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EcoBloggers
EcoBloggers is a feed of ecology blogs aggregated from around the web. If you write an Ecology blog (made up primarily of original posts by you or contributors), and you'd like to have it included here, email the feed link to the site webmaster. Each contributed post is trimmed to stay on the right side of copyright law and to encourage readers to click through to contributors' sites. You can get the RSS feed here. Each post is also automatically tweeted by @EcoBloggers.
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from The Quantitative & Applied Ecology Group
As a lab, we’ve made it a priority to increase the standards of our code to align with best practices for reproducibility and repeatability of our science. In keeping with this goal, this week in reading group Saras Windecker and Hannah Fraser lead a discussion on the British Ecological Society’s Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution, measures on how we can implement these guidelines in our research and the barriers that limit their uptake within the QAEco group. Here is a brief summary of that discussion.
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from Dynamic Ecology
Like many biology profs, Meghan often starts class by talking for a few minutes about the “organism of the day“, as a way to engage student interest and illustrate key concepts. I do something similar in my intro biostats course. I start some lectures with “statistical vignettes”: real-world examples that illustrate key statistical concepts and demonstrate their practical importance, hopefully in a fun way.
I’ll say right up front that I have no idea how successful these vignettes are.* I don’t know if they make much difference to how well students like the course, and honestly I doubt they move the needle in terms of student mastery of the material. But I like doing them, I can’t see how they’d do any harm, and I’m sure at least a few students like and appreciate them. So here are some of my statistical...
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from Small Pond Science
Some people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid dropping the H-bomb. (This’ll be a short and less-than-grand post because, well, I’m busy) Let me recreate a conversation I’ve heard (or been involved in) dozens of times over the years. “So, where did you go to college?” “Boston.” “You went to Boston College? Or BU?”… Read the full article.
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from methods.blog (Methods in Ecology and Evolution)
Post provided by Christina Derrick Focus Group Discussions: What are They and Why Use Them? To paraphrase Nelson Mandela: ultimately, conservation is about groups of people. On a global scale it’s our collective human footprint that drives habitat destruction and … Continue reading → Read the full article.
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from Small Pond Science
A couple weeks ago, the students in our department bought lunch for the faculty. It was a nice catered takeout box. I had the Mediterranean Veggie. It reminded me of the time that the students bought us all bagels and coffee, for the departmental office. But, these meals had a miserable aftertaste.
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from Dynamic Ecology
I am convinced that most people become scientists not for the big overarching aims of science, but for personal reasons. Because I love the outdoors, plants, working with data, and a very flexible independent job would be four of mine. Others love working with their hands, a certain form of status, just love their species, etc. But none of these are the overarching goals of science. And even if I don’t think overarching goals are why we get into science, I do think most scientists are bought into the overarching goals of science as well. Certainly I think most scientists see themselves as truth-seekers. Can we be more specific about the overarching goals of science? I am going to argue that there are three major overarching goals of science:
- Understanding – the answers to why questions. How does the world work. Why is the sky blue? Why are there so many species?
- Prediction – what will happen? Neptune must exist because of the weird...
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from Journal of Ecology blog
Dominik Merges (PhD candidate, Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre) has written a blog post about his recently published Journal of Ecology article about the spatial patterns of plant-associated fungi. When you think of Swiss alpine valleys, you might think of gentle mountain slopes covered with conifers (see picture 1). These tree line forests present… Read the full article.
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from Small Pond Science
I make a point to post at least once a week. Sometimes the blog posts are full essays, sometimes they’re just a less ordered collection of thoughts, such as this one. One of the reasons I helped start Rapid Ecology is that I wanted to see a much broader range of voices in this medium. I… Read the full article.
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from Conservation Bytes
Thermal microhabitats are often uncoupled from above-ground air temperatures. A study focused on small frogs and lizards from the Philippines demonstrates that the structural complexity of tropical forests hosts a diversity of microhabitats that can reduce the exposure of many cold-blooded animals to anthropogenic climate warming.
... Read the full article.
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from Dynamic Ecology
Ecologists (and lots of other people) often say that the world, or some feature of it, is ‘random’ or ‘stochastic’. But what exactly does that mean?
One view is that randomness is real; some features of the world are inherently probabilistic. Quantum mechanics is the paradigmatic example here, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others. An alternative view is that calling something ‘random’ is shorthand for our ignorance. If we knew enough about the precise shape of a coin, the force with which it was flipped, the movement of the surrounding air, etc., we could accurately predict the outcome of any particular coin flip, which is deterministic. But we don’t have that information, so we pretend that coin flipping is a random process and make probabilistic statements about the expected aggregate outcome of many flips.
Does the distinction between these two views matter for ecologists? It’s tempting to...
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