Can a Facebook friend list redraw a landscape?

Landscape ecology, the branch of science that studies how the pieces of a landscape fit together, has a word for a thin band of habitat joining two larger patches of forest. It is a corridor. Seeds, birds, insects, and small animals travel along it, and because they travel, both patches stay alive. Cut the corridor and the patches slowly starve on their own.

The team borrowed the idea and moved it online. They defined a virtual corridor as a friendship strong enough to carry permaculture itself, the knowledge and the practice, from one person’s land to another’s. You cannot walk it. It still moves things. And if the corridor is real, the two gardens at either end of it are the landscape patches it connects.

The terrain here was the lead researcher’s own Facebook account, a network he had been building since 2011. It held 1,267 people. Membership in eighteen permaculture-related Facebook groups narrowed that down to 286 people who might plausibly be carrying the practice. Each of them became a node, a single point in the network, and the researcher himself became the focal node at the centre, the point every line would be measured from.

The team built a score that did not exist before and called it Percentage Linkage Strength. It asks one question. How much permaculture actually travels down this connection? Forty percent of the answer comes from what happens online, and sixty percent comes from what exists on the ground. Those two halves have names of their own.

To qualify as a corridor, a person needed at least 30 of the 40 social points and 75 out of 100 overall. Run the arithmetic and something kind happens. Someone posting constantly with nothing planted could reach 40 at most. Someone with a project and training but no online presence topped out at 71. Only a person who was both active online and growing something in the ground could cross the line. The maths quietly refused to reward performance.

Every one of the ten had a permaculture project running on real land, mostly home gardens. Every one had sat in a training room beside the researcher at least once. They were young organic farmers, urban gardeners, entrepreneurs, advocates, a student, and a musician, spread across Laguna, Metro Manila, Rizal, Pampanga, and Nueva Ecija. The network moving permaculture across Luzon was built out of backyards.

The team drew the top ten as a sociogram, a diagram of who is linked to whom, using a tool called Meerkat Lite from the University of Alberta. Eleven nodes and thirteen edges. Then they did something a journal paper almost never does. They animated it.

Using Google Earth they pinned all 286 people to their provinces, since Facebook only shares location down to that level, and let the years run from 2011 to 2016. Clusters bloomed across the Philippine map as each friendship formed. Then the top ten lit up, joined to the focal node by lines. The camera dropped into each one, and what surfaced was a photograph of that person’s actual garden. The whole sequence was cut together in Camtasia Studio.

The last step was a simulation in NetLogo, a program built for modelling how simple rules play out across many agents at once. The team used its rumour mill model, which treats an idea like a rumour passing from neighbour to neighbour one step at a time, and ran it a thousand times with a year as each step.

The paper suggests two uses for the method. Researchers could use it to find study sites for permaculture work, since every corridor points at a real patch of land. Practitioners could use it to see how a scatter of individual gardens might add up to landscape-scale change, the kind of effect no single backyard can produce alone. It also comes with a hopeful note. Any discovered node can become a focal node itself, with its own friend list to measure. The corridors keep branching.

For Mycelium the finding lands close to home. Our whole reason for existing is to connect scattered permaculture knowledge into paths people can follow, and here is a study showing that those paths already exist between Filipino gardeners. They are only invisible until someone measures them.