Ecology Podcast

In the latest Journal of Ecology podcast, Scott Chamberlain interviews Peter Jørgensen of INNGE (http://www.innge.net/).

Music credit:

Artist: Pajaro (https://soundcloud.com/budabeats/pajaro-santa-leone)

Song: "Santa Leone" (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Pajaro/Best_Of_Breitband_Vol4/06_pajaro_-_santa_leone_1357)

Music credit:

"Instrumental" (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Howie_Mitchell__Charlotte_Williams_1108/Howie__Charlotte_Williams_11-14-58/Track_5-InstrGuitarAndDulcDuet)

by

"Howie Mitchell and Charlotte Williams" (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Howie_Mitchell__Charlotte_Williams_1108/)

The long necked sauropod dinosaurs were the largest land animals ever to walk the Earth – but why were they so large? One possibility is that it somehow involved the nature of the plant food they eat, as David Wilkinson (co-author of the paper "High C:N ratio (not low-energy content) of vegetation may have driven gigantism in sauropod dinosaurs and perhaps omnivory and/or endothermy in their juveniles." David M Wilkinson & Graeme D Ruxton 2012) explains in this interview with Robbie Wilson.

Wilkinson, D. M., Ruxton, G. D. (2012), High C/N ratio (not low-energy content) of vegetation may have driven gigantism in sauropod dinosaurs and perhaps omnivory and/or endothermy in their juveniles. Functional Ecology. doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12033

http://www.functionalecology.org/view/0/summaries.html#wilkinson

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12033/abstract

Alan Knapp interviews Brad Butterfield about his paper "A functional-comparative approach to facilitation between and its context-dependence", part of an upcoming Special Feature on Mechanisms of Plant Competition, and the importance of taking a trait-based approach to plant facilitation. A great deal of research has been conducted on the mechanisms and outcomes of plant competition, what traits help plants compete, but less well understood is how such traits affect the outcome of positive interactions among plants.

Butterfield, B. J., Callaway, R. M. (2012), A functional comparative approach to facilitation and its context dependence. Functional Ecology. doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12019

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12019/abstract

Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00077.x/abstract

Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00087.x/abstract

Jason Knouft, from Saint Louis University, Missouri, talks to Elizabeth Horne about his recently published paper, "Using fine-scale GIS data to assess the relationship between intra-annual environmental niche variability and population density in a local stream fish assemblage". Jason establishes the need for broad-scale geographic considerations of ecological issues, and explains how the application of these methods on a finer scale can yield new and valuable insights into the exploitation of ecological niches by local populations, and such populations’ likely reactions to new seasonal and environmental stresses.

Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00076.x/full

Freya Harrison, University of Oxford, UK talks with Graziella Iossa about her review on getting started with meta-analysis. Freya explains that meta-analysis is a statistically robust way of putting together results from different studies that test the same hypothesis. She provides in this review a 'road map' to the topic so that beginners can get a head start on meta-analysis. Meta-analysis hopefully will be more used as a result in the fields of ecology and evolution.

Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00056.x/full

Jane Elith and Michael Kearney, University of Melbourne, Australia and Steven Phillips, AT&T, USA talk with Graziella Iossa about their work: 'The art of modelling range-shifting species'. Jane explains that this is a method to predict species distributions, whose range are shifting, like invasive species or species responding to climate change. Mike Kearney then specifies why they used cane toads as a case study for their work. By taking characteristics of the animal and putting this information together they could ask from a physiological point of view, where cane toads could not live. They also asked how to bring together this mechanistic approach with more traditional approaches. This work advances methodology by combining information from physiological models to data in the correlation-based ones; by looking at details of how you can do the modelling; and by looking at tools for understanding models and data, something that a lot of people will find interesting. Then Steven explains about MaxEnt, a programme that models species distributions based on a machine-learning approach, developed with other colleagues and freely available on the web. For example a common use of the programme is predicting how climate change will affect species distributions. Finally, Mike reports that this method should be useful to anybody trying to predict species with unequal distributions. Jane also precises that students, managers, researchers could be potentially interested, especially given that MaxEnt is freely available.

Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00036.x/full

Art Munson, Cornell University, USA, talks with Graziella Iossa about his work with colleagues in developing a method for measuring the relative information content of data from different monitoring protocols. Art presents a method to compare the information from two data sources. As often in ecology data are difficult to compare because they have been collected at different points in space and time, Art and colleagues propose using a model that summarises each of these data sources and allowing a direct comparison of the data. Their work advances methodology in ecology and evolution in two ways. At first they were analysing a citizen science project, the eBird dataset, which collects bird observations throughout the western hemisphere and there was a question of how much the biological information was being collected by this citizen science project. One outcome of their work found that eBird is collecting a lot of useful information. More generally, this method can be applied to verify data sources for lots of different purposes.

Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00035.x/full