ENVIRONMENT

JOSEF SETTELE, an ecologist from the Center for Environmental Research in Halle, Germany, comes to rice-growing Asia with a novel approach to largescale environmental risk assessment.

Thinking
outside
GREG FANSLOW

the box
by Greg Fanslow organism, or some isolated part of an ecosystem, and start to ask questions about how it will interact with other boxes in the environment, were quickly inundated with uncertainty about how environmental change will reshape our world (see box). Another challenging aspect to developing an understanding of interactions between components of a complex system is the matter of communication. The different scientic disciplineswhich can be thought of as different boxes in which scientists workhave traditionally been viewed as distinct and have developed strikingly different languages. As a result, interdisciplinary collaboration tends to be rare because getting through language barriers with someone in a different discipline requires a lot of valuable time and energy for people that dont generally have a lot to spare. When you want to understand
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As society accepts the reality of global climate change and begins to prepare for it, we need the tools to predict the risks we should expect

limate change and human alterations of the landscapefor agriculture and housing, for example are virtually certain to affect biodiversity and the stability of ecosystems. This is simply because, although certain species will be favored by changes, others will not. The simplicity, however, stops there. It is relatively easy to test how something like increased temperature will affect an organism. We can isolate almost any organism, put it in a box, and observe how it responds to environmental changes we can simulate in a controlled setting, such as a laboratory. We might nd, for example, that warming benets this isolated organism. But what if warming also benets a disease of this organism? What if temperatures become too warm for other organisms on which our hypothetical organism depends, such as its prey if its a predator or

a pollinator of its host plant if its an herbivore? What if warming benets a competitor even more? Once we step outside the small hypothetical box that denes just one Calculating Complexity

cosystems are remarkably complex, which makes it exceedingly difcult to predict their behavior. If we are lucky, we may be able to understand how one species affects another species, but, in a relatively simple hypothetical system of 50 species, for example, each species potentially interacts with 49 other species. This gives us no less than 1,250 possible two-way interactions in a simple 50species system. If you expand your frame of reference to larger areas with many more types of ecosystems, its clear that even a large group of dedicated scientists couldnt study even a small percentage of the possible two-way interactions using traditional controlled experiments, much less the three- and four-way interactions that are often just as important.
Rice Today October-December 2006

ENVIRONMENT
processes in a very large scale system, but cant do experiments, modeling is a useful way to synthesize information gathered independently about components of a larger system. However, a model that combines too many different pieces of information becomes unwieldy and difcult to interpret because results can no longer be attributed to something happening in a particular part of the overall system. Josef Settele, an ecologist from the Center for Environmental Research in Halle, Germany, thinks he has the right approach to understanding environmental risks over large areas. The European Union has given Dr. Settele more than 25 million Euros (US$32 million) to implement a project called ALARM (www.alarmproject.net), which has a scope matched only by the ambition of its acronym: Assessing LArge-scale environmental Risks for biodiversity with tested Methods. The objective of the project is to apply our best understanding of how organisms and ecosystems function and use new ways to assess largescale environmental risks. Ultimately, we want to provide information that can be used to reduce negative impacts on humans and, in turn, minimize negative human impacts both direct and indirect, says Settele. After recently expanding its geographic reach by adding institutions and scientists from outside the European Union, ALARM
A MAP of Europe showing projected losses of areas that are environmentally suitable for amphibian species by the year 2050.1 Colors represent a six-class scale where increasing intensities of red represent increasing degrees of species loss.

Arajo MB, Thuiller W, Pearson RG. 2006. Climate warming and the decline of amphibians and reptiles in Europe. Journal of Biogeography (special issue: Species distribution modelling: methods, challenges and applications).

will encompass a total of more than 250 scientists from 69 institutions in 33 countries, and will have a budget of more than 25 million Euros. With the expansion of the project to Asia comes the need to tailor the ALARM approach for rice-growing systems and IRRI ecologist K.L. Heong has been enlisted to analyze long-term trends in the biodiversity of parasitic wasps. If the project continues to grow in the region, other rice scientists may be recruited as well. Dr. Settele is no stranger to rice elds either. He began his ecology career in the 1980s as a graduate student with an insect ecology project in the Ifugao rice terraces in the Philippines. He has now returned to the rice elds of Asia to join International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) scientists in applying an
ARIEL JAVELLANA

THE ALARM project will help researchers predict how climate change will affect rice-growing regions such as this area along the Magat River, which separates the plains of Nueva Viscaya and the mountains of Ifugao Province in Luzon, Philippines.

approach he developed to predict the impacts of complex environmental changes on the ecosystems of Europe. The feature of ALARM that sets it apart from overly complex modeling exercises is that it makes use of scientic narratives (or stories) based on scientists best understanding of the environmental systems they study. ALARM puts these narratives together to paint a larger picture of how something as large and complex as the environment of a continent will respond to different environmental driving forces. Just as challenging as reaching an understanding of how environmental change will play out is translating that understanding into language that policymakers and the general public can understand. To illustrate what he is trying to do through the ALARM project, Dr. Settele likes to contrast different forms of environmental storytelling. Scientists tend to be reluctant to let a good story distract attention from the facts, while journalists or activists can often be faulted for ignoring facts for the sake of a good story, he says. The goal of ALARM is to nd a compromise between these ways of telling environmental stories and treat stories as the envelopes to carry facts, and remember that facts are the basis of any good story.

Greg Fanslow is an environmental consultant at IRRI.

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Rice Today October-December 2006