Speaker: Matt Hammond
McMaster University Complex Ecological Systems Lab.
‘Designer ecosystems’ may help to achieve sustainability by building the best attributes of natural ecosystems into engineered ones. Past agro-ecological systems that purposely employed natural complexity for human benefit, from ancient Hawaiian fish ponds to the Biosphere 2 project, highlight the promise and the pitfalls of designing complex systems. Avoiding the pitfalls will only be possible if we apply recent insights into the power of biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity to regulate ecosystems. Hammond will discuss, among other examples, one such application from the McMaster University Complex Ecological Systems Lab: a biodiverse, indoor ecosystem that runs on kitchen waste to grow fish and plant crops.