Tag Archives: Trophic Cascades

A taste of the upcoming Season at Wild Cortes

Wild Cortes will be giving a peak of the theme for the upcoming season  this Monday, between 1:00 and 3:00. 

Curator Donna Collins explained, “It’s a bit of a preview that’s going to be a family day activity. We will be taking the families out into the forest, measuring trees to find a mother tree. Then we’ll also be digging to pull up some of the mychorrhizal networks and looking at them here underneath the stereoscopes. After that, participants will be actually creating their own mitochondrial network that will link to their own tree root.  They will be building this themselves. Finally, we will be mimicking the connections that all of these mychorrhizal networks and trees make, by making the connections with string and connecting people.”

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The Quadra Project: Structural Change

Systems are complicated. Indeed, we are just beginning to understand how complicated and unpredictable they are. And they include everything from biological ecologies to global weather.

Systems are integrated. Each part of a system is connected to all the other parts, so that any change in any part influences all the other parts. Usually, small changes are absorbed into the system with little apparent effect. But introduce enough changes, or alter key components, and something unpredictable happens. In Systems Theory, this is called “emergence”, and is marked by a sudden and unpredictable restructuring of the entire system.

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