Do farmers use, and imitate, self-organizing resource-concentration mechanisms driven by non-human engineers in constraining environments? Biocultural landscapes and biomimicry at the ecosystem level

Abstract

In a wide range of environments —but which all have in common the scarcity of some key resource that is crucial for life— there have emerged ecosystems that show remarkably regular spatial patterns in the distribution of vegetation, in topography, or both. These patterns have been shown to result from the activities of organisms that can be classed as “ecosystem engineers.” In these constraining environments, “engineer” organisms, acting in concert with physical mechanisms, convert an initially homogeneous landscape into a landscape composed of two kinds of patches, one kind in which the crucial resource is concentrated, the other kind in which the crucial resource is depleted. Thus, in environments where a crucial resource is generally scarce, engineer organisms create patches of habitat in which the resource is relatively abundant. This allows organisms to persist in environments that would otherwise be marginal (or worse) for their survival. The process by which this occurs is termed “spatial self-organization” and the phenomenon is called “self-organized patchiness.” In some of the environments where strikingly patterned, self-organized ecosystems occur, farmers construct cultural landscapes that are remarkably similar to the constructions of the “engineer” organisms. This resemblance between artefacts made by humans and constructions made by non-human living beings raises numerous questions. Does the resemblance reflect independent convergence on similar adaptive solutions to constraining environments, or do human and non-human engineers interact in one or more ways? The objective of this presentation is to explore these questions.