People
Rhyme and Reason
Ecologist looks at the science of life through the eyes of a poet
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Scan Prof. Madhur Anand's lengthy list of recent publications and you'll see many journal names befitting the research of this prolific U of G newcomer and Canada Research Chair holder, including the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Ecological Modelling, Conservation Biology and Restoration Ecology. But what's this: the literary journal Lichen?
Seems there's more than one way for a scientist to record her observations and ideas. Anand's efforts to make sense of the world around her — and around all of us — extend beyond her workaday research studies in theoretical ecology to more personal reflections captured in her published poetry.
This summer, she brought those attributes and interests to Guelph's Department of Environmental Biology as the CRC in Global Ecological Change. Her research involves quantitative ecology — applying mathematical, statistical and computational models to the study of ecosystems. She's interested in the big-picture impact of changes wrought on ecosystems, from biodiversity, climate change and land use to human migration and invasive species, or in her words, “any change that requires people to look at the large-scale or long-term effects of local or recent modifications.”
Anand studies patterns that unfold from interactions among living things and between those living things and their environment. That's more than just biodiversity, or the head count of species in a given area. Zoom out from there and you start to see broader patterns of interactions. Call it biocomplexity or what happens at the intersections within an ecosystem. “It's an attempt to understand how complex ecological systems work or are organized,” she says.
She can't be accused of not seeing the forest for the trees — not an inappropriate metaphor, as it turns out. Although she stresses that quantitative ecology can involve any kind of ecosystem, much of her past and current work involves forests and their response to such forces as pollution, logging, introduced pests and restoration.
Until moving to Guelph this year, Anand carried out those studies in a kind of natural lab in northern Ontario. She spent six years on faculty at Laurentian University, where she studied the recovery and restoration of forests from decades of mine smelter damage. She plans to continue research in Sudbury, where she was among the 10 top-funded researchers and held a CRC in Biocomplexity of the Environment from 2001 to 2006.
Speaking of efforts since the 1970s to restore the Sudbury-area landscape — or what was grimly termed the “moonscape” when NASA conducted its moon landing trials there — she says the city and its environs offer ecologists a way to study natural and human-induced recovery and the relative impact of native and non-native species on ecological community structure. “It's an interesting natural lab to study,” says Anand, who was born in Thunder Bay but raised in Toronto and Oakville.
Her interest in theoretical ecology had been caught years earlier, during the final year of her undergraduate degree in ecology and evolution at the University of Western Ontario. That's when she learned of the possibilities of using quantitative tools and models to help understand the natural world, from how bees share information in a hive to how predator-prey systems work to how ecological communities assemble. “I was just fascinated by all of that.”
Funded by an award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Anand pursued her PhD with Prof. László Orlóci at Western. She manipulated models to understand and predict changes in an abandoned farm field reverting to forest — no straightforward process: “We know nature is not that well-behaved.” Her doctoral work on complexity and ecological systems won a provincial award for excellence in research and technology development in 1997. Last year, Anand was recognized by her alma mater with its Young Alumni Award.
Although her studies are theoretical by definition, she says her work may eventually help inform policy decisions. More directly, Anand hopes her studies — and those of her graduate students and post-docs — help people think differently about the effects of human activities on the landscape, from the impact of smelters on forests to how climate change may affect population dynamics of such insects as forest tent caterpillars.
Her research involves its own share of links across disciplines and borders. She's currently collaborating on restoration and biodiversity studies with researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, where she holds an adjunct professorship. Through the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, she is working with colleagues in Brazil to study the impact of humans on forests.
Closer to home, she has collaborated with her husband, Prof. Chris Bauch, Mathematics and Statistics, on population dynamics of clonal plants. They have co-supervised a master's student at Guelph and are now co-supervising post-docs from France and the United States on two new projects.
Before landing her position at Laurentian, Anand completed a series of post-docs in the Netherlands, Israel, Italy and the United States, all within about three years. “I've had my tour of the world,” she says.
During her post-doc in Trieste in 1997, inspiration struck from an unaccustomed direction. She found herself in Venice with a botanist studying the effects of air pollution on lichens and began pondering wider lessons about the difference between studying life and experiencing it.
She wound up exploring those lessons not in a journal article but in a poem called Italian Scientist, published in Lichen in 2003. Since then, Anand has continued to follow connections between science and poetry, although her creative writing goes beyond scientific or biological subjects.
This year she was invited to present her poetry and ideas at a workshop on “Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science,” co-organized by the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery. She was selected last year to read at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival; this year, she discussed her poetry with writer D.M. Thomas at the Humber Summer School for Writers.
“Reading and writing poetry have been a passion for several years now,” says Anand. “For me, poetry represents one of the highest forms of creativity with ideas and language. I think there might actually be analogues between how ecologists formulate their view of a particular system in a model and how poets capture a complex idea or process in a few lines.”
Italian Scientist
by Madhur Anand
I cannot tell you how to get there, I can only show you.
The old Triestino botany professor meets me on the Rialto footbridge. He is lending me his weekend apartment. Points of reference: the Rialto bridge, the botany professor.
How does a means of passage become a destination? At this crossroads, young and old, tourists avoid tourists. People sell their identities as flags or masks, dispense confectionery welcomes and generic farewells. My guidebook instructs me to walk down to the Rialto bridge, then return along the other side.
But now a botany professor and his student have left behind their herbariums, glasshouses, flora, their dust-filled lives. Lily-livered, I want to discuss his findings about the effects of air pollution on lichens, now noticeably absent from this bridge. Or simply remind myself that lichens are far more primitive than lilies.
But instead, I'm just gathering proof that he has been breathing cigarettes and grappa all his life for this very day.
Speechless as he navigates the darkening Venetian architecture — like running through his alpine forest lit by a handful of stars, or riding his motorcycle through diamond-tipped mountains, losing my breath at 100 kilometres an hour.
Here is the apartment, but could I find it again? It's not enough just to study life, he insists, pulling out a key.
I cannot draw you a map, when every detail matters.