By: Ruairí Goodwin

Marcus Collier, the associate professor of sustainability science in the discipline of botany — where he also serves as head of discipline — joined Trinity College Dublin in 2017 for Connecting Nature, a project on nature-based solutions. In 2021 he received a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for NovelEco, a study examining how society perceives wild spaces in cities.

Q: What are novel ecosystems?

“It’s a very new term and controversial term. It’s not considered a scientific term per se. It’s still a concept, theoretical in nature, of ecosystems that are created by people. We know that humans have a huge impact on the planet and on ecosystems, and in the vast majority of cases these ecosystems retain some of the footprint of human activity with invasive species, garden escapes, or crops that have gone into the wild. When we talk about restoring an ecosystem, it may not be possible because there’s all these residual plants and animals that we brought in and transported all over the world. So, the ecosystem is considered a novel ecosystem in the sense it can never be restored to its original form. We can make a facsimile of an earlier ecosystem, but even those were impacted by early humans. For example, an urban area could never simply be torn down and replaced with forest. And even if we did, we’d still be left with all those human remains of plants and animals that were brought in. It contains plants and animals that would never normally be found together in an analogous ecosystem outside the city or somewhere else.”

Q: Where might we see these ecosystems around Dublin or Trinity?

 “We’ve created a couple of wild spaces in Trinity, but they’re not necessarily novel ecosystems, it’s more of a rewilding effort. There are quite a lot of locations where, for example, abandoned lots, buildings in dispute because of our housing crisis, or toxic areas such as parts of the Docklands. As it would cost a tremendous amount of money to rehabilitate the land, they’re just left there as brownfield sites, doing their own thing. There you’ll see plants like escaped crops — oil-seed rape, tomatoes, onions — alongside native species, animals and insects. There is one embankment out near Kilmainham, just outside the Royal Hospital, which in recent decades contains a lot of plants that are escaped garden species and so on. There are little pockets and corners of abandoned gardens and areas behind hoarding where no one can actually see them. So, there’s a surprising amount. We haven’t been able to map them because they change. One year, someone will come in and see all this stuff, and the council will come up with a sprayer or with a strimmer and strip it all down to the bare. And then they leave it there, and then in about five years’ time, it’ll all be back again in a different combination of species.”

Q: Speaking of monitoring sites like these, how do you use citizen or participatory science in your research?

“There’s a lot of apps out there for recording and identifying plants. The National Biodiversity Data Centre, for example, is a great resource because people voluntarily upload unusual things they might see. It’s a very good way of keeping track of invasive species in real time. As you might have seen in the news, the Asian hornet is a very good example of citizen recording. But what I’m doing is asking citizens not just to identify what species they see, but what those plants and animals mean to them. We have an app that people can use when going out looking at nature. It asks how close and connected they feel to nature. During their walk, they can identify and upload plants, contributing to an ecological database. At the same time, we ask how the experience changes their feelings. Using an emoji-style system, they record their relationship and their sense of connection to nature before and after the walk. Usually, we see that as people become more focused on plants or animals, often plants that will be sprayed or removed, they tend to feel closer to nature. So, we’re able to say quite clearly that by engaging with these wild species and spaces, in an urban setting, it brings you closer to nature. This is important because for years people have been removing themselves from nature, becoming distant from it. And we know that this disconnection from nature is fundamental to our unsustainable behaviour. So, if we bring people closer to these wild spaces, like novel ecosystems, we can bring them closer to nature. It means they change their viewpoint, their emotional relationship with nature, and they’re more likely to be more sustainable in their behaviour. It’s a big leap from wild spaces to behaviour, but it is a natural progression.”

Q: Where do you see the future of this research?

“We’re nearing the end of the project, but not a lot of people have uploaded data yet. We’ve had a couple of hundred people use it so far in different countries, which means we get two datasets. Dataset number one is simply a record of what is growing in cities. That dataset, because it’s geolocated, will be available for other researchers to use. The social science data is completely protected under GDPR, so that goes into a different type of system where it’s anonymized. For that dataset, we need an awful lot more people to start using it in order to get a representative sample. But so far, it’s going in a particularly interesting trend. We can see that people of all age groups will become more connected with nature when they see a plant or animal at the side of the road, for instance. As it’s more citizen-focused, those papers that we produce will have citizens as authors. They’ll be offered the opportunity to not just participate in the research, but also to author it. At the beginning of the project, we also asked them to develop the research questions with us. We had an idea of what we wanted to do, but within that realm, we asked people what they would like to discover about plants or animals in their area. Amazingly, we got 80 or 90 different research questions, for example, are plants different in different social classes? Are the weeds that grow in a working-class neighbourhood different? We were getting also some race issues in terms of different parts of where we were doing our research in New York, and also in Melbourne. In Australia, we were getting questions about indigenous people’s relationships with wild spaces versus Europeans’ relationships. Very different and possibly quite controversial questions, but wonderfully articulated, and incredibly important.”