Ecological State Protocols

= "Ecological state protocols are an enacted cultural record of how we exist, flourish, or perish together in a storied world. They are economic, legal, and machine - readable visions of what it means to be a social species in an era of mass extinction." [1]

Description

Regen Network:

"An Ecological State Protocol is a context-specific assessment of ecological health using a localized and universal set of indicators like GIS and remote-sensing. ESPs output either one or multiple quantifications of a shift in measurable ecological outcomes, such as pollinator density. Thus, it represents a basket of different indicators appropriate and applicable to the local context. The outcome is not a defined final number, but a holistic approach to defining a shift in the ecological state.

...

The health of an ecosystem can be assessed by analyzing changes in different ecological indicators, such as Soil Organic Carbon, for example. Ecological State Protocols (ESPs) are deployed to analyze the health of our planet’s ecosystems.

In other words, an ESP allows a person, organization, or business to track a shift in an ecological state (an ecological outcome).

...

ESPs are an approach aiming to transcend and include the current approach of verifying practices and use models to assume the impacts. An ESP studies both the immediate, short-term, visible impact (in order to assess regeneration on a local and bioregional scale: Did this practice occur — yes or no? And at which scale? For which amount of time? In which location?) and the longer-term ecological indicators (AGB, NPP, SOC…).

This combined approach of identifying a land management practice (like no-till agriculture or mixed agroforestry) while tracking its various different ecological outcomes (AGB, SOC, etc.) creates a unique opportunity to contribute to the global wisdom about the real-world impact of land and ocean stewardship.

It is possible for ESPs to target either just short-term or long-term impact, such as sediment runoff or soil organic carbon, respectively. But more commonly, the two will be observed simultaneously as part of a process to understand the full-spectrum impact of a particular set of practices."

(https://medium.com/regen-network/ecological-state-protocols-1c7e97dadeae)

Discussion

On the Importance of 'Seeing State'

Austin Wade Smith:

"Ecological state protocols are an enacted cultural record of how we exist, flourish, or perish together in a storied world. They are economic, legal, and machine - readable visions of what it means to be a social species in an era of mass extinction."

Austin Wade Smith:

"The notion of bringing vision and sensitivity where previously there was none is not a metaphor. It is both an exercise in qualitative impression as well as quantitative measure. It is both a science of the abstract and a science of the concrete. Through myriad observations, impressions, pixels, signals, experiences and readings we create durable representations of our place in the world and our relations within. This requires presence and perspectives from up close, as well as at a distance. Embodied perception at an intimate scale as well as earth observation data at a remote scale work in mutually reinforcing loops to weave a dynamic understanding of place and relationships. These shared visions are knowledge commons, inseparable from the corners of the living world from which they emerge, and as commons they must be stewarded and protected like their living referents because they form the basis of where we see ourselves in the world, and from where our values stem.

...

Defining the “state” of a place is a way of formulating the present as an accumulation of events from the past Like the process of bearing witness, ecological state is a testament to the wellbeing of a place, a people, a social fabric. It is a reflection of its extinctions and resurgences, its exposure and patterns of regeneration in a form coherent to prompt action and response. Despite the profound complexity at the heart of ecology and all living systems more broadly, the wellbeing of the planet is not unfathomable. To define and hold the state of the living world, is to make a kind of attestation. Doing so builds an important point of contact within the challenge of legibility. Ecological state is a form of knowing the wellbeing of the living world which is legible and thus actionable within anthropogenic systems like law, economy, policy, information technology, etc. It is an interface through which different worlds can touch, and upon which action can be orchestrated. Rather than a convergent process, the expression of ecological state can be an exploratory process. Let there be a renaissance of interfaces through which the living world exerts pressure on anthropogenic systems.

DAOs could be powerful assemblages of social, ecological, and technical relationships which own and steward the state of a given territory, ecosystem, and bioregion. This is because the protocols, (or perhaps we might call them rituals?), through which communities gather and cohere ecological state requires coordination and governance across diverse domains. This premise is not unfamiliar.

..

The methods through which data and experience are structured as information, formalized into situated knowledge, and ultimately made actionable as ecological state should be owned and governed by the inhabitants of a particular territory. Whoever owns or governs these standards controls the point of contact between ecological wellbeing and the different infrastructural and technical regimes which coordinate our lives. This interface becomes a coordination point for all kinds of interactions.

The rituals by which DAOs define and update ecological state are a response to the dilemmas of access and use. These patterns are not unfamiliar to commons rooted in plants, water, and minerals, because ecological states must be owned and governed like the living systems in which they are situated, and to which they refer. Ostrom explicitly states that both informatic and biophysical commons are shared resources prone to social dilemmas. [14] In the case of ecological state protocols, communities govern the means by which they form a coherent understanding of place through diverse and imperfect means. This process of overcoming complex inputs and incentives to create reliable consensus is a variant on a problem sometimes referred to as an oracle problem. DAOs can be a critical means through which communities own and govern oracles of ecological state, in order to orchestrate action, value, policy at a bioregional / territorial level. Making the complex and entangled state of a bioregion legible to political, economic, and informatic systems, without reducing them solely to the logic of any one of those systems, is essential in combating terra nullius. While rituals and protocols to cohere and maintain state may feel like a foreign concept to broader legacies of mutualism and environmental intimacy, the convergence of informatic, social, and ecological processes is in fact the point.

Ecological state protocols are an enacted cultural record of how we exist, flourish, or perish together in a storied world. They are economic, legal, and machine - readable visions of what it means to be a social species in an era of mass extinction.

(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg)

Examples

Regen Network:

Examples of Regen Foundation ESPs include Biodiversity, Above Ground Biomass (AGB), Soil Organic Carbon (SOC), Net Primary Productivity (NPP), Water Quality, Pollinator Density and many more. All of these ESPs are built to analyze specific datasets, and from such data sets, derive the information necessary to identify changes in the indicators specified by that particular protocol."

(https://medium.com/regen-network/ecological-state-protocols-1c7e97dadeae)

Directory

of participating protocols:

1. 2.1 Endangered Species Habitat Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2. 2.2 Pollinator Density Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3. 2.3 Water Quality Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4. 2.4 Habitat Quality Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. 2.5 Erosion and Sediment Delivery Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
6. 2.6 Urban Tree Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7. 2.7 Aquifer Carbon Sinks Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
8. 2.8 Air Quality Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Carbon Sequestration Indicators

1. 3.1 Soil Carbon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2. 3.2 Biological Indicators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3. 3.3 Above Ground Biomass (AGB) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
4. 3.4 Surface Water Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5. 3.5 Water and Nutrient Runoff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6. 3.6 Land Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
7. 3.7 Biodiversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
8. 3.8 Sediment Delivery and Soil Loss Due to Erosion . . . . . . . . . 18
9. 3.9 Net Primary Productivity (NPP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
10. 3.10 Covariables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
11. 3.11 Climate: Rainfall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
12. 3.12 Soil Moisture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

(https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Protocols.pdf)

More information

* Regen Network. Ecological State Protocols. B. Deriemaeker, G. Booman, T. Kazantsev, N. Assareh, M. Rada. May 13, 2018

URL = https://regen-network.gitlab.io/whitepaper/Protocols.pdf