Eva Nora Mueller

A transdisciplinary account of water research

Water research is introduced from the combined perspectives of natural and social science and cases of citizen and stakeholder coproduction of knowledge. Using the overarching notion of transdisciplinarity, we examine how interdisciplinary and participatory water research has taken place and could be developed further. It becomes apparent that water knowledge is produced widely within society, across certified disciplinary experts and noncertified expert stakeholders and citizens. However, understanding and management interventions may remain partial, or even conflicting, as much research across and between traditional disciplines has failed to integrate disciplinary paradigms due to philosophical, methodological, and communication barriers. We argue for more agonistic relationships that challenge both certified and noncertified knowledge productively. These should include examination of how water research itself embeds and is embedded in social context and performs political work. While case studies of the cultural and political economy of water knowledge exist, we need more empirical evidence on how exactly culture, politics, and economics have shaped this knowledge and how and at what junctures this could have turned out differently. We may thus channel the coproductionist critique productively to bring perspectives, alternative knowledges, and implications into water politics where they were not previously considered; in an attempt to counter potential lock‐in to particular water policies and technologies that may be inequitable, unsustainable, or unacceptable. While engaging explicitly with politics, transdisciplinary water research should remain attentive to closing down moments in the research process, such as framings, path‐dependencies, vested interests, researchers’ positionalities, power, and scale. WIREs Water 2016, 3:369–389. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1132 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Land Degradation in Drylands: An Ecogeomorphological Approach

Land degradation is particularly pernicious and pervasive in dryland regions. The dependency of local livelihoods on the services provided by ecosystems is greater in drylands than in any other ecosystems, rendering their inhabitants exceptionally vulnerable to land degradation. Current approaches to managing drylands to mitigate land degradation often fail to produce significant improvements because local knowledge is often undervalued and the complexity of underlying processes leading to land degradation is still not well understood. There remains a need to uncover the underlying dynamics and characteristic responses to environmental drivers and human-induced disturbances. The physical processes associated with land degradation in drylands fall at the interface of ecology and geomorphology. Regrettably, the disciplines of ecology and geomorphology have largely performed research in isolation of each other. The disciplines, in common with most, have a centrifugal perspective, looking outwards from themselves towards cognate disciplines. To address multidisciplinary scientific questions – such as land degradation in drylands – a centripetal approach is required in which the problem is the focus towards which the disciplines direct their attention. The purpose of this book is to take such a centripetal approach towards the understanding of the process linkages between ecogeomorphological dryland processes and patterns to better our understanding of land degradation, and to overcome the lack of interdisciplinarity in current dryland research.

Short-Range Ecogeomorphic Processes in Dryland Systems

Interactions between ecological and geomorphic processes in drylands operate at a continuum of spatial scales. Processes that operate at the smaller (plant-interplant up to hillslope) scales produce intrinsic patterns of vegetation and resource accumulation. Four aspects of short-range process interactions are presented here: the importance of vegetation cover of individual plants and plant patches and their interactions with resource availability; an updated account of the significance of the islands of fertility and landscape linkages; the interrelationship between facilitation and soil moisture dynamics and the importance of morphological properties, such as plant allometry, to generate stable patterns of vegetation.

Patterns of Land Degradation in Drylands

Land degradation is difficult to define because land can only be considered degraded with respect to some use to which it may be put. However, physical and biological properties of the landscape are typically measured to characterize degradation rather than its inherent or potential utility. One approach to characterizing land degradation is by assessing the provisioning of ecosystem services. Most provisioning ecosystem services depend on water, and water management is crucial to maintaining and increasing ecosystem services in arid lands. In contrast, vegetation change has been most commonly employed as an indicator of land degradation. Nevertheless, the close relationship that exists between vegetation and other biophysical processes of the environment means that any change in vegetation will result in a concomitant change to these other processes also. Of particular importance is a change in vegetation distribution since the spatial distribution of associated biophysical parameters controls landscape fluxes, and hence degradation, by controlling landscape connectivity. From a management perspective, an understanding of the degree of connectivity in a landscape can aid in triage of remediation efforts. Areas that are dominated by long connected pathways will not respond to localized, small-scale manipulations because those pathways present inertia that a small-scale manipulation cannot overcome. Two important ecosystem services provided by drylands are grazing land and agricultural land. Both land uses can be drivers of degradation. The role of grazing in land degradation depends on several factors which can be grouped into three categories: number of animals, kind of animal species and grazing system. For agriculture, systematic crop residue removal without fertilisation, poor cultivation practices and extensive soil salinization are examples of mismanagement that may lead to land degradation. Aside from the immediate provisioning of food, drylands provide ecosystem services at a broader scale. Drylands are highly significant to the global carbon cycle. Land degradation in drylands has implications for the effectiveness of carbon sequestration as well as for storage (through soil erosion). Because many dryland soils have been degraded they are currently far from saturated with carbon and as a result their potential to sequester carbon may be highly significant. To understand land degradation better, efforts have been made to develop integrated human-environment research that overcomes the perceived deficiencies of reductionist, discipline-based research. However, much integrated environmental research to-date has resulted in a ‘hierarchical relationship’ between the human and physical components. Three approaches have been advocated to improve human-environment understanding: (a) systems science that emphasises feedbacks between integrated human and natural systems; (b) computer-simulation modelling that explicitly represents the interaction of individual human decisions and physical processes; and (c) participatory research that emphasises engagement with the actors in the region being studied. However, many questions remain open, and advancing beyond narrow scientific disciplinary specialization is vital if the hierarchical relationship in understanding physical and social causes of land degradation is to be broken.

Land Degradation in Drylands: Reëvaluating Pattern-Process Interrelationships and the Role of Ecogeomorphology

In this book we have argued that improved understanding of land degradation in drylands needs a problem-centred multidisciplinary approach. Specifically, we have argued for an ecogeomorphic approach. In this concluding chapter we review successes and shortcomings of this approach, identify key challenges that need to be overcome, and present the conceptual and methodological advances that need to be made to overcome these challenges. There has been a wealth of research investigating patterns and processes separately at small spatial scales, and, some advances in linking ecology and geomorphology have been made. However, there remains little in the way of true integration across the disciplines that deal with both ecogeomorphic patterns and processes. To overcome this weakness, it is imperative that the lessons of ecology are learned – to value truly coupled eco-hydro-geomorphic studies, in which biogeochemistry, plants, geomorphology, soils and hydrology are all well represented and experimentally manipulated – and that the lessons of geomorphology and hydrology are learned: to value observational studies in which ecological measurements are coupled with hydrological and geomorphological measurements, and the role of exogenous forces is explicitly recognized. No one approach will be applicable to understanding land degradation in drylands. Unique settings, both biophysical and cultural, mean that the solutions to land degradation differ from place to place. Furthermore, evolutionary changes in drylands – degraded or otherwise – mean that methodological approaches employed to study the system may need to be fluid. We conclude the chapter by identifying five key challenges for land-degradation studies in drylands. First, a common language needs to be developed. Secondly, the problem of scale and scale interactions needs to be overcome. Thirdly, the lessons of complexity science need to be accepted and acted upon. Fourthly, the understanding of the interactions of ecogeomorphic processes and people needs to be improved. Fifthly, management strategies for combatting land degradation in drylands need to be developed taking account of scientific advances, but not waiting for an “ultimate solution” that will never arrive.

Approaches to Modelling Ecogeomorphic Systems

Drivers of land degradation often co-occur and their effects are often non-additive because of internal system feedbacks. Therefore, to understand how drivers of land degradation alter ecogeomorphic patterns and processes, novel tools are required. In this chapter we explore different modelling approaches that have been developed to simulate pattern formation, and ecological and geomorphic processes. These modelling approaches reflect some of the best available tools at present, but notably, they tend to simulate only one or at best two components of the ecogeomorphic system. The chapter culminates with a discussion of these different modelling approaches and how they provide a foundation upon which to develop much needed ecogeomorphic modelling tools.

Resilience, Self-Organization, Complexity and Pattern Formation

Clarity of definitions is fundamental to the successful completion of any interdisciplinary project. In this chapter, we focus on defining a number of key terms that recur throughout the volume, and thus it acts as both a foundation and glossary for understanding the material covered. Ideas of resilience, self-organization and complexity are widely used across in constituent disciplines discussed in Chap. 1, but their use varies and we attempt to define this variation and thus the context of use in the book. There is also a strong emphasis on pattern, so we provide here an initial definition, to be followed up in more detail in Chaps. 7 and 8. We then move onto the specific nature of drylands and the need to understand land degradation within them and through them. How the mode of study affects our understanding is the next theme, in particular how case studies based in different places can be generalized, given the variations in landscape and vegetation type within them. Following an initial summary of the preceding material to evaluate why self-organization and complexity are useful frameworks for understanding patterns and processes in drylands, the chapter concludes with an overview of the deterministic and stochastic frameworks for understanding pattern.

Assessment of Patterns in Ecogeomorphic Systems

Through studying patterns we can come to understand the systematic formulae that generate them. The scale and relative stability of the processes causing dryland degradation are particularly inviting to pattern analysis. The following sections give an overview of the functioning and application of pattern assessment tools including (geo)statistical, spectral and indicator methods and explore the potential of pattern-oriented modelling.