Watch the CEE meeting, Integrating ecology into macroevolutionary research

By way of an introduction to this blog post, watch this!

Back in March the Centre for Ecology and Evolution in London organised a meeting that brought together top researchers in macroevolution. The idea of the meeting was to highlight how advances in the study of macroevolution could be made by a closer integration with ecology, and the incoroporation of ecological ideas and ecological models.

The meeting had a terrific line-up of speakers, and a synthesis of the science is now available in Biology Letters.

As with any meeting of course, a limitation was that you had to be in London and free on the days of the symposium: I couldn’t make it as I was in the other side of the country and committed for the whole two days. However, in what is an innovation for evolutionary and ecological research, the organisers of the symposium recorded the talks and have now made them available to watch online. MEE, via our publishers Wiley-Blackwell, we were glad to sponsor the costs of making the talks available online. Not least as it meant that I could watch them!

Having now watched all of the talks, some highlights for me are:

•  Our new Associate Editor Luke Harmon talking about the methods his group have develpoed for  modelling macroevolution.
• Gavin Thomas on how ecological interactions can be incorporated into models of trait evolution.
• James Rosindall on neutral models.

However, all the talks are excellent and really worth watching.

I think this is an excellent resource for the evolutionary community: the videos have been professionally recorded and edited, and are easy and effective to watch. Given the modest costs of doing this, I hope that more meeting organisers will follow this lead.