Research Archives - Page 7 of 13

29/02/2016

The Evolution and Laboratory of the Technician.

First in a series of posts on life after an undergraduate degree, Alison Boyce gives an account of the life of a scientific technician.

Science, engineering, and computing departments in universities employ technicians. Anyone working or studying in these areas will have dealt with a technician at some point but most will be unaware of a technician’s route into the position and their full role in education and research.

Technical posts are varied e.g. laboratory, workshop, computer. Funding for technical support is afforded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) to provide assistance in undergraduate teaching. This is the primary role of technical officers (TOs) after which the Head of Discipline or Chief Technical Officer (CTO) decide further duties.

History

Until the early 1990s individuals joined the university as trainee technicians. Many came through the ranks starting as laboratory attendants, a position which still exists. Trainee technicians would spend one day a week over four years working towards a City and Guilds’ qualification. At this time the occupation was mostly hands on with little theoretical work. Many started young by today’s standards (starting at 14 years old was not uncommon), and they continued to study well past diploma level. Changing the nature of the role so much that nowadays almost all technical officers have primary degrees and come with a more academic view of the position.

In 2008, it was agreed that incoming technical officers must hold at least a primary degree in order to work at Trinity College Dublin. Those looking for promotion to Senior TO would require a Master’s and to CTO, a PhD. Those already in the system would not be penalised, local knowledge and experience are recognised equivalents and rightly so. This agreement gave rise to the job title changing from technician to technical officer reflecting the removal of the apprenticeship system. Many still use the old name but it doesn’t cause offence. These qualifications represent minimum requirements. TOs constantly train, learning new technologies and procedures. It is difficult to resist the temptation of further study when you work in an educational environment.

From graduate to TO

Gaining experience in medical, industrial, or other educational laboratories is most important. Further study in areas general to laboratory work are also advantageous e.g. first aid, web design, or statistics. Sometimes researchers move into a technical role temporarily and find they enjoy it so stay on. Applying to a discipline with some relationship to your qualifications makes sense; a physicist may not enjoy working in a biological lab. Having come though the university system many graduates would be familiar with teaching laboratories and their departments. Seeing a place for yourself in the future of a discipline is vital for career progression as it is seldom you will see a TO moving from one department to another. It should be possible to adapt the role to your skills or study to meet those required for promotion.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — BioLab Teaching Facilities

Day to day

All labs/disciplines differ but certain core responsibilities fall to the technical staff at some point. Running practicals is the biggest responsibility during term time with design and development out of term. Some departments in science and engineering have lab and field based classes. Various modules require field sampling in preparation for the practical. Getting out on the road can be very satisfying even if you are at the mercy of nature!

If you consider what it takes to run a home you’ll have an idea of what a TO does to maintain a lab/department. Ordering supplies and equipment. When something breaks, repair it or have it mended in a cost effective way. Logging, maintaining and installing equipment, health and safety information and implementation, chemical stock control, running outreach programmes, planning and managing building refurbishment, organising social events, updating the discipline’s web pages, assisting undergraduate student projects and much more.

These are just the basic duties and do not describe the essence of technical work at university level. Firstly it is to guide, instruct, and assist in scientific matters. An analytical and practical mind is necessary. You must have a willingness to facilitate the design and execution of projects in teaching and research. If you are eager to help and learn, it’s the perfect job for you. The information base for many materials and methods is the technical staff. Local knowledge and an ability work in consultation with other departments is often key to completing a project. Ideally, when a researcher leaves the university, their skills should pass to a TO keeping those abilities in-house. Imparting them to the next generation.

If you’re very lucky, you’ll be in a discipline that encourages you to take part in research and further study. It’s wise to check where a discipline or school stands before considering work in that area. Career opportunities open up in such disciplines. CTO Specialist is a promotion given to someone with expertise of a specialist nature e.g. IT, histology. Experimental Officer is a post created to further research in a discipline and often requires some teaching.

Overall, the position is what you make of it. If you strive to improve and adapt, you’ll find it immensely rewarding. Many practical classes repeat annually but on a daily basis you could be doing anything, anywhere. Being a technical officer is stimulating and constantly changing, keeping your brain and body active. You won’t be sitting for too long when you’re surrounded by young adults in need of advice and equipment. The relationship is symbiotic, your knowledge and their enthusiasm eventually gets any problem sorted.

Author: Alison Boyce, a.boyce[at]tcd[dot]ie

Alison Boyce has worked as a technical officer at Trinity College Dublin for over 20 years. In that time, she has acted as a master-puppeteer in seeing countless undergraduate projects through to completion. Her in-depth knowledge of technical, theoretical, and practical aspects of natural sciences has made her one of the most influential figures in the history of this department.

The editorial team thanks her for taking the time to write this piece.

23/02/201623/02/2016

The up-goer five: Explaining research using the “ten hundred” most used words.

At today’s NERD club, we tried our hand at explain our research using the up-goer five, which limited our available vocabulary to the “ten-hundred” most common words (thousand isn’t one of them).

After some brief hesitation, the 9 of us present found out that despite being quite challenging, this can be an incredibly fun and useful activity when it comes to explaining our often jargon-filled research to the public. While this system is rigid, and a tad extreme with words such as “plant” and “science” unavailable, it forced us to find alternative ways of explaining what we do.

Here’s what we came up with:

Prof. Yvonne Buckley

Original version

Decision makers and land managers are increasingly required to manage landscapes for multiple purposes and benefits. However, despite progress in the development of frameworks linking natural capital to the provision of ecosystem services and human benefits there remains little guidance for how management interventions can improve ecosystem service provision. As ecosystem services cannot be directly influenced, interventions need to be directed towards natural capital stocks. We provide a framework that explicitly links natural capital stocks to ecosystem service provision and identify manageable attributes of natural capital stocks as the critical intervention point. A structured decision making process based on our framing of the ecosystem services concept can facilitate its application on the ground.

Simple version

How to manage the living things that help us to live and enjoy life
People need many different things like food and wood from the land and I am interested in helping them to manage their land to get lots of good things from it. People have come up with ways of finding out the relationship between living things and the good things like food but it is still hard to find out how to manage the land for what we want. This is because when we make living things different it is hard to tell what will happen to the good things we want. We think the best way of getting out of this problem is to understand how changing where living things are and how many of them there are changes the food and other good things that we want. We help by giving people a plan for how to manage living things that will give us more of the good things we want from the land. This plan will help people to talk about what they want from the land and how to get it.

Olive Heffernan

The world is getting warmer, much warmer and quickly. It’s hot outside, in the air and in the water, even deep down in the water. Ice is becoming water, land is getting drier, so in some places its too wet and in others its too dry. People are having a bad time in lots of places. Animals are sad too. We know all of this because of the hard work of people’s brains.

What can be done?

We can drive less. We can eat fewer moving, living things. We can wear more clothes and not make our houses hot. Or we can do nothing. And wait until it is much hotter. Then we can try to change the world by putting things in space that will block the sun out. Or we can put stuff in the sky to make it cooler. If we do none of these things we might end up in the water, in hot, hot water.

Dr Kevin Healy

Two legged animal eating animals were around for 160,000,000 years but are not anymore. We do not really know what they ate. Some were as small as a dog while others were as big as a bus so they would have needed more food. One type of food that they might have eaten was already dead food. We know animals today eat food they found that was already dead so animals that are not around may have also eaten dead food. But did the big animals that are no longer around eat more or less dead food than the small animals? We made computers games to show that actually both big and small animals are very bad at eating dead things, while animals in the middle are much better at eating dead things. This was true even if we changed how far they could see, how much dead food was there, how many other animal eating animals were around and how much food they needed. We show that dead things might have been important to animals no longer around and that how big you are might still be important to how much dead stuff animals eat both today and in the past.

Luca Coscieme

“If I have everything I need, to do whatever I need to, I am happy. Just to say, if I have food I eat and I am happy. If I don’t have enough I have to eat less, or take food from somewhere else. If I take it from somewhere else, maybe another person will not have it for his own.

To do food I need land. The problem is that after I use land to do food this land gets bad and is not beautiful anymore. But if I have a lot of money, I can buy land and food from somewhere else and keep my land beautiful and clean.

If people can buy the land and the food they need, there can be a person with more money than you that buys all the things you need, and you can’t eat and live. So, it is important to control what people do with their money. It is important to check that no one is taking food or using land that is needed for another person to live.

People with no food get angry and one day they will come where people with money live and take back their land and their food.

I am studying a way to control if people with money is taking food and land from other persons that really need it (more than these people with money).

We can stop that by checking if these people really need these things and if they can find these things where they live. If they can, they have to use them, instead of going somewhere else to make less beautiful the land of other people.

Maureen Williams

Mean animals that live in other animals and how they make the other animals do weird things when its hot

Mean animals that live in other animals and then hurt the other animals are in many places. The animals I study all live in water that does not run. The mean animals sometimes make the house animals do things they would not do most of the time. When the house animals do strange things, this can make everyone else in the whole water group do things different to how they usually do and power from food can go to different places. When the water gets hot, everyone in the water does things not how they do them in cold water. I study how the mean animals and the house animals do things when the water is hot and cold and how this makes everyone in the water different. I also study how all the animals doing different things can make the power from food go different places and can change who eats who and how often. I study these things in the water outside and in small water inside.

Aoibheann Gaughran

How large a group of animals is can change how they act. It is important to know how big or small a group of animals are so we can understand how they play with one another and live in their home. Small night time animals with black and white faces are important to study because they get a cold that they can pass on to bigger black and white animals that live in fields eating green stuff to make the white stuff we put in our coffee. We carried out a study of papers that looked at the grouping of small black and white faced animals, how many of them lived together, how big their homes were and how many there were in total. We showed that how many animals there are in an area, changes how they act, their relationships with one another and with other animals that may not be their family or friends. All of this means we can better understand how these animals pass their colds onto one another. We have come up with a group of names that you can use to quickly and easily tell other people many animals there are in an area and how it makes this group different to other groups. We hope that our study will help people who want to save the small black and white animals as well as those people who want to do away with the colds that the animals get in a much better way than they do now.

Dermott McMorrough

I want to know how the brain understands what it sees in the world. When we see the world through our eyes, they send this to the brain telling it what they saw. The way the brain understands this is important because when the brain talks to the eyes, the pictures can be slow or might not get to the eyes at all. When this happens in people, they think they have a friend when they do not. They are talking to themselves.

We try to understand how the eyes talk to the brain by making simple games on a computer that make animals play with each other with an angry animal chasing a smaller animal. We set up roads between the cells in the brain and then make the brain bigger to see is the angry animal better at chasing the smaller animal in the computer game.

We try to understand this by looking into the animal brain while it plays around in interesting worlds on the computer. By changing the number of roads in their brains before and after the games, animals change what they catch, we hope to learn more about the brains power to understand these games.

This study will make new games of animal moving by bringing good ideas from old people in white clothes to the field of moving studies. Doing so will allow us to answer simple questions about the relationship between bodies of angry animals and their food and to add for the first time why food matters in such relationships. These relationships explain how animals talk with the world around them, and are at the heart of our entire idea of world.

Alain Finn

We study how and why trees and other green living things live and grow where they do. To do this we have to go to where the green living things live and look at them and what other things are living beside them. Green living things need to live in the ground, the ground is different all over the world and some things can live in some places and not others. We try to understand why this is by changing what’s in the ground and seeing what type and how many of each thing continues to live there.

Green things what live in the ground can also change themselves to fit the type of ground, rain or sun they get every day. They can change many things such as how big or small they grow or how thick their leaves are but quite often to make a good change to one part of their body they must also make a bad change to another. We try to understand what causes these changes by looking at one green thing that lives all over the world and seeing what changes are made and where the things with those changes are living.

Attempting to describe population ecology

If you’re interested, ESA’s new sci comm section has some useful tools for science communication: https://advancingecocomm.wordpress.com/

With thanks to the members of NERD club. You can find them on twitter at @y_buckley, @O_Heffernan, @healyke, @lucacoscieme, @MoDubs11, @Aoibh_G, @derm_mcm, @finchyIRL

INSPIRED BY XKCD. (THE IMAGE IS FROM #386.)
CREATED BY THEO SANDERSON. HOW DOES IT WORK?

09/02/2016

Listening to Evolutionary Oddities @TEDxUCD

Last December I was asked to participate in the TEDxUCD 2015 event. The event included 9 national and international speakers with a wide range of ideas worth spreading. Despite being asked to participate only two days prior to the event luckily I could draw on the wide research area encompassed in my new Post Doc position using the COMPADRE and COMADRE databases to study patterns in demography and life-history evolution in plant and animals. As I couldn’t possible fit all the ideas worth sharing from the fields of demography and life-history evolution into an eleven-minute entertainment talk I focused on research related to the variation of maximum lifespan across vertebrates. In particular, I discussed research originating from my PhD on trying to understand why some species seem to live far longer than we would normally expect and how their ecology may be related to this (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1784/20140298).

My approach is that it is the species that are found at the extremes of nature that can often be the most informative. Whales tell us about the limits of size, cheetahs the limits of speed and ants the power of cooperative behavior. However, it is not always the Guinness book of record style species that are the most interesting, for when it comes to understanding aging it is oddball creatures such as the bats and the naked mole rat that are the unsightly stars of many aging studies. The reason for this interest is because these animals seem to have the inside scoop on the elixir of youth with both bats (>40 years max) and naked mole rats (>30 years max) living an order of magnitude longer than expected for their size.

From commons.wikimedia.org

Despite this we still have little idea of not just how, but why these species have such life-history strategies. This is important not simple with regards to understanding life-history evolution, but because researchers are beginning to target species and genes with potential links to the abilities that keep aging at bay. For example, the extreme lifespan of naked mole rats has been touted as being the result of the reduced danger associated with its subterranean lifestyle. This has led researches to target species and genes associated with with living underground, such as genes related to their stretchy skin, as these are to thought to be themselves linked with reducing sources of age related mortality such as cancers. However, the role of subterranean living in increasing lifespan is still debated, leaving such a targeted approach in danger of missing the mark in other scenarios.

My idea worth sharing is that we should not just find these unusual species but also understand what evolutionary and ecological drivers shaped these species. With the help of more detailed datasets like COMADRE and COMPADRE we can begin to understand the evolutionary and ecological drivers that lead to species at the extremes of life history evolution. We should aim to not just know who the oddball stars of life-history studies should be, but why they really are stars.

Author: Kevin Healy

Contact: @healyke

18/11/2015

The world economy in a cube

In 1884, the English theologian and pedagogue Edwin A. Abbott wrote a romance called “Flatland”, in which he described a two dimensional world. The rigid and hierarchically organized society of Flatland develops in the large plane in which it lives, and flat authorities control that no flat citizen (the inhabitants are all flat geometric figures) escapes from the two-dimension reality. The book is a social satire as well as an exploration of the concept of multiple dimensions. Furthermore, it can also be viewed as a critic of narrow worldviews stubbornly based on old paradigms.

The novel’s example can be used to argue that despite the proliferation of metrics, our decision making process tends to be guided by the quasi-imposed limited set of information tools – mainly economic – that we use every day. In other words, concepts like Earth System, Planetary boundaries or biophysical limits, environmental sustainability, social welfare and other important elements of our life on this planet are not satisfactorily incorporated in our knowledge horizon.

The current economic worldview is based on the idea that a free market works for the 100% of the population. Thus, economic growth (as measured by growth in GDP) is the political mantra: “the rising tide that lifts all boats”. A recent study published on Global Environmental Change (available here) gives a different point of view by including the environment and the society in the economic picture.

National economies are investigated in a 3-axis diagram (a cube), where each dimension is a different compartment. In this way, the relationships between environment, society and economy are represented in a single framework without losing the specific information. This framework recognizes a physical (and also thermodynamic, and logical) order, highlighting the dependence of the economy on societal organization and, primarily, on the environment.

From this three-dimensional perspective emerges that the economic activity is always strictly correlated with the use of natural resources, and that social well-being is often neglected. Over a total number of 99 national economies investigated within the cube, none of them is at the same time environmentally sustainable, economically rich (high GDP), and equal in the distribution of income.

This means that growing GDP is beneficial for a limited fraction of the overall population, while the vast majority has to deal with increasing environmental problems and worsening ecological status. Moreover, decoupling economic growth and natural resources consumption, seeking the so-called dematerialization, is found very complicated. Continuous growth in GDP implies consequences especially for the poorest individuals and communities: “the rising tide is lifting the yachts and swamping the rowboats” (Dietz and O’Neill, 2013).

Politicians are looking at the world around as a mono-dimensional economic universe. This is due to the fact that economists play a relevant role within governments. We need ecologists and social scientists playing an equally relevant role, in order to finally show politics we live in a three-dimensional world.

Author: Luca Coscieme, @lucacoscieme

REFERENCES

F.M. Pulselli, L. Coscieme, L. Neri, A. Regoli, P.C. Sutton, A. Lemmi, S. Bastianoni, “The world economy in a cube: A more rational structural representation of sustainability”; Global Environmental Change 35, 41-51, 2015 (doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.08.002)

Dietz and D. O’Neill, “Enough is Enough”; London: Earthscan, 2013.

Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378015300236

Image Credits: www.downbox.org, catalog.lambertvillelibrary.org

10/11/201518/02/2019

Swan wrangling in the Pale

For those of us with an interest in the natural world, Mute Swans (Cygnus olor) are a staple of urban wildlife in Dublin, present in many parks and along both canals. However, it has been 25 years since there has been any real assessment of the state of the Mute Swan population in the Dublin region (1). This has been a period of immense change in the urban landscape.

Mute Swan © Graham Prole

Continue reading “Swan wrangling in the Pale”

04/11/201505/04/2019

A Nobel Pursuit

Splitting the atom, unlocking the secrets of radiation, or even leading a peaceful civil rights movement.

I grew up knowing that these were the sorts of achievements that earn you a gold medal and an invitation to Sweden in mid-December. I have since learned that the annual ceremony held in honour of Alfred Nobel hasn’t always been awarded to the most deserving candidate, and that sometimes the winners simply stumbled upon a discovery that changed the world. This was not the case with the 2015 Nobel prize for Physiology and Medicine. Continue reading “A Nobel Pursuit”

10/09/2015

The Skeleton in the Closet

After a few ups and downs, everything you always wanted to know about the effect of missing data on recovering topology using a Total Evidence approach is now available online (Open Access)!

This paper also treats many different questions that people might be interested in (Bayesian vs. ML; how to compare tree topologies; comparing entire distributions, not only their means and variance; and many more!) but I’ll leave it to you to discover it…

Back on track, more than one an a half CPU centuries of calculation ago, Natalie and myself wanted to build a Total Evidence tip-dated primates tree. The Total Evidence method is the method that allows you to combine both living and fossil species (or actually, read “both molecular and morphological data”) into the same phylogenies. The tip-dating method, is an additional method that uses the age of the tips rather than the age of the nodes for dating such a tree. But I’m not going to talk about that in this post.

At the start of the project, we were both confident about the idea behind it and that primates would be the ideal group for such work since they are so well studied. A study that I described in a former post also came out around the same time, encouraging us and comforting us in this project.

However, as you might guess, something went wrong, horribly wrong! For the Total Evidence method, we need molecular data for living species (check) morphological data for fossils species (check) and also for living species (che… No, wait)! After looking at the available data, we quickly found out that there was a crucial lack of living taxa with available morphological data (check our preprint to be submitted to Biology Letters putting the actual numbers on the problem). From that problem, rose the idea of actually testing how that would influence our analysis. And funnily enough, this problem become one of the two major parts of my PhD!

Running thorough (and loooooong) simulations, we assessed the impact of missing data on topology when using a Total Evidence method. We looked at three parameters where data would be missing:

The first one, was obviously the one I introduced above: the number of living taxa with no available morphological data (at all!).
The second one, was the amount of available data in the fossil record (because yes, fossils can be a bit patchy).
And the third one, the overall amount of morphological characters.

We then compared the effect of different levels of available data for each parameter individually and and their combination on recovering the correct topology, using both Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian Inference. For the correct topology, we used the tree that had no missing data in our simulations. For each parameter combination, we measured the clades in common between the correct topology and the trees with missing data as well as the placement of wild-card taxa (typically fossils jumping everywhere).

Unsurprisingly, we found that the number of living taxa with no available morphological data was the most important parameter for recovering a good topology. In fact, once you go past 50% living taxa with no morphological data, the two other parameters have no effect at all, even if you have a perfect or a really bad fossil record or many or really few characters. This is kind of intuitive when you think about it because the only way to branch the fossils to living taxa is to use the morphological data. Therefore, if there are no morphological data for the living taxa, the fossils cannot branch with them regardless of the quality of the data. Therefore, in this paper, we argue that to improve our topologies in Total Evidence, we should visit more Natural History museums. And not only the exciting fossil collections but the well curated collections of living species as well!

All the code for this paper is available on GitHub.

Check out the latest presentation about both papers.

Paper 1: Guillerme & Cooper 2015 – Effects of missing data on topological inference using a Total Evidence approach – Molecular Phylogenetic and Evolution (doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2015.08.023).

Paper 2 (preprint): Guillerme & Cooper 2015 – Assessment of cladistic data availability for living mammals – bioRxiv (doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/022970).

Author: Thomas Guillerme, guillert[at]tcd.ie, @TGuillerme

Photo credit: Thomas Guillerme (AMNH collections)

20/08/2015

Microplastics: a macro-problem for remote islands in the South Atlantic?

Dr Dannielle Green from the Biogeochemistry Research Group in Geography is about to return from an adventure in the South Atlantic where she was hunting for microplastics in some of the world’s most remote islands.

Plastic debris can be found in every country around the world and larger items like plastic bags and bottles can have obvious impacts, such as entanglement, ingestion and suffocation of seabirds, turtles and mammals. But even when plastic breaks down, it persists as small pieces called “microplastics” and in this form can still cause harm to a wide range of marine organisms who unwittingly eat it. Microplastics have been found in marine waters all over the globe but sampling has mostly focused on areas adjacent to large human populations, very little is known about concentrations in remote islands like Ascension Island and the Falkland islands. In collaboration with Dr David Blockley from the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute (SAERI), Dr Dannielle Green from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland flew out to the South Atlantic to assess the situation.

Eerily desolate but beautiful Ascension island

Water samples were taken from a range of sites around Ascension Island and the Falklands and every site was found to contain microplastics. In fact, the concentrations found were surprisingly high.

Taking water samples in the only glass bottles available... Pimm's bottles! — Taking water samples in the only glass bottles available… Pimm’s bottles!

Dr Green presented her work to the Falkland islanders by giving a public lecture at the Chamber of Commerce which was well attended with a mixed audience including government officials, fishermen, the general public and the local television crew. She explained the potential issues of microplastic pollution and a thoughtful discussion about solutions later ensued with input from the audience.

Dannielle presenting her results at the Chamber of Commerce in Stanley.

Microplastics can absorb toxic substances from the water column. In this way, they can become like “pills” of concentrated toxic chemicals that could be consumed by creatures like worms, shellfish, fish and mammals and can be transferred through the food web.

Pollution of natural habitats by microplastics is a global problem that we are only just beginning to understand, but it is one that is expected to get worse as plastic production continues to rise. Dr Green’s research explores the wider effects of microplastics on marine ecosystems. Through this work, she hopes to provide scientifically sound recommendations that will feed into policy and help protect our ecosystems.

Author

Dannielle Green

Photo credits

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-our-seas-from-the-microplastic-threat#/story and Dannielle Green

29/05/2015

V for Vulture

I have recently returned from a field trip to Swazliand where I was working with my long-time collaborator Prof Ara Monadjem to tag two African White-backed Vultures with high-spec trackers. These devices were purchased with a $20,000 grant from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund and are currently sending their locations every minute via the mobile phone network. Up to now we have no idea where the Swazi population of this species forages and this is something the tracking data will reveal. With only a few weeks of tracking data we can see the birds have already ventured into Mozambique and South Africa.

Author

Adam Kane, kanead[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

Andre Botha

22/05/2015

PLANTPOPNET – a global Plant Population Dynamics Network

The environment is changing around us at accelerated rates. Scientists and policy makers have come to realize that large-scale international collaboration and global data syntheses are needed in order to understand universal drivers of current global changes. A response to this need was the emergence of several coordinated distributed experiments worldwide in the last decades. In essence, these globally replicated studies are networks of ecologists around the world, who conceptualize the ecological research questions or participate by following a standardized protocol. Because understanding of ecological phenomena often necessitates long-term observations and experiments, data collection is usually replicated not only spatially, but also temporally across several years or decades. Data are periodically sent to the coordinator and groups of participants analyse data and publish scientific papers. All authors are given credit for their work.

A few examples of such global enterprises are: NutNet, the Nutrient Network, which seeks to quantify the impacts of nutrients and consumers on ecosystems in up to 80 grassland sites globally; HerbDivNet, The Herbaceous Diversity Network, studies patterns of diversity in herbaceous plant communities and the factors that cause those patterns at 30 sites in 19 countries; GLORIA, the GLobal Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments, targets climate change effects by monitoring diversity shifts in high alpine ecosystems at 121 target regions worldwide. ITEX, the International Tundra Experiment examines the impacts of global warming on tundra ecosystems at more than a dozen sites throughout the world. A recent addition to the list is PLANTPOPNET, the Plant Population Dynamics Network, which is the first to target the long-term monitoring of demographic performance in plant populations worldwide.

Why PLANTPOPNET ? Ecologists use environmental change scenarios to forecast rearrangements in species geographic distribution patterns, such as migrations to track suitable habitats and local extinctions. An overwhelming number of studies use species presences to generate their predictions, assuming for example that if just few individuals are present in a place, the population in that place is doing fine and is guaranteed persistence until conditions change. Such assumptions disregard many ecological mechanisms like local disturbances which may easily swipe populations out of the landscape. To progress further on this problem, PLANTPOPNET proposes to follow the detailed demographic processes of many plant populations globally under contrasting environmental conditions and in interaction with other organisms, measuring year-to-year performance of at least 100 plants per population. The study design will allow ecologists to answer important questions about the environmental and biological drivers of population performance and extinction, how plants adjust their life history strategies in different environments, and what are the demographic mechanisms of plant invasion.

If interested in joining PLANTPOPNET or if you would like to know more information, contact us at buckleyy@tcd.ie.

Authors

Anna Csergo and Yvonne Buckley

Photo credit

http://plantago.plantpopnet.com/

References

Lauchlan H Fraser, Hugh AL Henry, Cameron N Carlyle, Shannon R White, Carl Beierkuhnlein, James F Cahill Jr, Brenda B Casper, Elsa Cleland, Scott L Collins, Jeffrey S Dukes, Alan K Knapp, Eric Lind, Ruijun Long, Yiqi Luo, Peter B Reich, Melinda D Smith, Marcelo Sternberg, and Roy Turkington 2013. Coordinated distributed experiments: an emerging tool for testing global hypotheses in ecology and environmental science. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11: 147–155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/110279

PlantPopNet, A Spatially Distributed Model System for Population Ecology. http://plantago.plantpopnet.com/