Guest Blog

4 September 2023

A collaboration between scientist Céline Cattoën-Gilbert and illustrator Jean Donaldson.

It’s Sunday 14 August 2022, and I’m sitting in front of my computer. I feel a surge of numbing emotions and prickly memories gushing through me. My eyes scan the river forecasts for Westport, mentally tracing and mapping the ominous contours of rising water levels.

I research how to develop, improve and communicate flood forecasting models. Today the models have made me pause. Some of the highest predicted scenarios look like what occurred in 2021, when widespread flooding devastated Westport. Thousands of people had to be evacuated, and insurance companies paid out $97.2 million in damages.

I breathe and tentatively remind myself that uncertainties are still very large. We are five days ahead of a massive storm – known as an atmospheric river – hitting the West Coast and Tasman regions. We have time.

The Covid-19 pandemic thrust modelling into the public consciousness in Aotearoa New Zealand. Models are simplified representations of real-world processes. They are one of the tools available to decision-makers facing tough choices. For flood forecasting, we’re working with an unfathomably complex system to try and make predictions across many scales: from atmospheric to catchment to the human scale.

Flip flops. The supercomputer clocks.

It’s Monday morning. I lean forward watching my screen, and feel a mix of relief and frustration. The models are flip flopping between a widespread urban flooding scenario and a less severe rural flooding scenario for Westport. With each forecast update, I am mesmerised by the oscillation of the worst case scenarios between river forecast updates: one world where the storm heads on to the West Coast and a parallel one where it moves north, hitting Nelson. The following day the West Coast declares a regional state of emergency, enabling a strategic and coordinated response. We still have time.

Flip flops. The rain drops. The supercomputer continues to clock.

In 1922, Lewis Richardson attempted to solve weather prediction equations — by hand. A century later, we have bigger, faster and more advanced supercomputers — powerful machines capable of processing enormous amounts of data and performing complex calculations. We have technology advances in observations with satellites. Breakthroughs in modelling the pathway of rainfall from the atmosphere to the rivers. We now have access to unprecedented and enormous improvements in our predictions. But despite all our efforts and advances, it is still difficult to predict and prepare for floods.

Enter chaos, the butterfly effect, and the human mind.

In the 1960s, Edward Lorenz was bewildered by his failed weather modelling experiments. Using the same computer model, and the same initial conditions but rounded to three decimals, two dramatically different results occurred. The weather is predictable, but given ever so slightly different conditions at the beginning of the simulation, the forecast will deviate over time. Dramatically. Chaotically. Known as the butterfly effect, the amount of difference in the starting points of the two scenarios is so small that it is comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings.

Flip flops. The rain continues to drop. Now the ground begins to soak. Relentlessly, the supercomputer clocks.

When a raindrop hits the ground, it faces a myriad of options to travel through the landscape to reach the river. Sliding over the land, percolating below the surface, gushing through tiny holes from bed rocks, roots, urban stormwater pipes. Knowing the correct pathway will tell us how fast and how high the river roars, where the water rises, and where help may need to go.

Flip flops, flip flops, flip flops. The rain pours onto saturated ground. The supercomputer delivers new scenarios. Which one will unfold?

The butterfly effect means that we need to capture uncertainties at each step of the prediction process. Instead of relying on just one computer model to predict floods, ensemble forecasting uses a whole bunch of them. These scenarios consider small variations in rainfall, river levels, and how much water is already in the soil. Each model might give a slightly different prediction based on its own initial state, assumptions, and calculations. By looking at all these different predictions together, we can consider a range of possible outcomes to prepare for.

Tick tock. The humans talk.

Science is meant to help people foresee the invisible. To imagine how rising forecasted river levels could transform into a chest-height wall of water or an ocean of mud at their doorstep. Humans must be able to imagine that the worst-case scenarios of the forecasts could occur. Even when the rain outside has stopped, the rushing river upstream may still be bursting through its banks.

But the human mind can struggle to envision the possibility of an extreme flood forecast becoming reality, even after it’s occurred. The sheer devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle was far beyond what I could possibly imagine as I drove north of Gisborne Tairawhiti recently. Witnessing its aftermath with my own eyes months later, I was astounded by the massive volumes of sediment obscuring the severely eroded riverbanks. The trees and trunks uprooted and scattered in seemingly random locations. The roads scarred and interrupted by countless landslides. My heart sank at the sight of the hilly landscapes disfigured, marred by erosion over kilometres and kilometres of land. I still can’t imagine the nature of forces at play needed to cause such a profound and lasting impact on the land.

We are running out of time. By Tuesday, exhaustion runs through my body and my mind. I impatiently check updated river forecasts and scrutinise every nuance in our scenarios. A pattern is emerging from the chaos. The latest modelling is reassuring and indicates an easing in predicted intensity for Westport. But the next day, north of Westport, the Maitai River in Nelson city will burst its banks. More than 200 homes will be evacuated and numerous landslides will be triggered.

Aotearoa has experienced some serious floods over the last few years, and we’re going to have more. For those whose lives and homes have been devastated by these floods, the recurring threats of floods surpass imagination with a haunting memory. The mere sound of a raindrop, the scent of damp streets can trigger a rush of fear. The chatter of past emotions can overwhelm the human mind in an instant. So, when the river’s forecasts hint at receding waters from a second front for Westport during that August flood event, a distinct kind of strength emerges for Coasters. It takes incredible mental stamina, clarity of communication, trust in the science, the responders, the authorities, and the unity of the community to divert emergency efforts to their neighbouring catchment — where help is most urgently needed. Emergency responders, with their unyielding commitments, are unsung heroes of our changing climate.

Working with decision-makers has been an invaluable personal and professional growth experience. Through this, I have learnt that models don’t need to be perfect to be insightful. I have peeked into some of the complex pathways from predicting floods to decision-making for early actions. From that experience, I see that we urgently need improved integrated predictions across disciplines of science, natural hazards, forecasting, human behaviour communication and social science.

We must continue to move towards a world where we better weave together our science, our people, our community, our values and our imagination to effectively enhance flood preparedness.

Céline Cattoën-Gilbert is a Principal Investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini who focuses on forecasting floods.

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/.

3 July 2023

A collaboration between scientist Markus Luczak-Roesch and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.

In 1975, a student working in Japan made a mistake. They misunderstood some instructions in Japanese and added 1,000 times more of a substance to a chemical reaction than they were supposed to.

The chemical reaction created a silvery plastic. When New Zealand-born scientist Alan MacDiarmid visited Japan and saw this silvery plastic, he recognised the potential of its remarkable properties. He worked on this new material alongside Hideki Shirakawa and Alan Heeger, and they created plastics that could conduct electricity.

MacDiarmid and his collaborators were awarded a Nobel Prize for this work, the third Nobel Prize ever awarded to a New Zealander. Conductive plastics now underpin most of our lives through their use in smartphone screens and solar panels.

What creates Nobel Prize winning ideas? Is it the right people being in the right place at the right time? Is it what these people say or do? Or do ideas just appear out of nowhere? Many people will say intuition, serendipity or coincidence may often be at play. Was it the way the instructions were given to the student that led to this fortunate mistake? Was it the student’s language barrier? Was it MacDiarmid’s ability to recognise the significance of this mistake? Or was it the unique composition of all of those things?

Amongst all the random occurrences in the world, do certain ones have a lasting impact? To try and answer this question, I have a suggestion to make: Everything is information.

Consider something as common and seemingly simple as MacDiarmid and his research team having a chat about an experiment they want to perform in the lab the next day. There are a lot of things going on:

• The words that are said
• Brain waves as sensory input is processed
• Body temperature
• Heart rate
• Frequency of eye moment

Over the course of the conversation all of these signals will continuously change. Some more or less than others. If we record them all we could get a very detailed landscape of information about their chat, and hopefully capture the coincidence that led to their groundbreaking discovery.

But studying what a human says over a time period is very different from studying their brain waves over the same period, for example. We’re dealing with apples and oranges to understand the full picture of this situation. The apples here being the words someone says, the oranges being the electrical activity in people’s brains.

We’re working on how we can map all these different signals to a specific type of mathematical object, namely a network. If we combine the many networks we construct from the different signals, we get something that you can think of as a cube. A cube of all the information from the whole variety of sources that were observed over a time period. Within this cube we can then search for structures that represent meaningful coincidences — because if these structures weren’t present the cube would fall apart or change shape.

This may sound rather complicated. So, let’s explore baking a cake. When baking a cake you combine all sorts of different ingredients that come in different forms like milk, sugar, and eggs. Mixed together and baked, the result is a tasty cake. But if you leave one of those ingredients out, you end up with a hot mess that won’t hold its shape. This roughly describes what we are dealing with here on a mathematical level.

We weren’t there to monitor MacDiarmid and his team having a chat before their discovery, but we do want to study human conversations in this way. We can also use this method to uncover patterns in complex data to better understand things like climate science, genomics, humanities, psychology and neuroscience.

Let’s connect what we just described to the present moment. You’re currently reading this blog post, which is — within the grand scheme of your lifetime — a tiny, statistically insignificant event. But at this very moment there may be something in your mind or your body’s response that may later trigger a thought. This could be minutes later, months later or even years later.

With our methods we want to make it possible to capture the holistic complexity of this moment and link it to related information in the past and in the future, to understand which indispensable ingredients are key in the baking of your life.

Do you think reading this was one of them?

Find out more about Transcendental Information Cascades

Markus Luczak-Roesch is a Principal Investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini who brings unique computational approaches to collaborative teams to generate new insights into complexity and contribute to our understanding of emergence.

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/.

2 June 2023

A collaboration between scientist Chrissie Painting and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Anna Brown.

“Found some!” I let out a sigh of relief and turn towards my colleague’s voice coming somewhere from among a tangle of logs and vines. Above me a kākā whistles, but this charismatic clown is not who we’re here to see.

I climb awkwardly over a huge fallen tawa and find my co-researcher Ummat crouched down staring at a pair of pepeke nguturoa* (New Zealand giraffe weevils). The male giraffe weevil is about the length of a clothes peg, and he’s standing guard over a smaller female, who is painstakingly using her drill-shaped head to carve out a hole in the tree to safely deposit her egg.

We open our backpacks, grab our binoculars, notebooks, and stopwatches, and start watching the pair. It takes four hours, but the female eventually turns around and starts to lay her egg into the carefully prepared hole. During that time we watch three different males mating with her – our original friend who we met at the start of the day, as well as a tiny male about a fifth of his size, who creeps underneath the guarding male and sneakily mates with the female. The third male is so long he towers over both the other males.

All of these weevils are painted with little numbers that act as ID badges, their size measured and a bit of leg tissue clipped to use for DNA analysis. Only one of these males can father the single tiny egg that has been laid into the tree.

We are peeking at the sex lives of giraffe weevils to answer a question that has been rattling around in my brain for years. How does the potent force of competition to pass on genes shape an animal’s behaviour and appearance? Being bigger is partly the answer to being successful if you’re a giraffe weevil. Bigger males are more likely to win fights with competing males and get the chance to mate. Males use their ridiculously elongated head like a jousting pole to throw their opponent off the tree in an attempt to secure mating opportunities. Goofy, but effective.

However, getting to mate doesn’t necessarily mean getting to be a dad. Across animals, the majority of females mate with multiple males. Females often store sperm from these suitors in their reproductive tracts, where those sperm literally race to successfully fertilise an egg. The result is an astonishing array of adaptations that evolve as a response to this secretive competition that continues after mating.

Sperm competition is like entering a lottery – the more tickets (sperm) you buy, the more chances you have to win (fertilisation). In deer mice, sperm clumps together to form a cooperative bundle that races towards the egg, male damselflies have spoon-like penises that scrape out the sperm from a female’s previous rendezvous, and male scorpionflies can assess how much sperm a female is storing and adjust their ejaculate size in response.

Back in the bush, we are watching our female rock her body back and forth, scraping microscopic bits of bark to plug the hole where she’s laid her egg, making it invisible to onlookers. Neither of us speaks, as this part of the observation is crucial – we need to pinpoint the exact spot that the female has laid her egg. I’m drawing a map in my mind: one centimetre from the lightning-shaped crack, just below the bubbly lichen and between those two black specks. I reach tentatively across to the tree, draw a bright red dot on top of the covered hole and then glue a bottle cap over it. A week later we return to the tree and carefully extract the egg using wood-carving tools and all the patience we can muster.

Once plucked out, the egg is the size of a fairy sprinkle. This precious packet contains answers to our mystery. DNA genotyping will reveal the father, and which aspects of his biology make him successful. Is it the length of his weapon? The order in which he mated? Or maybe it’s how long he got to mate for.

We will watch many more episodes of this epic sex saga. Combined, these observations will reveal the intricate secrets of giraffe weevil mating behaviour, and ultimately, tell us a little bit more about how evolution is responsible for driving diversity in Earth’s creatures.

*I’ve not been able to find much information about the Māori names for the giraffe weevil but pepeke nguturoa loosely translates to ‘long-beaked beetle/insect’, in reference to the male’s elongated rostrum. Giraffe weevils are also known as tūwhaipapa and tūwhaitara, which is said to refer to the atua of newly made canoes and alludes to the beetle’s long canoe-like body. The giraffe weevil’s scientific name Lasiorhynchus barbicornis also has an interesting etymology, with ‘lasios’ meaning densely hairy, ‘rhynchos’ meaning proboscis, ‘barbi’ meaning beard and ‘corni’ meaning horn. That means both the genus and species name are referring to the male’s super hairy moustache that runs along the underside of its rostrum!

Chrissie Painting is a Principal Investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini, with a particular fascination for insect mating systems and a passion for raising the awareness of the littlest creatures of Aotearoa.

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/.

1 May 2023

A collaboration between research assistant Claire Grant and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.

“Right, let’s go Pup!” Dad sing-songs to our dog Blue as she bounces from left to right, bow-wowing at the top of her lungs. She’s just as excited about going hunting as we are. We’ve been through our list: boots – check, keys – check, rifle – check, but we’ve probably forgotten something important, as Mum likes to point out. Up goes the screechy roller door and we’re finally on our way.

Driving across the bridge we both look west, our eyes following the Waipawa river up to the Ruahine and Wakarara Ranges. “Oh yeah, not looking too bad aye,” I say in my blokiest voice as the blue-green mountains lean over us, silhouetted by clear skies. “Oh mate,” Dad replies. The Waipawa river leads the way for the first half of the drive, before it splits in two and the Makaroro takes over as our guide.

As we drive alongside the rivers, Dad and I reminisce, “Remember when we used to float down the river all the way from the Waipawa Bridge out to Patangata at the start of summer?”

“Yeah that was fun as. But we had to walk half the way because the river was so low.”

We’re halfway there when we have to stop and wait for a column of dairy cows to cross the road, udders swollen and swaying. We give the cows voices and personalities. Betsy’s a complainer, “Walking, walking and more walking” she says in a disgruntled drawl. And here comes the farmer, Trev, on his quad. Good bloke.

The road crinkles as the land compresses and the foothills emerge from the plains. We round a bend and the mountains fill the sky. Sweeping down the hillside to the Makaroro’s edge I wind down my window and breathe in the scent of toasted grass, while doing my best to feel the spirit of this place with the intensity I felt as a kid. It’s friendly yet ominous, inviting yet threatening.

Here is where the Makaroro begins its journey towards the pasture-land of Central Hawke’s Bay. It’s the same place I have returned to throughout my life, and each time it’s almost exactly as I remember it. It fills my soul to be here, to return home.

But this is the proposed site for the Ruataniwha dam.

*****

Droughts and dry spells have plagued Central Hawke’s Bay over the past several years, and climate change has pushed water security to the top of the list of local issues. The ecological health of the Tukituki catchment, within which the Waipawa and Makaroro rivers lie, is a major concern, though it is constantly vying for attention against agricultural irrigation demands.

With less water flowing in the rivers the concentration of pollutants increases, and ecological issues such as toxic algal blooms arise. The proposed Ruataniwha Dam was supposed to be Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s silver bullet solution to support freshwater ecosystems and provide secure water for irrigation.

The council’s approach is an example of top-down environmental management. Top-down management tends towards the view that technology can provide environmental salvation and that systemic changes are unnecessary. When viewed in this way, the best solutions are those which are quick, cheap, and cause the least amount of social disruption. Through this lens, a dam is a logical solution.

This reliance on technology reflects only one of the wide range of worldviews that exist within communities. Take my position in the Ruataniwha Dam debate as an example. I am connected with the Makaroro river in a way which makes it more than just a resource. It is a lifetime of memories. It is a being with a spirit. It is so much more than a feasible site for water storage infrastructure. From my view, a dam is not an option.

My view is an example of a bottom-up environmental approach. Bottom-up approaches tend to be built on an holistic foundation. The environment is not viewed as an object apart from humanity, which exists only as a resource for economic gain.

Taking a bottom-up approach leads to very different solutions to environmental issues. Perhaps we should diversify our economy to increase resilience, or perhaps we need to build stronger relationships between people and their freshwater ecosystems to encourage responsible use. Such solutions are not quick or cheap. They are complex, and they certainly don’t avoid social disruption. They recognise the diversity of understandings and potential solutions that don’t fit within a top-down view.

There is rarely a perfect solution to environmental problems, whether it’s water scarcity in Central Hawke’s Bay, deforestation in the Amazon, or overfishing in the Southern Ocean. But ultimately we all want our communities to live prosperously in healthy environments for generations to come. When different ideas about what should be done about environmental issues clash and bring each other to a stand still, what do we do? The problems still exist and we need to do something.

So, do we build the dam, or do we not?

Claire Grant has been exploring top-down and bottom-up approaches as a research assistant on Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Ki te toi o te ora: System change to reverse health inequality and environmental degradation project.

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/.