Te Pūnaha Matatini

On a Thursday afternoon in June, a power pylon toppled over in a small rural area in Aotearoa New Zealand, cutting power to most of the Northland region. This happened after contractors removed too many nuts from the bolts securing the pylon during cleaning. The seemingly mundane act of removing these nuts led to catastrophic effects: the three unsecured legs of the pylon lifted, the tower toppled off its base, and the resulting electricity outage affected 100,000 properties. Electricity is distributed through a network, and this particular pylon was crucial to the network. The removal of the pylon had a massive impact on the transmission of power between communities. Networks are made up of nodes and links. Electricity networks are easy to imagine, with power stations and substations the nodes, and power lines the links that connect them. Not all networks are as visible as power grids. For example, we can think of people as nodes in social networks, and their interactions as links between them. Information, ideas and disease travel through these networks as power may flow through an electrical grid. In our latest post on the foundations of complex systems, Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Kyle Higham and Emma Sharp and illustrator Hanna Breurkes explore how understanding how things spread on networks is vital for the world to thrive → https://bit.ly/3BBdduu

Need a summer job? We're looking for a research assistant to gather data for our annual report → https://bit.ly/3TALikS

For Te Wiki o te reo Māori, let's take a look at the current state of te reo in Aotearoa 🔍

From one million sterile fruit flies raining from the skies in Australia, to modelling the health of a lake like an asthmatic lung, our annual report for 2023 is full of stories that share the value of our complex systems research.

"She has so much weight on her shoulders, more so perhaps on her head, because that’s where the Bible was placed. The weight of expectation, not just from Māori, and not just from the people of Aotearoa, but from people internationally. Indigenous people came to the tangihanga and said: “We’re looking at you, Māoridom, to show us how you will achieve this unity, this kotahitanga." Matua Tom Roa talks to E-Tangata about the new Māori queen.

"Tammy Steeves is a conservation geneticist with the University of Canterbury who has extensively studied the science of translocation. She points out that when a species or population is on the brink of collapse, choosing to do nothing, for fear of the consequences, has its own consequences. As she puts it, 'inaction is a decision'. "So far, she says, freshwater conservation has been too focused on mitigating 'every single risk'. 'That’s an impossible task. We want to minimise a lot of those risks, but not be paralysed by the fact that risks exist.' "It’s also about weighing up the benefits. Crayfish are ecosystem engineers. They shape freshwater worlds—perhaps, they might also repair them." Dive into the world of kōura with Bill Morris and New Zealand Geographic, featuring Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Tammy Steeves and Aisling Rayne 🦞

We’re looking for a student at The University of Auckland to work as a research assistant to use data to understand the benefits of the cardiac rehabilitation programme at Health New Zealand | Te Toka Tumai Auckland → https://bit.ly/3WY4ARO

I was recently reflecting on an interesting question about complex systems research that was posed to me: When material scientists are concerned with materials, what is the object of concern for complex systems researchers? Check out the latest Te Pūnaha Matatini newsletter (https://lnkd.in/gJWGfedr) where I begin giving an answer to that question as follows: "Unlike materials [...] it’s not possible to touch complexity. People don’t have an intuitive notion of what complexity is, when it occurs, and why it might be important to their lives. So, we must try to find an explanation that people can relate to more naturally."

In certain areas of Australia, millions of sterile male fruit flies rain from the skies every two weeks. These Queensland fruit flies are reared to the peak of health in a special facility, then sterilised through irradiation, before being loaded into an aeroplane and dropped from the air. When the sterile males mate with local females, the females are unable to lay viable eggs. This method effectively suppresses fruit fly populations, which cost Australian growers hundreds of millions of dollars a year in damaged fruit, pest control and lost market access opportunities. But is this too many sterile fruit flies to drop from the skies? TPM Whānau member Dr Tom Moore wants to know. The Queensland fruit fly is an important pest of concern for Aotearoa New Zealand. Although there have been multiple detections in Aotearoa, the fly has not yet established a foothold. But this comes at a cost. In the most recent incursion, 11 male flies were caught on Auckland’s North Shore – at a cost of $18 million. Tom has seed funding from Te Pūnaha Matatini to explore new methods of causal inference, which is the process of determining the independent effects of the individual parts that make up larger systems.

The Makarora River sparkles in a distinctive blue as it winds its way from the Southern Alps into Lake Wānaka. When it reaches Boiler Flat, it splits into shallow channels that flow around ever-shifting small islands in its gravel bed. This river is a braided river – an iconic feature of Te Waiponamu, the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s hard to imagine much life thriving among the floods, droughts, instability and tonnes of gravel that characterise braided rivers. But if we zoom out to consider their entire breadth, braided rivers support an immense diversity of life. The groups of species found in different parts of a braided river are constantly changing. Surprisingly, when all these local patches of a braided river are considered together, the composition and diversity of species in the overall system tends to stabilise through time. This stability is explained by ‘emergence’ – a key concept in complex systems. Emergence is a process we see everywhere, and occurs when small things interact to create larger things which also interact, behaving in new and unexpected ways. In the second post in our series on the foundations of complex systems, Jonathan Tonkin, Julia Talbot-Jones and Hanna Breurkes explore the concept of emergence.