Category: Seminars

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Seminar series: David Angeler, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

FoodWeb

Part of our series of posts by final-year undergraduate students for their Research Comprehension module. Students write blogs inspired by guest lecturers in our Evolutionary Biology and Ecology seminar series in the School of Natural Sciences.

This week, views from Somantha Killion-Connolly and Joe Bliss on David Angeler’s seminar, Ecological complexity: a torture or nurture for management and conservation?

Panarchy – Sense or nonsense?

Scientists have been told for many years now to lift their heads from their microscopes, look up and take in the bigger picture. Well the picture has gotten even bigger and more complex according to the hypothesis of panarchy (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). In a recent seminar by Dr. David Angeler of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Dr. Angeler attempted to communicate this approach as the way forward in ecosystem management. If you were to do a search of the internet for the definition of panarchy, don’t expect a nice simple concise definition, as this controversial approach takes a bit of explanation. Ecologists have been providing evidence for decades showing that ecological systems are far more complex than imagined. Panarchy attempts to provide a conceptual framework for characterising the interactions between ecological and human systems in order to manage them in a sustainable manner.

Panarchy seeks to find common ground between economic, social and ecological theories. This seems like a big ask and paradoxically the way it seeks to achieve this is, using Dr. Angeler’s analogy, to break up the big picture into smaller pieces to make a jigsaw puzzle. Where the hypothesis begins to make a lot of sense is that is requires you to take not only a top –down, as was traditionally used, but a bottom up approach also. Ecologists have traditionally investigated ecological communities and how they have changed spatially and temporally. Dr. Angeler proposes to instead look the big ecological picture in terms of scales. We should not only be looking at how organisms at different scales are affected by biotic and abiotic variables in time and space, but also the interactions between scales. Therefore, according to panarchy, ecological systems consist of scale specific structures and processes that change and interact as you advance through the scales. The further spatial dimensions are increased, the slower the processes are in the environment and vice versa.

Where the theory begins to get more complicated is when you need to view an ecosystem and its constituents as undergoing a continuous cycle of change, with four defined stages. The stages are referred to as the exploitation stage (rapid expansion in an open niche), conservation stage (accumulation of energy and a period of stability where the carrying capacity is reached), the release stage (period of rapid decline due to changes in pressures) and the re-organisation stage (period of natural selection from the pressures of the release stage).

Dr. Angeler in his research on the invertebrates in freshwater lakes of Sweden (Angeler et al., 2013) has shown how the theory is empirically testable using multivariate time series modelling. This method is based on a redundancy analysis and adapts a spatial method to time series analysis. Using this long term data set collected by his University, Angeler’s aim was to track changes in the species community and gain an understanding into what are the vulnerabilities of these vertebrate communities to changes in their environment.  The practical goal of this work is to prevent a system from reaching its tipping point. The results of this study suggested that studying processes that happen on a temporal scale which are un-related to general environmental changes has strong management and conservational potential. Personally, I think the main concepts of panarchy do make sense but its application and the analysis required is far from simple and it really is a difficult idea to communicate.

Author: Somantha Killion-Connolly

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Multivariate Time Series Modelling Explained
I think the language of science often hinders the communication of ideas and restricts them to a narrow audience of specialists. I attended a talk given David G. Angeler presenting his research on Ecological Complexity using Multivariate Time Series Modelling and the Panarchy concept to study the condition of a number of Swedish lakes. I found it difficult to even understand what the research was about so, I have been inspired to write this blog and explain part of this complex topic, in simple language which I hope will be graspable for a wider scientific audience.

Let us start be first breaking down the term “multivariate time series modelling” and studying its parts.  Multivariate means more than two variable quantities. In this context of studying ecological complexity, these variable quantities include the number of organisms of a particular species or species group as well as abiotic factors such as mineral concentrations and water temperature. Time series modelling involves plotting data at uniformly spaced time intervals.  So multivariate time series modelling is plotting multiple variables against time.

The benefit of plotting multiple variables such as multiple abiotic factors and a species population’s numbers on a specific time scale is that it allows you to find correlations between factors. For example, if we take the population numbers of a plankton species which were sampled once a month in a lake we can plot the population number over a year and see how the population fluctuates. Our plankton may show fluctuations up and down over the year. To investigate whether any of the abiotic factors influenced the fluctuations in our plankton numbers we can plot how the abiotic factors fluctuated over the same time span and see if any of them correlate with the fluctuations of the plankton. If any of the abiotic factors fluctuate with the same rhythm as the population then we might suspect this in an important factor influencing the population. However this doesn’t rule out the possibility that the abiotic factor itself varies with the population number but is not the cause of the fluctuation, correlation does not prove causation, but this can then be investigated by experimentation.

Another important benefit of using multivariate time series modelling, which Angeler used when studying the ecology of his lake, is that it allows us to see correlation at different time scales. For example plankton may fluctuate up and down in a regular pattern in response to annual variation in day length. But on a longer time scale, say over 20 years, there may be a trend of increasing population numbers due to a large scale effect such as climate change.

Looking at ecological variation using multivariate time series modelling allows us to assess how organisms are responding to different conditions on small and large time scales. Angeler hopes to use these data to assess the health of ecosystems and to understand how they will be able to handle changing conditions such a global warming. He suggests that management may be able to aid ecosystems facing this large scale change by affecting them in ways which act on smaller scales.

Author: Joe Bliss

Image Source: Wikicommons

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Seminar series; James McInerney, NUI Maynooth

McInerney

Part of our series of posts by final-year undergraduate students for their Research Comprehension module. Students write blogs inspired by guest lecturers in our Evolutionary Biology and Ecology seminar series in the School of Natural Sciences.

This week; views from Dermot McMorrough and Maura Judge on James McInerney’s seminar, The hybrid nature of eukaryotes rejects the three-domains hypothesis of life on Earth.

Time to stop the press? Science for the Masses.

What exactly constitutes “pop science”? What is it that takes a piece of research from the relative anonymity of peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences to mainstream media outlets and the masses?

Dr James McInerney addressed a topic of monumental importance to the way we understand life on Earth. If his findings are accepted and withstand the test of time, we will actually have to rewrite biology textbooks around the world and that’s a pretty big deal. I must admit I was impressed with his claims, and he seemed incredibly thorough with how he went about proving them. At the end of his impressively complex and graphic filled presentation, I was left with one main question: why was I only hearing this now? His paper has been accepted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (impact factor of 9.737), and has implications for almost every field of biology, so why isn’t this being shouted from the rooftops? My inner nerd wants answers and is feeling quite indignant at this stage.

After some thought and discussion, I think I’ve found my answer: People don’t care. My inner nerd has retired to the bar; it’s a harsh reality to take.
I was once told that information, not money, makes the world go around. While this is a romantic notion for someone fascinated by learning new things, that information is rarely free.

Science is often reported in mainstream media. People like to think they’re learning something new on their way to work, and so stories with a scientific undertone (and rarely more) are common in daily newspapers and in the general media pick and mix. These articles often do have scientific background, but have been so bastardised to make them more digestible that they are scantly recognisable as related to the original research. Recently, here in the department of Zoology, many of us were surprised to hear that our own Kevin Healy and Dr Andrew Jackson had become “fly experts” according to media outlets such as Today FM. How do you make the move from macroevolution and computer modelling to entomology and pest control overnight? You don’t. The media does that bit for you. The story needs to be easy to understand, and while the flicker fusion rate study was fascinating, it can be hard to grasp if you’re not familiar with the background. I’m not exactly happy with how this happens, but if it gets the scientists (who’s work so often goes unnoticed by the public) a bit of publicity, then it’s a price I think we’ll have to be willing to pay. Science is not immune to the realities of economics and so needs funding to survive. If a story about flies helps them get a grant to further their research in a field completely unrelated to entomology, so be it.

What has this got to do with the seminar? Dr McInerney just rewrote the book on the domains of life, not a species or a phylogeny or insects – the domains of life! Surely the people would want to know this right?
Science editors in news outlets will “dumb down” these stories as not to make their audience feel inadequate (who reads a newspaper to feel stupid?). The problem with the domains of life story is that dumbing it down could take a while – a long while. I’ve done 3 years of science, one of which supposedly specialises in this field and it took me a while and a lot of help to figure out how he was going about proving his claim. To get that story onto the front page of the Herald, you’re going to have to write very small and hope the average reader has a clue what a domain even is.

So can this story ever make it to the masses? It’s not going to be easy. For science to make the headlines, it usually has to involve the word cancer, obesity or global warming – either with the intention of condemning us for being fat, lazy death traps, or better still telling us we can cheat death a bit, while still being fat lazy death traps.

I was impressed with Dr McInerney’s talk, at least what I understood of it. I do, however, have one caveat before this is unleashed on the world. To change dogma such as the current domain hypothesis, you need to be able to explain it more or less in one sentence. People do not accept change like this lightly. I got the impression he struggled to get his explanation into a one-hour slot in a room full of undergrads and academics. If he can explain it in simple terms, he’s onto something. My inner nerd has hope yet.

Author:Dermott McMorrough

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The seekers of truth?

As Richard Dawkins says in the selfish gene “those who choose to study it [Zoology] often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance”. I personally feel this statement could not be truer. After a debate regarding evolution the other week, a fellow classmate remarked “I just don’t like thinking about all those deeper questions”. Is this the right attitude? Einstein did not believe so. “When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology (branch of philosophy that studies knowledge)” (Einstein 1916).

In a seminar delivered by Professor James McInerney he asked the question of how complex life really began. He began his talk by highlighting the importance of philosophy and of past philosophers in his work. This idea intrigued me and I began to ask, are we neglecting this important link? Karl Popper, a German philosopher, wrote many books in the 1960s electrifying the scientific community. He said you are doing science if you can invent an experiment that proves yourself wrong. This idea is known as falsifiability and is sometimes synonymous to testability. As you can see, this idea of proposing and testing hypotheses in a way that allows you to reject them is in keeping with the modern day, highly relied upon, scientific method. Popper stressed the problem of demarcation, which is distinguishing science from non-science or pseudoscience and made falsifiability the demarcation criterion. This means that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific. However there is a problem with this; evolutionary scientists cannot falsify their observations and hence even the theory of evolution is still only deemed a theory. Popper later amended this, saying you definitely know you’re doing science if can you can falsify your experiment but some things fall outside this possibility such as the theory of evolution where the event has already happened and you cannot replicate it in the laboratory.

William Whewell, a British philosopher from the mid 19th century, who originally coined the term scientist (originally referred to as a natural philosopher) then coined the term consilience. Consilience means the convergence of evidence. It’s the principle that, if evidence from multiple independent, unrelated sources are in agreement, you can draw very strong conclusions even if the individual sources of evidence are not strong on their own. This is the case for the theory of evolution as independent data sets from various field such as genetics, chemistry and physics back one another up, agreeing with the mutability of species over time. Hence induction is consistent and evolution is thought of as a strong idea. Today, McInerney uses this idea in determining the origin of Eukaryotic cells, finding strong supporting evidence for a single hybridization event resulting in a single domain of life, as opposed to the three domain hypothesis.

Hence science is indeed founded by philosophers and we are the modern day “natural philosophers”. Science was originally constrained by religion, e.g. Charles Darwin’s struggle in the publication of the theory of evolution, due to the non-religious inference that humans are indeed animals. Thanks to philosophers such as Popper and Whewell we can disregard non-science and hence have come a long way since the idea of “the ladder of life” with God and angels positioned at the top rungs, then royalty, humans below, and finally animals. However we don’t often think about the philosophy of science and evolution. When I told my elder cousin that I was interested in evolutionary biology her response was “Evolution…sure isn’t that figured out?”. Before, we were restrained from addressing philosophical questions by religion, now it seems we have become absorbed in the facts and statistical data with a disregard for the broader questions that science and philosophers set forward to address. Nowadays, if you don’t adhere to popular scientific dogma, your theories easily face rejection. The majority of scientists are evaluators of data and not pioneers, creating original ideas. However, only those with a talent for original thought can be pioneers such as James McInerney who combats the commonly held belief of the three domains of life. Science is the tool to answer philosophical questions and we cannot ignore our ancestors, the philosophers, who gave birth to us scientists.

As Einstein said, in response to a physics lecturer’s proposal to  introduce as much as possible of the philosophy of science into the modern physics course, “independence created by philosophical insight is, in my opinion, the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.” (Einstein, Dec 1944)

Let us not seek only money and acceptance, let us become the seekers of truth.

Author: Maura Judge

Image Source: Wikicommons

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Seminar series; Britt Koskella, University of Exeter

HorseChestnut

The first set of our weekly Wednesday posts by final-year undergraduate students as part of their Research Comprehension module. Students write blogs inspired by guest lecturers in our Evolutionary Biology and Ecology seminar series in the School of Natural Sciences.

This week; views from Sam Preston and Emma Dunne on Britt Koskella’s seminar, Bacteria-phage interactions within their long-lived hosts

Evolution Gone Viral

Forget Darwin’s finches and forget the cichlids of Lake Malawi. if you want to see natural selection and evolution in action you’re going to need to think a lot smaller, because evolutionary biology’s gone viral.

One of the problems with adaptive evolution is that it happens on a scale we can’t appreciate. Generations of human lives can come and go and natural selection’s hardly gotten started. For the most part we’re stuck observing current diversity – the results of past natural selection – and interpreting it as best we can to get an idea of the evolutionary processes that shaped the organisms we see today. But that’s not the case with phages.

Phages – short for bacteriophages – are viruses that infect bacterial cells. They can produce thousands, even millions of copies of themselves in a matter of minutes. Each bacterial cell lysed by a phage represents a new generation of virus particles produced in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea. Every new generation is an opportunity for natural selection to go to work, and evolutionary change that might take thousands of years with larger organisms occurs in a matter of days with phages. This makes them almost perfect organisms for evolutionary study, an idea that is by no means novel; phage evolution has been studied intensively by biologists attempting to account for the origins of these ubiquitous organisms and the mechanisms of their gene transfer.

Britt Koskella and a handful of other researchers, however, are taking the study of phage evolution to new places. It is already known that the rate at which parasites adapt to their hosts has an impact on the host community structure, and there’s little that can adapt as quickly as a phage. Koskella’s research aims to determine how phages, by coevolving with their bacterial hosts, can influence the community structure of higher organisms.

Bleeding canker disease is a problem for horse chestnut trees (Aesculus hippocastanum) in the UK. It’s caused by the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae, which is itself parasitized by phages found in and on the leaves of A. hippocastanum. This is the model Koskella uses to explore phage adaptation to overcome bacterial resistance. In an elegant experiment, she showed that phages become locally adapted to P. syringae in the same tree (i.e. phages of a given tree are more infectious to P. syringae from the same tree than another).

In another experiment Koskella showed that this adaptation is met with counter-adaptation from the bacteria. By freezing phage/bacterium samples taken at various times in the year, she was able to test how resistant bacteria are to phages from the same time period, from earlier periods, and later ones. She discovered that bacteria from either the same or slightly earlier time periods relative to the phage were most susceptible to infection, whereas bacteria from later time periods were less susceptible. Interestingly, bacteria from much earlier time periods relative to the phage were also less susceptible to infection than contemporary bacteria. This result is particularly interesting, as it undermines the prevailing “evolutionary arms race” hypothesis of competition-based coevolution, instead suggesting that adaptations, when acquired, incur costs such that when they are no longer useful (i.e. when the phage/bacterium has adapted to cope with them) they are selected against and lost from the population.

The decision to investigate these evolutionary processes using P. syringae is an important one. By illustrating how phages affect a serious, disease-causing bacterium Koskella highlights the potential for phage adaptation to have a dramatic effect on tree communities. And if phages play a role in determining the structure of communities of primary producers, then one might expect knock on effects on the rest of the food web.

I think it’s fair to say that Koskella’s field of research is still in its infancy, but the premise is exciting nonetheless. For myself, there are a lot of unanswered questions that future research might address. To what extent do phages actually benefit the plants they’re in? Is there a cost to trees for harbouring phages? Can plants and phages coevolve, perhaps with plants encouraging phage residence to act as a symbiotic immune system?

Phages are already beginning to see use in biocontrol in American agriculture, but our knowledge of their function in the environment is only rudimentary. There is a great need for more research on their role in shaping the evolution of communities. If our irresponsible use of insecticides in the 20th century has taught us anything, we want to know everything we can about phage interactions before we cause irreparable harm.

Author:  Sam Preston

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Superbugs’ Kryptonite

Antibiotics have long been hailed as one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century. These little miracles were once doled out in their multitudes to do battle with our ear infections, kidney infections, throat infections, sexually transmitted infections and all-colours-of-nasty infections. But has the situation turned full circle, are we reverting back to a world “pre-antibiotics”?

Superbugs and their vigorous resistance to antibiotics are presently charging through the media. Our abuse of antibiotics has rendered them useless against such a massive force as a rapidly evolving bacterial infection. Don’t we all know at least one person with a stash of AugmentinTM in the back of their medicine cupboards just in case they catch a cold? One can only cringe while pondering on how they managed to build such a stash. Using antibiotics as a stronger version of over the counter medicines is a worryingly fashionable form of personal healthcare. It has led to many strains of bacteria becoming completely resistant to their former attackers.

But don’t hold up your white flag in surrender just yet. Bacteriophages are marching into the mainstream as the new superheroes. As the Greek origin of their name suggests, these viruses “devour” bacteria and then replicate within them. Described as “viruses that cure” by the BBC in an informative documentary on their history, bacteriophages have been used as an alternative to antibiotics for nearly a century. They once had widespread use, even being used to treat the Red Army in the 1920s. But, they were soon overtaken by antibiotics which were cheaper to make, and easier to prescribe, use and store. The first publications on Phage Therapy (using bacteriophages as treatment for bacterial infections), were mainly written in Russian or Georgian, making them largely inaccessible to the wider scientific community – a community dominated by English speakers still to this day. Phage Therapy has only been formally approved as a treatment for humans in Russia and Georgia, although phages for killing bacteria responsible for food poisoning, such as Listeria, are now in use in the West. Nevertheless, phage treatment offers a compelling solution to superbugs.

Just like bacteria can evolve resistance; bacteriophages can evolve to overcome this resistance. Britt Koskella from the University of Exeter is studying the apparent co-evolutionary arms-race between phages and their bacterial hosts. The results of her 2011 paper on how bacteria-phage interactions shape host populations have important implications for therapeutic phage epidemiology. With phages playing the game bacteria really don’t have a chance. Once the bacteria move the goalposts, the bacteriophages have the ability to change tactics and score. This attribute is making Phage Therapy an attractive alternative to antibiotics.

The list of advantages of phages over antibiotics does not end with their cunning ability to co-evolve with their bacterial hosts. Due to their specificity, they do not affect the useful bacteria lurking in your body and cause malicious side effects. Antibiotics are infamous for causing rashes, headaches, nausea, and diarrhoea – who wouldn’t prefer these symptoms to be eliminated from their recovery? Phages also occur naturally. We ingest numerous bacteria-eaters every day; they do not cause us any harm as they are passing through. They can even be genetically modified to reinforce their fighting power.

Study into the potential of bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections largely ceased when antibiotics emerged. Now that we seem to be reverting to a world “pre-antibiotics” there seems to be space for a revival in these studies. Phages have not-so-recently been used to combat MRSA, a superbug that increasingly plagues hospitals. Research into this is being carried out in Warsaw, a far stretch from the claimed centre of modern medicine. Highlighting the problems associated with the abuse of antibiotics seems to be falling on deaf ears, especially since the stashes of AugmentinTM are only getting larger. Will bacteriophages be allowed to step up and be the kryptonite that defeats the superbugs?

Author: Emma Dunne

Image Source: Wikicommons

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Blog-tastic!

Seminar

Andrew Jackson and I started a new module this year called “Research Comprehension”. The aim of the module is simple: to help students to develop the ability to understand and interpret research from a broad range of scientific areas, and then to develop opinions about this research and how it fits into the “big picture”. In our opinion, this is perhaps the most important thing an undergraduate can get out of their degree, because no matter what you do when you graduate, in most jobs you will be expected to read, understand and interpret data. Often this will be in a subject you are unfamiliar with, or use unfamiliar methods or study organisms. So being able to understand this information is key!

The module revolves around the Evolutionary Biology and Ecology seminar series in the School of Natural Sciences, so the topics are broad and cover whole organism biology, molecular biology, genetics, plants, and animals etc. Students attend the seminar on a Friday and read some papers sent on by the speaker. There is then a tutorial on a Monday with a member of staff who has interests in the area of the seminar. This gives everyone a chance to clear up any confusion and to discuss what they liked (and disliked) about the seminar. The continuous assessment for the module is in the form of the blog posts we will post here. Thus the module also aims to improve the students’ abilities to communicate all kinds of scientific research to a general audience, a skill that is currently in great demand.

From next Wednesday onwards we will select a few blog posts to put onto EcoEvo@TCD. These may not necessarily be the posts that get the best grades, but they’ve been chosen to reflect the diversity of angles the students have taken to communicate the parts of the seminar they found most interested. Overall we’ve been extremely impressed with the quality of their blog posts, so we hope you enjoy reading them!

Author: Natalie Cooper, ncooper[at]tcd.ie, @nhcooper123

Image Source: Jorge Cham, www.phdcomics.com

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Morphometrics are fantastic!

As I mentioned in a former blog post, we invited François Gould (@PaleoGould) to enlighten us about the murky world of geometric morphometrics. His talk and workshop were eventually described by some people (@SiveFinlay – to protect her identity) as “the best day of [their] PhD so far!” I will clumsily try to summarize our awesome day of morphometrics.

What?
François emphasized the importance of seeing geometric morphometrics (hereafter let’s be familiar and just call it morphometrics) as a toolkit of methods for shape variation analysis more than a discipline in itself. So one can use this toolkit to describe and analyse the variation of shape defined as the “aspects of geometry invariant to rotation translation and reflection”. To get your head around this definition, one example François gave which I found really useful is that if you drop a pile of A4 papers, they will still have the same shape even if some sneaky ones tried to rotate, translate or reflect while falling on the floor.
As a practical example, understanding shape variation allows you to study superiority, competition and opportunism in the evolutionary radiation of Dinosaurs.

How?
So here’s where we get to all the technical mumbo jumbo at the heart of morphometrics. As François explained to us, it is way easier to think about morphometric ideas than to formally explain the mathematics behind them and many knowledgeable morphometricians are still arguing about the theory underpinning morphometric methods. I don’t have the talent or the knowledge to talk about so I’ll leave it up to the experts here, here and here.
However, I’d like to show you the general methods and share some of François’ comments.

So, regarding the different analyses you can do, the most common approach is to use landmarks; homologous points on a biological object. You place them on the different items you want to analyse using either 2D images or 3D scans. The trick with working with landmarks lies in paying attention to their homology and their number (some of the debates and details about this crucial step can be found here or here). Then you can “translate, rotate and scale the shapes with a least squares fit” in order to compare your different objects (that’s the Procrustes method, named after the mythological blacksmith who distorted his victims to fit an iron bed, who said morphometricians weren’t cultured?). Depending on your question, the resolution of your images and your study objects, alternative methods could be more appropriate to deal with novel structures or curves but again, I’ll pass you on to the excellent literature on this topic.

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Here’s one of the examples François showed us from his studies. You want to compare these femur heads?
(picture courtesy of François Gould)
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Landmark them and then pile ’em up using a Procrustes transformation (easy: just translate, rotate and scale all these bad boys).
(picture courtesy of François Gould)

This is an excellent summary, both theoretical and practical, which details some of the amazing possibilities when using this toolkit of methods.

Before embarking on your own morphometric analyses, here are François’ useful questions (slightly paraphrased!) which you should ask yourself:

1) What the heck are you doing? You can use morphometrics for data exploration or for hypothesis testing; make sure you know what your question is before you start collecting your data.

2) How are you gonna do that? Many tools exist to analyse shape, from old-school calipers to a CT scanner. All give good results depending on what your question is.

3) What analyses are you gonna use? Again, that all depends on the crucial first step but after François’ talk I recommend this nice review which will help you find out what’s the best fit for your question.

I gratefully thank François Gould as most of the information in this post comes from his workshop (the slides from which can be found here) and the rich discussions we had (plus the massive amount of morpho chat he had with other people and where I sneaked in to absorb some of his extensive morphometric knowledge).

Author

Thomas Guillerme: guillert[at]tcd.ie

Photo credits

François Gould (@PaleoGould)

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IUCN Red Listing Ecosystems Workshop

Peatlands_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6592

Many of us attended a fantastic seminar on Friday the 17th of May, given by Dr Ed Barrrows – IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: An evolving tool for risk assessment, priority setting and landscape action. Dr Ed Barrows is a former graduate of Trinity’s Zoology Department and is currently the Head of Ecosystems at the IUCN. The focus of his talk was to introduce us to the new risk assessment criteria developed by the IUCN to assess ecosystems. This will ultimately provide the world with a Red List for Ecosystems. We were all familiar with the concept of a Red List for Species but this was the first time we had been introduced to concept of a standard global assessment of risks for entire ecosystems or “higher levels of biodiversity”. First we had a great introduction into the new ecosystem assessment tool developed by the IUCN. Ed brought us through the process behind the model and the need for such a tool. Incorporated in the model was the interesting concept that of ecosystem collapse. When does an ecosystem go beyond recovery and change into something else.

A well deserved cup of coffee and great pastries helped us to digest and process this information.

Following this, a number of the lucky ones who had signed up for the workshop traipsed over to the SNIAM building where we were in for a treat. Ed was hosting a two hour workshop to give us all some practical experience of applying the model and carrying out a risk assessment on an Irish ecosystem. There really was a great mix of people attending from permanent Trinity staff, post docs, master’s students, undergraduates and members of various NGO’s.

We were divided in to four groups. The model uses four distributional and functional symptoms to assess ecosystem risk. Two of the groups were to look at the criteria A & B (distributional) and the other two C & D (functional). Ed explained to us that the process of evaluating a habitat would normally take over four months and extensive amount of backing data. He then proceeded to tell us that we had two hours and two scientific papers with which to assess maybe one of the most politically sensitive habitats in Ireland “Peat lands”! A lively debate ensued as the two groups from each section gave their results and the reasons as to why they come to those conclusions. The final discussion looked at the fifth criterion which estimates the risk of ecosystem collapse and assigns it to critical, endangered or vulnerable – I think there are still people arguing over it…

Author

Caoimhe Muldoon: muldoocs@tcd.ie

Photo credit

Wikimedia commons

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Unlocking your potential with the British Ecological Society

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At their Annual Meeting in December just gone, the British Ecological Society held a special event for PhD students and Post Docs entitled “Unlocking Your Potential – Keys to a Successful Career in Ecology”. The purpose of the meeting, as you might have guessed, was to provide early career ecologists with advice on how to go about attaining and maintaining a career in the diverse field of ecology. This was not a meeting on how to survive your PhD, although as you can imagine, there were some small tips. The meeting, craftily held in a bar, featured a fantastic panel of speakers from a variety of ecological backgrounds, at various stages of their careers. In attendance were Professor Steve Ellner from Cornell University, Professor Georgina Mace from University College London, Jenny Bright from the RSPB, Paul Craze, editor of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Franciska De Vries from Lancaster University.

Each member of the panel effectively summarised how they progressed from studying as an undergraduate to where they are today – in around seven minutes! Each spoke very fondly of their current positions and the paths they had chosen in order to get there. What was most interesting was the diversity of career paths taken after each completed their PhDs. While some walked straight into a Post-Doc, others took more time, struggling to find a Post-Doc available or that they were interested in. Another found great opportunities in filling various short-term university teaching roles and never found the need/want (I can’t say which) to go for a Post-Doc. And another, knowing exactly where they wanted to work, had to volunteer and persist until finally getting their foot in the door with a contract. The diversity of paths taken directly relate to the type of career each speaker aspired to, as well as their personal interests.

Below are the main points I took from all of this, which I think hold relevance for current PhD and Post-Doc students, as well as those further along in their careers. Although it’s not always easy, spend time thinking about where you would like to go next and what you would like to do (i.e. what really interests you). However, remember things won’t always go as planned. Sometimes, no matter how well prepared you are, i.e. with the correct skill sets, good connections and an impressive academic history, there are forces beyond your control, e.g. a dip in the economy, changes in funding practices etc. Of course, other times everything will go exactly as you had planned, if not better! The panel admitted that so much of this progression comes down to luck and the opportunities that present themselves.

In the Q&A that followed, one chap asked a great question – “How do I make my own luck?” The consensus from the panel: by recognising a good opportunity when it comes your way and grabbing it by the… Opportunities will eventually present themselves; you need the ability to differentiate between those that will take you even slightly further in your desired direction and those that won’t. One of the major rewards: being able to go to work and effectively just work on whatever it is that really interests you.

Author

Seán Kelly: kellys17[at]tcd.ie

@seankelly999

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

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Global Lakes Observatory Network Meeting

During unseasonably warm, dry and bright weather in mid-October,the Global Lakes Observatory Network (GLEON) held its annual meeting in Mulranny, Co. Mayo.

The meeting was organised by TCD alumni Elvira de Eyto, Eleanor Jennings and Valerie McCarthy, along with their GLEON, Marine Institute and Dundalk IT colleagues. GLEON represents a network of scientists working on lakes with high frequency physico-chemical observations obtained from buoys deployed with sensors. It is a grassroots network of limnologists, ecologists, information technology experts, and engineers who have a common goal of building a scalable, persistent network of lake ecological observatories.

Unlike more traditional conference formats, where attendees sit and listen to research presentations, GLEON members are grouped together to discuss their areas of interest, identify potential for collaborations and to make the decisions that will inform the future path of the GLEON network. Although the program was very full, the open, collaborative and discursive approach ensured the meeting was highly enjoyable.

The current membership of this global organisation currently stands at 351, attendance at the Mulranny meeting at more than 100 and as the photo shows, there was also a strong showing of TCD students and staff, past and present.

Author

Caroline Wynne: c.wynne[at]epa.ie

Photo credit

Caroline Wynne

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“See you later, pollinator”

Scientific conferences can be a great way of meeting people, getting and sharing new ideas, and networking with people from, often, all over the world. And they can be good fun too! On October 25th-28th several people in the School travelled to Norway for the annual conference held by the Scandinavian Association for Pollination Ecologists (SCAPE). This meeting is held for ecologists working with pollination, plant reproductive biology and other related fields and it attracts a small but expert crowd from Scandinavia, Europe, and sometimes even further afield (this year there were attendees from Brazil and Israel!). Continue reading ““See you later, pollinator””