Thoughts of a travelling ecologist 8. On the brink

<正>My young student,Alessandro Lo Cacciato confessed shock when witnessing the death of a sick roe deer at the knife of a passing-by hunter by a Danish roadside."Why such cruelty?" -he asked.-"I understand that this animal is destined to die but can it not be done by causing less pain? "Israeli friend and colleague,Yael Lubin,with     

Thoughts of a travelling ecologist 13. Numbers, rates, ecology

正Numbers and rates are important in ecology.I almost hear you say:"Ehem,and what's news in this?Have you never seen an insect outbreak and its following collapse?"So the starting statement may seem either pompous but obvious,or sneakily provocative,so that I could lament about the lack of mathematical lit-     

Thoughts of a travelling ecologist 12.The plight of the monarch butterfly

<正>Nature conservation needs people who care about nature,and the efforts to convince people to care about the fate of nature has extensively relied on selected charismatic species,theconservation icons.One famous example is the great panda,Ailuropoda melanoleuca,well known as the World Wide Fund for Nature(WWF)logo.When it comes to invertebrates,the     

Thoughts of a travelling ecologist 9. What money cannot buy － monetarising ecosystem services

<正>A few years before the millennium,due to a desire to make the occasion significant,there was a flurry of activities.Various summaries and initiatives were born,mostly of transient importance,and more than one of these aresimply marks of hubris.Ecologists were not exempt from this spirit of the times-but they were successful in making an impact.A group of American ecologists initiated the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment(MEA,2005),a global exercise,to     

Thoughts of a travelling ecologist,7 In memoriam Tibor Jermy

正My former colleague,Tibor Jermy,Hungarian entomologist,died recently,at the age of 97.He was the Director at the Plant Protection Institute in Hungary when I started my research career-many years ago-as a young scientist.That same year,having reached retirement age,he gladly resigned from the directorship and returned to the workbench,to continue a productive research career for another ca.30 years,before he had to give up work in the laboratory,due to his decli-     

Thoughts of a travelling ecologist 14. Structure-function conflation in environmental risk assessment and monitoring

正Recently,I attended a conference organised by the European Food Safety Authority in the beautiful and prosperous Italian city of Parma.The overall topic of the conference was risk assessment,and the program included a section on aspects of environmental risk assessment.In various areas,including the evalution of the effects of pesticide applications,invasive     

Thoughts of a travelling ecologist 11.The marriage of invasion biology and social science is preordained

正The human race now declared that it rules the world.Weofficiallydeclared the start of a new era in the history of the Earth,the Anthropocene.The Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences accepted the proposal that humanity's     

How to walk on statistical mandalas as a population ecologist

We population ecologists who are believed to be good at dealing with statistics often get confused about what kinds of statistical methods we should apply to our nuisance data. There are a couple of conflicting paradigms and many associated methods in statistics. Classical frequentists’ approaches that have dominated in science have been severely criticized by the newcomers: Bayesian and evidential statistics. But, both newcomers also have weak points. Researchers devoted to different statistical approaches are seeking soft landing places where they can compromise each other. Key aspects of statistical inference are discriminating model selection and parameter estimation. Likelihood and Fisher information play important roles in both processes. As an overview of the compromise processes, here I will introduce three contributing papers by M. L. Taper, J. M. Ponciano, R. M. Dorazio, and K. Yamamura for the special feature entitled “Bayesian, Fisherian, error, and evidential statistical approaches for population ecology.” This special feature is based on a symposium held in Tsukuba, Japan, on 11 October 2014     

From ‘ecologist’ to ‘conceptual ecologist’: the utility of the conceptual ecology analogy for teachers of biology

This paper advocates the application of established teaching models to the professional development of biology teachers. This is achieved by using the analogy of conceptual ecologies, made explicit through concept mapping. The approach is designed to support teachers' developing understanding of pupils' conceptual change by using familiar terminology and biological analogies. Monitoring of students' understanding at an ecosystemic level may also help distinguish between instances of conceptual change and contextual switching (described here with reference to photosynthesis).     

Sergei Winogradsky: a founder of modern microbiology and the first microbial ecologist

Sergei Winogradsky, was born in Russia in 1856 and was to become a founder of modern microbiology. After his Master's degree work on the nutrition and growth physiology of the yeast Mycoderma vini at the University of St. Petersburg, he joined the laboratory of Anton DeBary in Strassburg. There he carried out his studies on the sulfur-oxidizing bacterium Beggiatoa which resulted in his formulation of the theory of chemolithotrophy. He then joined the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich where he did his monumental work on bacterial nitrification. He isolated the first pure cultures of the nitrifying bacteria and confirmed that they carried out the separate steps of the conversion of ammonia to nitrite and of nitrite to nitrate. This led directly to the concept of the cycles of sulfur and nitrogen in Nature. He returned to Russia and there was the first to isolate a free-living dinitrogen-fixing bacterium. In the flush of success, he retired from science and spent 15?years on his familial estate in the Ukraine. The Russian revolution forced him to flee Russia. He joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris where he spent his remaining 24?years initiating and developing the field of microbial ecology. He died in 1953.     

Genomics in a changing arctic: critical questions await the molecular ecologist

Molecular ecology is poised to tackle a host of interesting questions in the coming years. The Arctic provides a unique and rapidly changing environment with a suite of emerging research needs that can be addressed through genetics and genomics. Here we highlight recent research on boreal and tundra ecosystems and put forth a series of questions related to plant and microbial responses to climate change that can benefit from technologies and analytical approaches contained within the molecular ecologist's toolbox. These questions include understanding (i) the mechanisms of plant acquisition and uptake of N in cold soils, (ii) how these processes are mediated by root traits, (iii) the role played by the plant microbiome in cycling C and nutrients within high‐latitude ecosystems and (iv) plant adaptation to extreme Arctic climates. We highlight how contributions can be made in these areas through studies that target model and nonmodel organisms and emphasize that the sequencing of the Populus and Salix genomes provides a valuable resource for scientific discoveries related to the plant microbiome and plant adaptation in the Arctic. Moreover, there exists an exciting role to play in model development, including incorporating genetic and evolutionary knowledge into ecosystem and Earth System Models. In this regard, the molecular ecologist provides a valuable perspective on plant genetics as a driver for community biodiversity, and how ecological and evolutionary forces govern community dynamics in a rapidly changing climate.     

The biosecurity of on-farm mortality composting

Composting is a natural biological decomposition process that takes place under aerobic and thermophilic conditions. It can be used for the day-to-day management of mortalities on farms and for carcass disposal in emergency animal disease (EAD) outbreaks. In mortality composting, carcasses are placed in piles or bins together with supplemental carbon sources such as sawdust, litter, straw or wood shavings. Composting is particularly suitable for broiler-farm mortalities and litter. In the case of emergency disease outbreaks, composting can be conducted either inside or outside the poultry house following killing. Composting has been successfully employed for emergency disposal of carcasses in a few cases in North America, but research is lacking on the biosecurity of the process. Composting is a well-established pathogen reduction technology, but process management and heterogenous pile conditions pose particular challenges for validating the microbiological safety of mortality composting. This paper reviews the available information on the biosecurity of mortality composting, identifies potential sources of risk, and highlights emerging research needs. Reports to date of the use of composting in EAD outbreaks are also discussed.