Posted 05 Aug 2009 / 0
During Tuesday evening of ESA’s meeting I attended a really great special session entitled “Big Models in Ecology: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly Are All Possible Outcomes”. Organized by Vince Gutschick, the session began with a series of overviews by Gutschick, Lou Gross, Lara Prihodko, and Matthew Potts. It then opened up for a Read More
A Major Post, Computing, Conferences, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Society of America, Individual-based Models, Mathematics, Talks & Seminars
Posted 05 Aug 2009 / 0
At lunchtime I attended a workshop dedicated to helping participants to integrate environmental justice content into ecology courses. The workshop started off with an introduction by Leanne Jablonski. She discussed the absence of ecologists (and therefore the science of ecology) in the environmental justice movement and the need to connect ecologists to communities suffering from Read More
A Major Post, Allometries, Conferences, Ecological Society of America, Environmental Justice, Human Evolution, Macroecology, Talks & Seminars
Posted 05 Aug 2009 / 0
I spent Tuesday morning in a really well-organized symposium entitled “Mutualistic Networks”. Headed up by Jordi Bascompte, the collected talks focused on the network architecture of mutualistic interactions, mostly among plants and their various insect pollinators. I came in with only a very basic understanding of matrix-based interaction networks, but Bascompte’s introduction to the session Read More
A Major Post, Competition, Conferences, Ecological Society of America, Interactions, Mutualism, Mutualistic Networks, Parasitism, Pollination, Predation, System Stability, Talks & Seminars
Posted 04 Aug 2009 / 1
Sunny Power started off the first full day of ESA’s meeting with a great overview of where the society has been and where it is headed. My impression has been that ESA has been slowly asserting its rightful place as not only a source of scientific information relevant to policy but also an active commentator Read More
A Major Post, Conferences, Ecological Society of America, Ecology Education, Public Policy, Senescence, Sustainability, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Urban Ecology
Posted 03 Aug 2009 / 0
Today I arrive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I am here to attend the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting and give a talk entitled “Virtual Prairie Dogs Weigh in on the Resource Dispersion Hypothesis”. I have never been to Albuquerque and when I mapped the various locations where I will be during the conference I Read More
A Major Post, Conferences, Ecological Society of America, Freshwater Ecosystems, Talks & Seminars, Water Supply
Posted 03 Jun 2009 / 0
A few years ago when I was still a graduate student in Stony Brook University’s Department of Ecology and Evolution, a group of us formed a reading group with the ambitious moniker “Social Policy and Global Progress”. Our ambitions in forming the group were clear: we wanted to ground our understanding of ecology and evolution Read More
A Major Post, Climate Change, Ecology, Food, Hunger, Public Policy, Sustainability, Vegetarianism
Posted 18 May 2009 / 0
I just finished reading a fascinating article in The Atlantic entitled “What Makes Us Happy?”. Although I am not all that well-read or at all trained in human behavioral science, I am increasingly interested by it, and this article by Joshua Wolf Shenk does an amazing job covering a lot of ground. In the past Read More
A Major Post, Adaptation, Altruism, Data Limitation, Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology, Happiness, Human Evolution, Long Term Ecological Research, Psychological Adaptation
Posted 18 Mar 2009 / 0
Why blog? That’s a question that I haven’t been able to answer for a long time. A first belief: for me, “belief” in something implies action. I can have an “understanding” of something – I can understand that there is a problem because people are suffering in Darfur – but for me to really “believe” Read More
A Major Post, Belief, Ecology, Evolution
