There are several popular approaches to the goal of finding generalities in ecology. One is essentially top down, searching for generalities across ecological patterns in multiple places and at multiple scales and then attempting to understand the underlying mechanisms (e.g. metabolic scaling theory and allometric approaches). Alternatively, the approach can be bottom up. It may consider multiple models or multiple individual mechanisms and find generalities in the patterns or relationships they predict. A great example of…

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I started off the New Year with a much-needed bookmark reorganization and deletion, which also gave me a chance to re-read some of the links I've held onto (sometimes for years). There's an ever-increasing amount of useful content on the internet, but these have proven some of the most helpful, concrete, and lasting guides for navigating a scientific life.I thought I'd collate the list here with the hope others might find some of these useful.How…

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Here is this year's card, with best wishes from both of us at the EEB & Flow!It gets a little harder every year to figure these out. R's plotting capabilities improve every year, but usually via specialized packages. I've tried more and more to use as few additional packages beyond base, and to produce a script that is hopefully compatible across platforms.For best performance, users must install the 'deldir' package and the 'RCurl' package. This…

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It seems that ecologists have been complaining that no one writes single author manuscripts anymore since at least the 1960s. de Solla Price predicted in 1963:"…the proportion of multi-author papers has accelerated steadily and powerfully, and it is now so large that if it continues at the present rate, by 1980 the single-author paper will be extinct”Fortunately, an interesting new editorial in the Journal of Applied Ecology has the data (from their archives of published…

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I spend a lot of time thinking about the related topics of conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, so I was interested to see an editorial in the Washington Post on precisely those issues. The article, "We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution" by Alex Pyron, presents a misrepresentative and potentially harmful position about the future of the earth's biota. Pyron begins by stating that "Evolution loves death." Selection necessarily means the…

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The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is so frequently discussed in the ecological literature that it has its own ubiquitous acronym (BEF). The literature has moved from early discussions and disagreements about mechanism, experimental design, and species richness to ask how different components of biodiversity might contribute differentially to functioning. The search is for mechanisms which hopefully will lend predictability to biodiversity-function relationships. One approach is to independently manipulate different facets of biodiversity –…

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The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is so frequently discussed in the ecological literature that it has its own ubiquitous acronym (BEF). The literature has moved from early discussions and disagreements about mechanism, experimental design, and species richness to ask how different components of biodiversity might contribute differentially to functioning. The search is for mechanisms which hopefully will lend predictability to biodiversity-function relationships. One approach is to independently manipulate different facets of biodiversity –…

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In a time when most news about human impacts on the Earth's biodiversity seems to be negative, a new paper in Nature provides a glint of good news about our ability to change the current trend of loss. Encouraging new conservation efforts and funding may be contingent on providing evidence that such efforts will actually be effective.The new report from Waldron et al. (2017) provides evidence for a predictable relationship between conservation spending and reduction of biodiversity…

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In case you missed it, a new paper in Royal Society Open Science from seven popular ecology blogs discusses the highlights and values of science community blogging. It provides some insights into the motivations behind posting and the reach and impacts that result. It's a must-read if you've considered or already have a blog about science. It was nice to see how universal the 'pros' of blogging seem to be – the things I most…

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The last post here mused on the connection between (but also, distinctness of) the scientific goals of "understanding" and "prediction". An additional goal of science is "description", the attempt to define and classify phenomenon. Much as understanding and prediction are distinct but interconnected, it can be difficult to separate research activities between description and understanding. Descriptive research is frequently considered preliminary or incomplete on its own, meant to be an initial step prior to further analysis.…

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