Beavers Were Brought To The [Utah] Desert To Save A Dying River. Six Years Later, Here Are The Results.
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https://www.upworthy.com/beavers-refresh-utah-desert-ex1 <-- shared technical media article
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https://youtu.be/9-L___3vV9s?si=7H4JJ7sq_t76jw2L <-- shared media video
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https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2025/01/23/voices-federal-water-investments/ <-- shared local media article on the revitalization
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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210713-the-beavers-returning-to-the-desert <-- shared international media article on the translocation
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H/T @upworthy
#water #hydrology #desert #Utah #PriceRiver #SanRafaelRiver #restoration #ecosystem #river #waterresources #arid #wildlife #agricultrure #tourism #economics #ROI #costbenefit #humaninpacts #climatechange #overfarming #pollution #Colorado #ColoradoRiverBasin #drought #extremeweather #fluvial #pluvial #wildfire #risk #hazard #fisheries #beaver #translocation #landform #geomorphology #dam #dams #beaverdam #ponds #wetlands #natural #waterquality #reintroduction #keystonespecies #trophiccascade #recreation #fisheries #riparian #habitat #diversity #flow #engineering #fedscience

This is both amazing and beautiful: "A trophic cascade is an ecological process that starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down. A classic examples is when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park..."

https://youtu.be/oSBL7Gk_9QU

#EcologyMatters #TrophicCascade #WildlifeRestoration #Ecosystems #Biodiversity #NatureBalance #ConservationAwareness #Rewilding #ProtectWildlife #EnvironmentalEducation

Wolves at the Door

The Myth of the EdTech Ecosystem

We who work in the education sector often encounter the metaphor of “the edtech ecosystem.”  This metaphor is used to suggest that such ecosystems are self-regulating, and the edtech ecosystem is specifically framed as an innovative domain that exists to “disrupt” traditional education. But this framing serves vendors and venture capitalists (and learning technologists) who cast themselves as “forces of nature”, and want to bring about change for education’s sake, when in actual fact they are commercial actors driven by profit, or institutional actors trying to “gain seats at the table” (and the assumed power and influence that said table represents).

In late June of this year, we were invited to give a talk at the M25 Consortium of Libraries conference, the first one that had been convened face to face since 2019.  We wanted to confront the underlying assumptions of the EdTech Ecosystem metaphor, by way of telling a story about Yellowstone National Park, in the US.  

Trophic Cascade(s) in Yellowstone

Following the eradication of grey wolves from Yellowstone in the early 20th Century, the population of elk (large herbivores) grew unchecked. These herbivores grazed the park’s vegetation beyond what was sustainable, causing riverbank erosion, loss of habitat, and causing the reduction of other species such as beaver. In addition, without strong tree roots to stabilise the soil, rivers meandered unpredictably. Essentially, biodiversity collapsed and the park as a whole suffered. 

This ecological disaster was brought about by the removal of a key species – the wolf – causing a trophic cascade – that is, the indirect effects across an ecosystem, caused by impacting one species, a domino effect that alters the ecosystem throughout. For example, when the farmers and ranchers (at the advice and encouragement of the US Government) shot all the wolves they didn’t expect to lose all the beavers and all the trees.

In 1995 the park authorities, acting on the advice of ecologists, began a programme of reintroduction of the grey wolf. The wolves preyed on the elk numbers, controlling their population, and it changed their grazing behaviour. The vegetation recovered, it supported the return of beavers, waterways became stable, and the ecosystem became more diverse, more balanced.

EdTech “Ecosystems”

This figure is from a 2019 article, by Regan, P. M., & Khwaja, E. T. It shows the ecosystem of tech companies in the education sector, and their relationship to each other.  The red nodes are Venture Capitalist investors.  The blue nodes are the edtech companies funded by the VCs.

This is a system that has no balance.  The individual companies and the VCs are doing so much of the same thing, competing with each other to exploit the same food source, that is, Higher Education. This diagram represents a network of actors exerting gravity over the sector in a disproportionate way.  

This entire diagram is a herd of elk, uncontained by wolves.  We might say the red nodes are the ranchers and farmers and government officials, determined to get rid of the wolves.

What is missing from this figure? The answer lies not in another technological solution or stream of funding from venture capital,  but in fundamental human elements: pedagogical wisdom, ethical frameworks, and holistic educational philosophy.  That would look, possibly, more like a network of the people doing educational work from within universities and other institutions.  

Like this one.  This  shows a Network generated in Socioviz, a social network representation of people, connected by practice and priorities on a social media platform.  This is Lawrie’s social network , mapped according to his interests in education and digital (blue), birds and wildlife (pink), canals (green), and the athletics world championships (red), (plus a few outliers).  The smaller nodes are people he engaged with about those topics, over the entire month of August in 2017 (A LIFETIME AGO).  This is a representation of relationships, of connections, of ties weak and strong, of people in webs of meaning.

This is a personal network filled with humans and human interests, even if it was visualized with data from a specific tech platform.  The humans, and the varied interests, they are the point.  This network is not just about edtech, or education, but about all the other things Lawrie (and other people) engage with.  The flows in Lawrie’s network are multi-directional, not going in a single path.  This isn’t a cascade of information or money in one direction, but an engagement, a feedback loop that enriches.  

The previous network is a financial network, filled with products.  It is an edtech monoculture, extracting resources from the Education sector, leaving it devastated.

Once the wolves were removed from Yellowstone, elk populations exploded, overgrazing the land and stripping vegetation from riverbanks. Many educational institutions buy technology and (increasingly) subscribe to tech services without a clear pedagogical or research purpose—whether it’s AI-driven grading, data analytics, or virtual learning platforms. While these tools promise efficiency, their unchecked dominance can lead to:

• Surface Learning: For example, reliance on automated assessments leading to test-driven, shallow learning rather than deep critical thinking.
• Equity Gaps: Digital divides creating barriers, leaving some students behind while others thrive in well-resourced environments.
• Dehumanised Education: The latest trend, AI tutors and pre-packaged AI developed digital curricula stripping away the human connections, accelerating the stripping of staff from the system that adjunctification has been driving for a while

 Like the elk of Yellowstone, unchecked EdTech overconsumes resources (such as institutional funding and staff time) and creates a monoculture that crowds out more diverse, nuanced approaches to teaching and learning and research.  Like eroded riverbanks and dying willow trees, learning environments filled with standardised, tech-driven instruction often lack intellectual depth. Students may complete assignments quickly but miss out on the reflective, discussion-based, and inquiry-driven aspects of true education.

So while EdTech has often been described as an ecosystem, one that regulates itself, as a necessary disruptor of education, we see very little evidence of regulation, or of the benefits of disruption. The reality is that edtech is an unbalanced force, growing unchecked in ways that sometimes harm rather than help learning–we can point to the growth of GenAI tools within the sector as the latest example of that.. And just as Yellowstone suffered without wolves, and the explosion in Elk numbers, the educational ecosystem is suffering from a lack of humanity, where GenAI tools are becoming ubiquitous.

Libraries

In a library context, this can look like collection development funneled through one particular company’s vision of what resources individual libraries “should” need (based on generalities), ignoring the specifics of what an organization needs to support the particular people in their specific place. It can look like discovery layers that prioritize holdings across a network (hello OCLC WorldCat), rather than what is available locally. It can look like replacing physical holdings with digital collections that are subscribed to, rather than held in perpetuity by an institution. It can look like swipe card surveillance technology used to inform about library use, rather than engagement at a human level with the community within (and outside of) your library building.

It can look like replacing human library workers with chatbots.

The lens of library technology can obscure the importance of human expertise in the library, the network of people who should be required to facilitate and communicate the complex work of scholarship. When the largest part of our budgets is going to subscriptions and systems, not people, we lose so much.

Call for a Trophic Cascade

The ecosystem we are concerned about is the whole of education, the entire sector. The unchecked actors (the elk) are indeed the vendors and products, and the market logics that mean that universities and libraries are encouraged to literally buy into the priorities of the sellers of edtech and library tech, not the people who have to use that tech while they are engaging in and supporting learning, teaching, and researching.  The variety of approaches to academic practices that was possible before the slick layer of VC driven technology was applied is being homogenized, and in some cases suffocated, leaving us with a monoculture, fragile and sterile, and increasingly written by a machine.

This is accelerating through the race to adopt “AI” and this will lead to algorithmic conformity, a monoculture at best, and more likely a degraded ecosystem overall, less rich and less sustainable than we need it to be. 

Before wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, overgrazing destroyed key plant life, depleting the ecosystem. In education, deep learning and meaningful engagement, like the vegetation of Yellowstone, are at risk of being stripped away when technology is prioritised for its efficiency rather than its effectiveness. And if we are really honest, it is not about efficiency, it is about expediency, finding a fast solution even if it’s not a particularly good one. 

For the education ecosystem to heal, something must regulate the overuse of technology and restore the conditions for diversity.

Human-Centred Futures

We need the wolves that can restore balance to the Education landscape. But who are they?  

It’s certainly not an algorithm, software update, or digital tool. It is the intentional, human-centred application of pedagogy, ethics, and critical reflection, acting as the “wolves” that bring stability to the ecosystem. We need workers in the sector to be the wolves.

We also need regulatory wolves–something we are unlikely to have in the US, and maybe not in the UK, but perhaps the EU can get started so that we someday might follow.

Just as wolves in Yellowstone reshaped elk behaviour, the introduction of regulatory, pedagogical, and humanitarian concerns could force technology to slow down, adapt, and serve an educational purpose rather than merely expanding unchecked to increase vendor profits. 

We are advocating, as we usually do, for human-centred approaches to technology  (and, everything).   The presence of human-centred values ensures that:

• Technology serves learning, not the other way around. Digital tools as a means to an end, not replacements for complex, human-driven instruction.
• Education prioritises depth over efficiency or expediency. Instead of valuing speed, automation, and scalability above all else, institutions should focus on fostering intellectual curiosity, creativity, and dialogue.
• Educators need to regain agency. Just as wolves reshaped the movement of elk, empowering teachers with pedagogical autonomy helps them resist technology-driven mandates that prioritise cost-saving over student success.

Without the reintroduction of wolves, everything struggles to survive. When technology dictates academic practices and priorities, rather than the other way around, library and other education workers become implementers of software rather than architects of learning. If education is to be dynamic, adaptable, and human-centred, then educators must have the space and authority to engineer the learning experiences that best suit their students.

In the education ecosystem, institutions that embrace thoughtful, human-centred approaches over technology integration will see a similar effect. Instead of letting technology dictate educational structures, they will reshape their policies, practices, and cultures to ensure that human learning remains the central focus.  To have the agency to adhere to humanistic priorities, institutions additionally need government support, both financial and regulatory, to be robust.  

This means:

• Resisting technology-driven policies that erode teaching and learning and research autonomy.
• Investing in CPD, SoTL, and pedagogical research rather than prioritising technology and software.
• Creating environments where humanity is prioritised over technology and is used to enhance rather than dictate the learning process.

For the education ecosystem to return to a rich, diverse and sustainable system we need a trophic cascade, one in which the “wolves” of critical pedagogy, ethical considerations, and holistic learning reshape its behaviour, restore balance, and allow deep learning to flourish once again.

At the end here we want to point to the need for maintenance and sustainability.  Just because there was a restoration of the ecosystem does not mean that the current political situation will allow that to continue.  At the time we gave this talk there was a push to privatize the US National Parks, sell the public lands, and extract the resources.  Ecosystems have never existed in a vacuum, and that continues to be the case.  We are advocating for individual responses here, and also collective action, both practical and political.  

We must be the wolves at the door, not to destroy, but to restore the balance.  

#19659d #ecosystems #edtech #GAI #GenAI #humanCentredEducation #libraries #TrophicCascade #ventureCapital #Yellowstone

One of the classics of NZ ecological science is this Auckland study by Sandra Anderson and colleagues. They showed, in extraordinary detail, how the loss of two endemic flower-pollinating birds from mainland Auckland (korimako and hihi), and the relative rarity of another (tūī), have caused the population to falter of the endemic bird-pollinated plant taurepo, Rhabdothamnus solandri.

Plus, Australian silvereyes, now widespread in NZ, were nectar robbers and damaged a lot of the flowers.

Everything is connected, and the effects of species declines can be unexpected and initially easy to overlook.

"Nectar robbing by silvereyes, revealed by slit corolla tubes, was always rare on islands (means 3.2% of flowers near Whangarei and 4.3% near Auckland) compared with the mainland (14.1 and 79.2% in Whangarei and Auckland regions... These data reinforce the conclusion that a shortage of visits by endemic bird pollinators on the mainland is the cause of the failure of seed production and that recently self-introduced silvereyes are not effective substitute pollinators."

Anderson, S. H., Kelly, D., Ladley, J. J., Molloy, S., and Terry, J. 2011. Cascading effects of bird functional extinction reduce pollination and plant density. Science, 331:1068–1071. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199092

#BirdPollination #nz #TrophicCascade #ecology #SpeciesInteractions

Low Contribution Of Livestock In The Grey Wolf Diet In The Area With High Availability Of Free-Ranging Cattle And Horses
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-025-01926-3 <-- shared paper
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[not my usual fare (word play very much intended), but a fascinating and data-driven study; the study is not definitive, of course, but it adds to the scientific knowledge base, including with the socio-economic considerations…]
#wolf #predator #apexpredators #livestock #predation #depredation #death #cow #horse #greywolf #casestudy #Poland #cattle #horses #ecosystems #socioeconomic #forests #humanimpacts #conflicts #WartaRiver #genetic #fingerprinting #tracking #GIS #spatial #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #cameratraps #scat #fecal #feces #wildanimals #ungulates #deer #mammals #rabbits #domesticanimals #foodsource #cost #economics #dogs #population #impacts #conflict #landscape #wildprey #prey #trophiccascade #herds #vegetation

Restoring Predators, Restoring Ecosystems: Yellowstone Wolves And Other Carnivores Drive Strong Trophic Cascade
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https://phys.org/news/2025-02-predators-ecosystems-yellowstone-wolves-carnivores.html <-- shared technical article
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2025.e03428 <-- shared paper
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #YellowstoneNationalPark #Largecarnivores #Willows #Crownvolume #Chronosequencephotographs #Trophiccascade #strength #ecosystem #ecology #biology #biodiversity #vegetation #wolf #elk #willows #riparian #stream #water #hydrology #tree #health #foresthealth #herbivore #carnivore #reintroduction #plants #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #biomass #foodweb #predictivemodel #model #modeling #response #predators #yellowstone

Best viewed on the large screen:
#kelp #MontereyBay #otters #TrophicCascade
https://youtu.be/2Rchqd400W0?si=zvBhYgKjyxH-NZxW

How Wolves Change Rivers [REMASTERED HD] - George Monbiot - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88Sact1kws

Recommended

#Wolves #Ecosystem #TrophicCascade #Nature

Top-Predator Recovery Abates Geomorphic Decline Of A Coastal Ecosystem
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06959-9 <-- shared paper
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#GIS #spatial #monitoring #apex #predators #trophiccascade #biology #geomorphology #habitat #ecosystem #otter #seaotter #crab #substrate #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #marine #vegetation #balance #estuary #california #plant #biomass #erosion #marsh #wetlands #saltmarsh #sealevelrise #tidalscour #stormsurge #protection #naturalsystems #predator #marshcreek #burrowing #surveys #keystone #predatorcontrol #coast #coastal #wetlands #geomorphicstability #biology

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23122023/blm-protect-wildlife-corridors-the-west/

#TrophicCascade: Long-distance migratory corridors are critical for the survival of herds. Yet Wyoming and other western states have stalled in establishing strong legal protections for these corridors on their public lands, where they are developing high-value energy and mineral projects and providing grazing ranges for ranchers.
#ButchersCrossing #HowTheWestWasLost #landback #SiblingBeings #TragedyOfEnclosure #CattleWreckedLandscapes

New publication: #Treecover and its heterogeneity in natural ecosystems is linked to large herbivore #biomass globally. #megafauna #trophiccascade #rewilding #biodiversity #climatechange
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.10.007

‘whenever the words deer and problem come together, many people have big feelings’ #OverBrowsing #Deforestation #TrophicCascade #Invasives #LymeDisease #NativeStewardship #Sustainability #Deer https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/bambi-deer-overpopulation-environmental-damage/

How Beavers Engineer The Land [Remastered HD] | George Monbiot - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy_WE9NAzY4

"Beavers bring life to rivers and the land. Beavers are ecosystem engineers that help to mitigate floods and droughts, reduce forest fires, and create habitats for all kinds of animals. North American tribes revered the beaver. "

#Ecology #Ecosystem #Environment #Nature #TrophicCascade

How Amphibians Restore Balance To The Land [Remastered HD] | Harvey Tweats - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7jru5DeoGQ

"Amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and reptiles) are an important keystone species to the trophic cascade balance that maintains the insect populations and healthy aquatic ecosystems"

Contains potentially disturbing images.

#Ecology #Nature #Ecosystem #TrophicCascade #Environment

How Whales Change Climate [Remastered HD] | George Monbiot - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKiqHQT48-I

#Nature #Environment #Ecosystem #TrophicCascade #Whales #ClimateChange

How Wolves Change Rivers [REMASTERED HD] - George Monbiot - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88Sact1kws

Fascinating, and eye-opening. Highly recommended.

#Nature #Environment #Ecosystem #Wolves #TrophicCascade