms form. These toxic blooms make it unsafe for swimming, and some species can be lethal for local tuna populations – or for anyone who might eat them. A particularly nasty bloom in the early 2000s killed 1,000 eels on the lake.
Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigator Dr Matiu Prebble (Ngāti Irakehu, Ngāi Tahu) is a tangata tiaki, one of the caretakers of the lake who issue permits locally to whānau members of Ngāi Tahu who harvest eels from January to April. “It’s difficult to make a decision on whether to go ahead with eeling when there has been a bloom,” he explains. There are three monitoring stations on the lake which the Cawthron Institute and Environment Canterbury use to sample water quality. Researchers at the Cawthron Institute analyse these samples for algal cell counts of cyanobacterial blooms, and if dangerous levels are reached, a warning is sent out through Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand.
“This is quite a delayed approach,” says Matiu. “We don’t get any of the data until a month later showing us what is happening in the lake. So we don’t actually know what this means for the eel fishery on the lake in real time.”
This is where the tools of complex systems can be useful. The appearance of a bloom can be thought of as a tipping point, when the complex system of the lake undergoes an abrupt transition between a clear, healthy state and cloudy, polluted state based on changes in underlying conditions such as phosphorus levels.
Matiu and fellow Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigator Associate Professor Graham Donovan have seed funding from Te Pūnaha Matatini to analyse the wealth of monitoring data from the lake from a temporal and spatiotemporal tipping point perspective and develop a predictive model to inform future monitoring, predictions and potential interventions.
Graham has experience modelling bodily organs, and looking at other tipping points – such as asthma attacks in asthmatic lungs. He is interested in early warning signals that can be identified in data from asthmatic lungs that signal an impending asthma attack.
This work resonated with Matiu, as Ngāi Tahu envisage Wairewa as a bodily organ. When Ngāi Tahu ancestor Makō first laid claim to the area, he was very taken by the richness of mahinga kai or traditional foods that were available there, particularly the eels. He laid claim by saying “Taku pane ki utu, aku waewae ki tai,” or “Inland a pillow for my head and on the shores a rest for my feet.”
“Wairewa is the whakatinanatia or embodiment of Makō,” says Matiu. “For the last century, it’s been a poorly functioning organ of his body. At the moment it could be though of as a poorly functioning bladder, but what we really want the lake to be like is a highly functioning organ like a lung.”
“I saw Graham speak about his work on modelling bodily organs, and this approach really resonated with me given how we think about the lake,” says Matiu. “There’s a lot of potential in utilising his complex systems approaches to bodily organs to come up with new ideas about how we can address some of the problems in these lakes.”
Seed funding has created a unique project that could only have originated within Te Pūnaha Matatini. This funding paid for two summer interns to work on the project: Tavake Tohi (Tonga) in Auckland, and Madeleine Barber-Wilson (Ngāti Kahungunu ki te Wairoa, Ngāti Ruapani mai Waikaremoana) in Christchurch.
Tavake has a background in geographic information systems, and has been analysing satellite imagery and data from a multispectral drone to explore the spatial dimensions of blooms on the lake. He also has a personal connection to the heke of the eels, as they are also harvested in his village in Tonga at the other end of their migration.
Maddie has simultaneously been analysing years of water monitoring data to understand the lake as a temporal system. “Critical transitions between cloudy, polluted states and clear, healthy states in shallow lakes can be modelled mathematically,” says Maddie, “and our goal is to use a model to find mathematical early warning signals of changes in state for Wairewa. Restoring the health of this lake means protecting a source of mātauranga and kai for iwi and hapū of the rohe. I’m excited to be putting my maths skills to work in the real world and am hoping that the results of our project will be helpful for future kaitiaki of the lake.”
Applying modelling approaches usually used for bodily organs to a lake is pushing the boundaries of complex systems theory and its real-world application. “This project is about both extending complex systems theory, and applying this to the lake as a spatiotemporal system,” says Graham. “We have water sampling data from multiple locations at different times, and visual data from satellites and drones. Where we really want to get to is what we call spatiotemporal early warning signals, looking at how the lake changes in both time and space.”
“The lake is very long and narrow,” continues Graham. “It’s not one dimensional, but it has a very significant length from the headwaters down to the flat, and not much width. So if you can incorporate data from all these sources in a stratified structure, can you get more accurate early warning signals than you could by just looking at the temporal data alone?”
This work is of central importance to the Wairewa community, and has broad engagement from Wairewa Rūnanga, the Birdling’s Flat community, the Christchurch City Council, Environment Canterbury and the Department of Conservation. About 20 years ago, Charisma Rangipunga put forward the wero “ka haha te tuna ki te roto, ka haha te reo ki te kāinga, ka haha te tangata ki te whenua.” If the lake is breathing and full of tuna, and the houses full of language, the people will be well. But if there are no eels or language, the people will suffer.
“If we don’t have our tuna there,” concludes Matiu, “then we might as well pack up and leave, basically.”
Illustrated by Sophie Burgess.
Wider than freshwater
16 August 2024
A collaboration between systems thinker Justin Connolly and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
When I was young, I wanted to be a detective. I could often be found ‘investigating’ things around the house through my father’s magnifying glass. If I looked at them through that glass, my parents would have seen me squinting – one eye closed and the other magnified to comedic proportions through the lens. As I grew into a teenager, I loved reading detective books or watching detective shows on TV.
But in all good detective stories, the case is nearly always more complicated and nuanced than what it seemed like at the start. Over time I came to realise that a good detective didn’t only look through the magnifying glass, they also put that down, opened their other eye and looked around them to understand the wider context and how that related to what they were investigating.
Now, many decades later, myself and colleagues work to apply such detective skills to freshwater. In Aotearoa, we’ve been experiencing issues with our water in recent decades. Water quality is often lower than desired and can be unsuitable for swimming or other uses, and pressures on how much gets used by humans is increasing. We recently completed work to widen our perspective on the related factors that influence and impact the state of freshwater. We sought to highlight what can be seen through the magnifying glass, and what can be seen when putting this down and looking around at the context.
Zooming out for a better view of the freshwater policy landscape – Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research
The things we see through the magnifying glass are the things that may appear obvious. These include precautions intended to help improve freshwater quality, such as: planting streambanks to buffer and mitigate contaminants flowing to water bodies, ‘green infrastructure’ such as wetlands, controlling the intensity of animals or crops on farmland, and the amount of nutrients applied to land to support them. This also includes things that relate to the amount of water used, such as: the efficiency of water use, and the storage of water for use later.
These ‘magnified’ areas are recognisable from discussions around the state of freshwater. They tend to be close to and obviously related to freshwater. But what do we see if we put down the magnifying glass and look around at the wider context?
We see that greenhouse gas emissions can result from activity closely associated with freshwater, like fertiliser use. For example, a byproduct of nitrogen fertiliser manufacture and use is greenhouse gas emissions – increased levels of which can (in the longer term) impact weather patterns and freshwater availability.
How we design our towns and cities also influences activity that has an impact on freshwater. For example, expanding suburban areas can reduce the amount of farmland. If our focus is on producing more from farmland that we have, this can encourage further intensification of activity on remaining farmland to compensate for production lost to suburban sprawl. Expanding suburban areas are also usually the result of our preference for building low-density housing and relying on cars for transport – all of which also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Procedural things have an impact too. Government funding processes have an in-built bias towards things that are new (capital expenditure) and that depreciate in value. For example, money borrowed by local governments can usually only be used for capital expenditure, so it encourages the building of new assets (which are usually linked with suburban expansion and can impact on freshwater environments). Also, green infrastructure does not depreciate – it actually grows (e.g. a tree grows over time)! Therefore such infrastructure that is freshwater-friendly tends to be difficult to account for ‘on the books’ of local government, meaning it is harder to justify.
Finally, our use of energy is linked to all of these activities, which is also linked to greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn is linked to weather and rainfall patterns. While the efficiency of our energy use is important, so too is the carbon intensity of all forms of energy generation. What is often not appreciated is that even renewable energy has a carbon intensity – due to the fossil fueled-powered machinery used to build them. This still has a greenhouse gas emissions profile.
What does all this detective work highlight?
It shows that the areas where we can intervene to improve freshwater outcomes are far more varied than usually appreciated. Yes, there are some influences on freshwater that are obvious and closely related, and these need our attention (what we see through the magnifying glass). Yet there are also many less obvious areas that equally have an impact on freshwater outcomes – perhaps an even greater impact in the longer term. We need to look around at the context to see these (what the detective sees when they put down the magnifying glass and look around). They may not always appear obvious, but they can have significant impact.
Unlike fictional detective stories, when seeking to improve freshwater outcomes there is not a convenient and tidy ending point – there is no dramatic climax and a single ‘culprit’ revealed! Yet the skills of a good detective – investigating the detail and understanding the influence of the wider context – can lead to impactful insights and action in places that make a significant difference.
Let’s ensure we nurture such skills in our future generations of ‘detectives’ dealing with the complex problems we face now and in the future.
Justin Connolly is a principal investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini and the director of Deliberate, a consultancy specialising in the use of qualitative research and systems thinking to help understand complexity. You can find out more about Deliberate at https://www.deliberate.co.nz/.
Jean Donaldson is a designer and native bird fanatic based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can see more of her work at https://jeanmanudesign.com/.
Feedback: Processes that change the thing that caused them
15 August 2024
This is the third of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.
We’ve all been there. Someone steps up to a microphone to speak, and there’s a little high-pitched ringing around the edges of their voice through the speakers. In a flash, this has become a loud squeal. Jolted in their seats, the audience clasp their hands to their ears until the person with the best reflexes manages to leap across to turn down the volume.
This is feedback. A microphone placed too close to a speaker picks up the sound from the speaker and amplifies it, then sends it back out of the same speaker. The microphone now picks up the louder sound, and amplifies it further. This reinforcing feedback happens rapidly, and before long we’re being assaulted by a high-pitched squeal.
We can also imagine a thermostat in a room. We set a preferred temperature, and allow the heating to run until this temperature is reached. At that point, the thermostat switches off the heating, and the room slowly cools. This is balancing feedback. Once the room has cooled below the set temperature, the heating is switched back on.
Feedback is all around us
Feedbacks are processes that change the thing that caused them.
Let’s say that we have a system with two parts: A and B. A is connected to B by one process, and B is connected to A by another. If the state of A changes, it triggers a corresponding change of some amount in B, because they are connected. But now, B has been modified, and because it is also connected to A by a second process, the change in B also results in further change to A.
The processes connecting A to B, and B to A, are both feedbacks, and those feedbacks can be reinforcing or balancing. Audio feedback and thermostats are classic examples of these two types of feedback. A reinforcing feedback drives further change in the direction a process was already going. It is a self-sustaining, or amplifying, feedback, which can lead to exponential growth or decline. A balancing feedback, on the other hand, leads to a reversal in the direction of change. So something that was increasing starts to decrease, and vice versa, which can lead to stability or equilibrium.
The concept of feedback is key to understanding complex systems in reality, reaching well beyond the scales of the examples of audio feedback or temperature control. Systems of feedback determine patterns we can see in the world around us. These patterns can be observed over time within any complex system, whether that be from the perspective of the earth sciences, biology, how cities work, or human health.
When we observe these dynamic patterns, whether it is exponential growth (like a virus spreading) or collapse (like the Wall Street crash of 1929) or even if a system is in a state of seeming stability, it is useful to explore the feedback processes behind these patterns. It is through understanding feedback that deep insight into fundamental causes and how to make change can be found.
Reinforcing and balancing feedback on a global scale
In studying the climate we can see reinforcing and balancing feedbacks playing out on a global scale. We know the release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels results in more longwave radiation being trapped in our atmosphere, which leads to warming. This warming melts sea ice and thaws permafrost. Which in turn lead to further warming, which leads to more melting, and so on. This is reinforcing feedback, just like the squeal of a microphone.
Like the way a thermostat works, rainfall is an illustration of balancing feedback. Evaporating moisture from the surface of the Earth leads to increasing water vapour in the air. This increasing humidity then makes it harder for further water to evaporate from the land or ocean. Eventually, as the air becomes saturated, it rains, humidity is reduced, evaporation resumes, and the whole cycle starts again.
Feedbacks between people and environments
There are destructive inevitabilities, such as the increase in extreme weather events, of planetary system feedbacks like warming caused by too much carbon dioxide. But there are also constructive feedbacks where relationships between people, our practices and culture, and the built and natural environments are leading to new and innovative solutions.
One helpful reinforcing loop in the area of energy, where increasing demand for solar and wind power is driving down the cost of these clean energy sources so that they become more affordable for households.
In transport, if we can understand feedback processes underpinning car dependence, we can shift from reliance on cars to more people walking, wheeling and biking. For example, we know that fewer people ride bikes when they associate them with negative experiences of car danger and injury. If traffic on busy streets is slowed and road space is allocated to bike lanes, more and more people become visible, and you will see more people riding different kinds of bikes. When people see others like themselves on bikes having fun while getting around, this is a reinforcing feedback as they feel inspired and encouraged to then give it a go.
The ways we adapt to a changing climate bring new feedback processes into play. When people’s homes and land are threatened by severe weather, flooding, sea level rise and coastal erosion, balancing feedback responses – such as the construction of sea walls – might successfully buffer a worsening crisis in the short-term. But adaptations may not be sufficient in the long term and may in fact cause greater harm through attracting further housing development and therefore increasing the number of people exposed to climate dangers.
Understanding feedback is essential for finding solutions
Identifying and understanding processes of feedback is critical to understanding the complex causes behind the issues that we face. If we understand feedback, we can find more appropriate and sophisticated solutions, and become aware of dangers and unintended consequences. If researchers and policymakers incorporate feedback in their methods and practices, we can create more effective pathways of action that result in beneficial outcomes.
In the next post in this series on the foundations of complex systems, we’ll be taking a look at how we can understand phenomena across different scales in order to intervene more effectively.
A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Alex Macmillan and Nick Golledge, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
Read more about the foundations of complex systems
Intervening in complex food systems to improve food security
29 July 2024
In certain areas of Australia, millions of sterile male fruit flies rain from the skies every two weeks. These Queensland fruit flies are reared to the peak of health in a special facility, then sterilised through irradiation, before being loaded into an aeroplane and dropped from the air. When the sterile males mate with local females, the females are unable to lay viable eggs.
This method effectively suppresses fruit fly populations, which cost Australian growers hundreds of millions of dollars a year in damaged fruit, pest control and lost market access opportunities. But is this too many sterile fruit flies to drop from the skies? TPM Whānau member Dr Tom Moore wants to know.
The Queensland fruit fly is an important pest of concern for Aotearoa New Zealand. Although there have been multiple detections in Aotearoa, the fly has not yet established a foothold. But this comes at a cost. In the most recent incursion, 11 male flies were caught on Auckland’s North Shore – at a cost of $18 million.
Tom is a quantitative ecologist who specialises in integrating scientific hypotheses into statistical models to address causal questions. He is particularly interested in understanding how invasive species establish themselves through data that spans across time and space. Aotearoa relies heavily on its biological resources, so this sort of agricultural research plays a pivotal role in our economic prosperity and shaping a sustainable future.
“Current methods of controlling fruit fly populations are effective,” says Tom, “but without a deeper understanding of the causal processes at work these could become less efficient due to future change, resulting in unnecessary costs.”
Tom has seed funding from Te Pūnaha Matatini to explore new methods of causal inference, which is the process of determining the independent effects of the individual parts that make up larger systems. Causal inference techniques drawing on interdisciplinary methods linking mathematics, computer science and statistics have become popular in other parts of the world, but are not yet widely used in Aotearoa.
Current statistical approaches can be limited in their ability to identify causal relationships. “It’s very common to collect a lot of data without a targeted question, chuck it in all in a model, and see what comes out the other side,” says Tom. “Richard McElreath calls this a ‘causal salad’. So while a certain model might make good predictions, it may be misleading in terms of causation, and unhelpful in planning interventions.”
Causal inference is a technique that considers how variables are related. This approach has been applied in other systems like economics, but is a new and developing technique in ecology. Developing causal models to support agricultural management decisions like the suppression of fruit flies has the potential to significantly improve our understanding of how to effectively intervene in these complex systems to improve food security in an uncertain future.
“By explicitly modelling cause and effect relationships in complex systems based on ecological theory,” Tom explains, “these techniques can evaluate if, and under what conditions, cause and effect relationships can be identified.” This project is an exciting opportunity to both develop complex systems theory, and to apply it to make a real difference to agriculture in Aotearoa.
Tom is working with a team including Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Dr Will Godsoe and Dr Giulio Valentino Dalla Riva to develop a non-linear model of population dynamics using three years of weekly fruit fly trapping data.* They are also collaborating with entomologist Dr Lloyd Stringer from Plant and Food Research, and three colleagues from the from the University of Canterbury: statisticians Professor Elena Moltchanova and Dr Phillipp Wacker, and doctoral student in computational and applied mathematical sciences, Pooja Baburaj.
Tom and his team will then use this modelling approach to test out different biocontrol scenarios – exploring whether less frequent deployment of biocontrol measures can achieve the same population suppression. “If the model shows that you can reduce the frequency of biocontrol to monthly and the data looks the same, that’s a great outcome,” says Tom, “and would save a bit of money.”
The team is motivated to explore and showcase how causal inference can be used within the scientific process when defining hypotheses to generate more meaningful insights. Tom is especially excited about sharing this approach with his colleagues at Plant and Food Research and the broader research community, and hosting a workshop with Te Pūnaha Matatini colleagues to increase the capacity of the causal modelling of complex systems in Aotearoa. He hopes that this work will inspire interdisciplinary collaboration between agriculture, ecology and statistics.
Tom says that “we can ultimately use causal inference to predict where invasive species might spread, and how their population dynamics will manifest in a system, so that we can make evidence-based decisions on how to respond.”
“This is a way that we can solve real-world problems with innovative and evidence-based research.”
Illustrated by Chelsea Sullivan.
*This data was collected as part of the post factory pilot of SITplus fly production project (FF17001) that was funded by the Hort Frontiers Fruit Fly Fund, part of the Hort Frontiers strategic partnership initiative developed by Hort Innovation Australia, with co-investment from Macquarie University, New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Plant and Food Research New Zealand, and contributions from the Australian government.