Post provided by Vasco Elbrecht Many things can negatively affect stream ecosystems – water abstraction, eutrophication and fine sediment influx are just a few. However, only intact freshwater ecosystems can sustainably deliver the ecosystem services – such as particle filtration, food biomass production and the supply of drinking water – that we rely on. Because of this, stream management and restoration has often been in the … Continue reading Building Universal PCR Primers for Aquatic Ecosystem Assessments
A new technique makes it possible to cost-effectively analyse genetic material from fossil plants and animals. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and the universities of Lausanne and Bern have used this technique to examine the DNA of silver fir remains found in lake sediment in Ticino. They found clues as to how forests reacted to the emergence of agriculture.
The new process utilises the latest advances in DNA technology to isolate ancient DNA (aDNA) from prehistoric plants and animals. The techniques used to date are, however, expensive. “As population geneticists often need several dozens samples to make reliable statements, many research ideas are not currently financially viable,” says Nadir Alvarez, a professor at the University of Lausanne’s Department of Ecology and Evolution.
Habitat destruction and degradation represent serious threats to biodiversity, and quantification of land-use change over time is important for understanding the consequences of these changes to organisms and ecosystem service provision. Historical land-use maps are important for documenting how habitat cover has changed over time, but digitizing these maps is a time consuming process. HistMapR is an R package designed to speed up the digitization … Continue reading Digitizing Historical Land-use Maps with HistMapR
Why on earth would someone try to combine field ornithology and mitochondrial biology? They’re so different! However, as I have a general background in both ecology and physiology, I am deeply convinced that physiology can help us to better understand ecology. I also see ways that ecology can help us to better understand physiological processes.
Admittedly, my memories from lectures on the mitochondrial electron transport chain are a little fuzzy – many ecologists and evolutionary biologists might feel the same way. Yet, I discovered the importance of getting over this first negative feeling when realizing the importance of mitochondrial function in shaping both ecological and evolutionary processes. Continue reading “What Can Penguins Tell Us About Mitochondria? And Vice-Versa!”
Close up of a black-capped babbler (Pellorneum capistratum), one of the species in our study.
Our newly-developed method simulates intraspecific trait variation when measuring biodiversity. This gives us an understanding of how individual variation affects ecosystem processes and functioning. We were able to show that accounting for within-species variation when measuring functional diversity can reveal details about ecological communities which would otherwise remain unseen. Namely, we found a negative impact of selective-logging on birds in Borneo when accounting for intraspecific variation which we could not detect when ignoring intraspecific variation.
Why Biodiversity Matters
Biodiversity is important for many reasons. One of the main reasons is its contribution to the range of goods and services provided by ecosystems (i.e. ecosystem services) that we can take advantage of, such as natural food resources or climatic regulation. It’s generally believed that biodiversity contributes to these services by increasing and maintaining ‘ecosystem functioning’ – often defined as the rate at which ecosystems are turning input energy (e.g. sunlight) into outputs (e.g. plant biomass). Continue reading “When Measuring Biodiversity, Do Individuals Matter?”
Understanding how biodiversity is distributed and its relationship with the environment is crucial for conservation assessment. It also helps us to predict impacts of environmental changes and design appropriate management plans. Biodiversity across a network of local sites is typically described using three components:
alpha (α) diversity, the average number of species in each specific site of the study area
beta (β) diversity, the difference in species composition between sites
gamma (γ) diversity, the total number of species in the study area.
Despite the many insights provided by the combination of alpha, beta and gamma diversity, the ability to describe species turnover has been limited by the fact that they do not consider more than two sites at a time. For more than two sites, the average beta diversity is typically used (multi-site measures have also been developed, but suffer shortcomings, including difficulties of interpretation). This makes it difficult for researchers to determine the likely environmental drivers of species turnover.
This new Special Feature is a collection of five articles (plus an Editorial from Guest Editor David Warton) inspired by the December 2015 Eco-Stats conference at the University of New South Wales in Australia. It shows how interdisciplinary collaboration help to solve problems around estimating biodiversity and how it changes over space and time.
The five articles are based on joint talks given at the conference. They focus on:
As David Warton states in his Editorial, “interdisciplinary collaboration and the opportunities offered by recent technological advances have potential to lead to interesting and sometimes surprising findings, and will continue to be fertile ground for scientists in the foreseeable future”. Meetings like Eco-Stats 15 and Special Features like this one will, hopefully, help to encourage these sorts of collaborative research projects.
To understand the factors shaping vocal communication, we need reliable information about the communicating individuals on different levels. First, vocal behaviour should be recorded from undisturbed animals in meaningful settings. Then we have to separate and assign the individuals’ vocalisations. Finally, the precise timing of vocal events needs to be stored. Microphone backpacks allow researchers to record the vocal behaviour of individual animals in naturalistic settings – even in acoustically challenging … Continue reading Microphone Backpacks for Individual-level Acoustic Recordings
Nature is complicated. As a scientist, you might say, “Well, duh,” but as students of nature, this complexity is probably the single greatest challenge we must face in trying to dissect the hows and whys of the natural world.
History is a Set of Lies Agreed Upon: Moving beyond ANOVA
For a long time, we tried to strip this complexity away by conducting very controlled experiments adhering to rigid designs. The ‘two-way fully-crossed analysis of variance’ will be familiar to anyone who has taken even the most basic stats class, because, for many decades, it was the gold standard for any experiment.
It might be tough to manipulate this whole reef.
The problem is: the real world doesn’t adhere to an ANOVA design. By this, I mean that by their very nature, manipulative experiments are artificial. It’s hard—if not impossible—to manipulate an entire forest or a coral reef, and as such, we retreat to more tractable, smaller investigations. There is certainly a lot of value in determining whether the phenomenon can occur, but these tightly regulated designs say nothing about whether they are likely to occur, particularly at the scales most relevant to humanity.
To get at the latter point, we must leave the safety of the greenhouse. However, our trusty ANOVA toolbox isn’t very useful anymore, because real-world data often violate the most basic statistical assumptions, not to mention the presence of numerous additional influences that may drive spurious relationships. Continue reading “piecewiseSEM: Exploring Nature’s Complexity through Statistics”
Online Images: A Treasure Trove of Ecological Data
In the proclaimed ‘information age’, where answers are available at the click of a button or a swipe of a finger, we have become accustomed to the ability to get an almost instant grasp of any topic. Other fields are already making use of this wealth of easily accessible online data, but biologists and ecologists tend to let it slip by. However, this attitude is slowly beginning to change. Some ecological and evolutionary studies are emerging that have used the internet to gather data – through online citizen science projects (e.g. Evolution MegaLab) or databases (e.g. using Google Trends) – but few have used existing data, particularly publicly available data from image repositories.
We were curious to apply the concept of using existing images on the internet to a fascinating visual biological phenomenon: colour polymorphism (or the occurrence of multiple discrete colour phenotypes). To do this, we planned to exploit an existing penchant people have for uploading photographs of animals to the Internet.
Our search phrases included the common and scientific name of the species, as well as a location-specific term
Methods Blog 