Te Pūnaha Matatini

"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.

Do you create art that deals with complexity?

Do you create art that deals with complexity? Researchers and artists are increasingly coming together to explore and communicate research to the public. At Te Punāha Matatini we value the opportunity to work with artists to explore how art and research come together to tell stories about our world. Te Punāha Matatini is looking for a guest artist to work with our researchers and community for six months to create a piece of art in any medium that reflects your time with us. If you are inspired by complex systems and share our values, we would love to hear from you.

Soil is complex. Beautiful. Wondrous. It gives us food, foundations and filters the air we breathe and water we drink. In a very literal way, soil is also a part of us. Our bodies are not discrete entities. Our bodies are networks; we are but an assemblage of a host organism with microbial communities living in and around us. Our interdependencies with the soil we eat make for healthy microbial communities of our gut, of ourselves. Our insides are the outsides — the world. Understanding soil, or land, as ‘kin’ is not a new concept in Indigenous knowing of the world, providing a perspective on the responsibility of treating, nurturing and caring for it as one would a relation. Kaupapa Māori researcher, activist and grower Jessica Hutchings has proposed that land, or soil, should have equivalent-to-human status in its own right. This is understood and practised in some communities. It might seem a stretch to others. Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigator Emma Sharp writes about accepting that soil is part of us 🌱

"Your degree of trust in who someone is will definitely increase over what you've got at the moment." Te Pūnaha Matatini Co-Director Markus Luczak-Roesch speaks to RNZ about the new digital trust framework designed to be the answer to people's experiences with fraud, doubt and lack of trust online 📻