[MUD-Dev] ... forests and ecologies.

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 30 Nov 97 at 9:39, Mike Sellers wrote:
> At 10:48 PM 11/29/97 PST8PDT, Ling wrote:
> >Okay, today's stupid question:  Forests!  How do they start?  I mean,
> >seriously!  I've always lived in rurban areas, and the forests near me
> >seem to have been pruned a bit.  Do forests really start off with a wall
> >of trees?  Does nature define a sharp boundary in Her mysterious ways?
>

Sometimes these boundaries are very sharp sometimes non-existent.  Altitude 
and geography breaks can be rather abrupt.  Forests sometimes also change 
composition gradually yet never break (Broad-leaf to needle).
  
> The "wall of trees" is a human-created phenomenon, from when people have
> cleared forests for farmland or roads.  In more natural circumstances, the
> boundaries between terrain types is usually much more gradual -- grasslands
> with a few trees here and there, and then there are small copses of trees,
> then larger groups, and pretty soon it's all a big forest.  This is true
> whether the forest is expanding and the copses are outliers, or whether the
> forest is dying back and the copses are the last hardy outposts of its
> former extent.  

Hehe.  I can't think of anything more natural than a man standing in the 
middle of a forest with his Poulan or Husk Varna (urm, woman too) ;)
But clearings within forests occur quite frequently.  In fact I live in
one such "natural" clearing (although you wouldn't know it today) that 
prior residents used as consistently over the centuries as an encampment. 

> As for how forests _start_, that's a complex question that's beyond me.  I
> think it probably has as much to do with evolution and climate as anything
> else... I suspect giant forests change in climatological if not geological
> time.  

It's a topic of some debate.  I have recently come across one such theory
that seems rather interesting, at least somewhat practical in designing a 
mud ecology.  Assume there are a fixed number of trees in the mud world.
If an civilized area clearcuts areas for farmland, assume the same amount
of growth in forests in another part of the mud world, farthest from the
point of the clear-cutting.  Simple.  Realistic, maybe not.  But from the 
player perspective at the local level, I think visibly realistic.

> One of the things that I believe is semi-consciously
> frustrating to many players is the lack of webbed interdependencies
> (ecological, economic, societal, political) in mud-worlds.  It can be
> difficult to set up and keep such relationships relatively stable, but it
> can also, I believe, create a much more satisfying world.  

Right on! 

> >This is it, in my own words:  If your mud ecology/food chain/supply chain
> >can be corrupted by adding a few entities a few factors more 'powerful'
> >than the existing ones, then there's something wrong. (that's not what the
> >article says, that's me being me)
> 
> To some degree I agree.  Most stable systems are also brittle: introduce a
> new variable and things go all haywire.  Systems that are more flexible,
> more close to 'living' systems, tend to be in continual, dynamic,
> homeostatic equilibrium (like the water molecules moving from water to ice
> and ice to water at the same rate, or like your heart rate increasing with
> activity, but not linearily with it).  Such systems tend to deal with the
> introduction of new factors more easily than do more brittle ones; things
> may change, but not instantly, discontinuously, or without recourse.  For
> example, introducing a great new predator into an area typically won't mean
> that that predator will "take over" the area -- even it is governed by its
> food supply, how it disposes of its waste, what can decompose it, what its
> life-cycle patterns are, etc.  Each of these limit how "effective" the new
> creature can be in the environment (despite what the "Alien" movies tell us
> :) ).  

Visions of "Watership Down" and the many other frailties of the Australian 
continent.  Should a mud ecology be this fragile though?