The evolution of evolution, LEGO in the lab and other Science-y links

My week is coming to an early end as I head off to some friends' wedding tomorrow, so in lieu of another post, here are some interesting science links from around the internet this week :)

This infographic explores how thinking about evolution has changed since Darwin. It shows pretty clearly the circuitous path that science takes, the way ideas converge and diverge, and ultimately become more nuanced and complicated.

A theoretical physicist blogger answers the question "should you write a science blog?". She mentions the basic, but undeniably key points - do you have time? do you really have time? do you like writing? I also like her advice: "don't be afraid of your readers".

Mental illness can be exacerbated or first show up during grad school. Even in liberal academia, talking about mental health issues can be a bit taboo, something that doesn't help anyone. A blog post from Nash Turley considers the issues and implications.

Another serious issue, related to issues of gender in science: an article in the Economist presents evidence that women authors tend to be less cited than male authors, and this was in part due to less self-citation by women.

Also, LEGO now has its first female scientist character, and with her short hair, goggles, lab coat and gloves, she's a great lab safety role model too ;)

Of course, LEGO has many other science-related applications :)

Edit - the link about blogging was initially incorrect, should be correct now.

Studying Frankenstein: what can we learn from novel ecosystems?

There's been some discussion going around ecolog about an article telling the ecological story of Ascension Island. I should note that the original article is not a great example of science writing; it tries to create conflict that doesn’t exist and lacks a reasonable understanding of ecological theory. There are a couple linked chapters/publications about Ascension Island that make better additions to the story though (1, 2).

Ascension Island is one of those tiny islands first visited by Europeans in the 1600s. Like many young, small, isolated islands (1200 mi to the next nearest island), it was highly depauperate (~25-30 species of plants). Like many such islands, once humans became regular visitors, new species began to make their to way Ascension. The Brits and their love of cultivating and homogenizing particularly altered the island, and they systematically introduced species calculated to provide ecosystem services, aesthetic value, and food.

As a result, Ascension Island changed strikingly – once an island with lowland deserts and a rocky, barren mountainside, the mountain is today known as Green Mountain. The originally depauperate mountain is now lush with three different vegetation zones, a large variety of plants including “banana, ginger, juniper, raspberry, coffee, ferns, fig trees, Cape Yews, and Norfolk Island pines”, and a complex cloud forest. The original article presents this as some inexplicable outcome, but frankly it seems in keeping with existing ecological ideas. Under island biogeography, if you decrease the distance from an island to the mainland (including via human-aided dispersal), diversity should increase. Given the massive number of species that were introduced, and the coddling they received to aid their establishment, heightened diversity is hardly a surprise. And though the original article suggests that shared evolutionary history is necessary for complex ecosystems, coevolution is hardly a requirement for a functioning ecosystem to develop. Species may be able to coexist despite lacking a shared history--niches may not be filled as tightly as in a long-established, coevolved community, but invasive species research in general should have taught us that novel species combinations can easily occur. Secondly, many of the introduced species on the island are from the same part of the world and likely do share evolutionary history.

The mountain before and after. From Catling & Stroud.

from Hobbs et al. 2006

I hadn't given much thought before to the concept of “novel ecosystems” and it has received little attention from the ecological literature (excepting the odd papers, and much more attention from a conservation and management angle). Ascension is a particularly striking example of how human modification leads to ecosystems which are entirely different from anything that has ever been present on the planet. Novel ecosystems have been defined in a number of ways. Generally, they are synthetic ecosystems that include conditions and combinations of organisms never before in existence, and do not depend on human maintenance to persist (as agriculture fields would). Novel ecosystems may be considered to be the outcome of abandonment of human managed systems or else the degradation of existing systems through human activities and invasion (figure). Of course there are incredibly few ecosystems that aren’t affected in some way by human activities (especially in this age of intentional and unintentional human-mediated species introductions), but it is the truly unique ones that are particularly interesting.

There are at least two ways to approach novel ecosystems. One approach is parallel with invasive species and conservation research, and in fact these research areas overlap a fair amount. This is the way in which most research on novel ecosystems seems to be framed. Novel ecosystems carry many of the same issues about making value judgments as invasive species research, and issues of management and whether novel ecosystems can or should be returned to their original state dominate. For example, the conflict between maintaining alpha (island) and gamma (global) diversity exists on Ascension Island– modern, invaded Ascension Island provides greater diversity and ecosystem functioning (erosion control, food, temperature moderation, habitat) than the original barren landscape. But the original endemic species, not surprisingly, have gone extinct or are increasingly at risk.

But focusing solely on these difficult value-laden questions seems to have been at the cost of exploring the value of novel ecosystems as a study system. The most interesting examples of novel ecosystems are not simply modified or invaded ecosystems, but ecosystems that truly never existed before. Like post-shale dump landscapes in Scotland, where the refuse from mining is now host to unique grasslands that act as refugia for locally rare species; or the San Francisco Bay, which now is utterly unrecognizable compared to historical descriptions due to heavy invasion; or urban ecosystems with their unique habitats and issues; or even the habitat and connectivity created by stone fences which now occur on most continents. The questions here aren't always about invasion and management, but instead focus on what the new community looks like. How do novel communities assemble, what processes dominate (mass effects, environmental filtering, competition, predation, etc, etc)? How does ecosystem function relate to the community that assembles? Most BEF research after all, is focused on more traditional ecosystems. What leads to stability in a novel ecosystem, or are they stable at all? They can function is an example of highly unfortunate but also highly informative ‘natural’ experiments for ecologists. But at the moment, if you search for "novel ecosystems" on Google Scholar, the title words are "management", "conservation", "restoration" or "invasion". Actually, there probably are ecologists doing work on novel ecosystems from a purely ecological perspective, but this work gets grouped with  disturbance, invasion, and urban ecology: it just remains to consider them in a more unified fashion. If the conversation remains focused only on the conservation issues (as the discussion on ecolog seemed to shift to rapidly), it just seems like we're limiting ourselves a little.

The species we’ve neglected

Species in last 3 months' papers in Ecology Letters.
"Multiple species" tended to be meta-analyses.

Browse the abstracts of a high profile ecological journal (for example, Ecology Letters, right) and one pattern you’ll notice is that high impact, hypothesis-driven ecology usually involves a small pool of focal species. Plants, for example, dominate any discussion of community ecology and have since Clements’ and Gleason’s arguments. It is not that hard to see why – plants don’t move, for one, live in speciose groups, and often complete a full lifecycle in a matter of months. They are also the lowest trophic level and so pesky multiple trophic level interactions can be omitted.

Other groups of species also show up frequently. Insects are popular for some studies of herbivory (again, it is easy to estimate damage to species that can’t move), mutualisms, and predation. Butterflies and birds, being pretty and easy to count, make a nice model for species populations and climate change studies. And while it is easy to sound critical of this kind of system-based myopia, it exists for perfectly good reasons. Immobile plants, after all, are a major source of experimental knowledge upon which much of modern ecology relies. They are easy to work with and manipulate, and their responses are relatively easy to measure (phenology, fitness, biomass, herbivory). Further, once an experimental system is established, using that system becomes increasingly attractive. You have a growing literature to base decisions on, to put your results into context, and against which to prove the novelty or importance of your work. In contrast, if you do your work on the rare bunny-toed sloth-monkey, the novelty of the system may overwhelm the generality of the work. And so the short-term limitation is that established systems allow immediate in-depth studies, while novel systems, though necessary to broaden ecological knowledge, may (initially) relatively be shallow in their returns.

Establishing a new system may be a time-consuming activity with the possibility of failure. But these under-utilized species have something new to tell ecology. This is not to say that the popular systems of species have nothing to tell us anymore – not at all, given all the complexities of ecological dynamics – but they bias the story. The ecological processes at play are not likely much different between novel systems and traditional ones. But the same processes interact in different ways and differ in importance across systems, and so we may have unrealistic expectations about the importance of, say, competition, if we only focus on 1 or 2 systems. To follow Vellend’s (2011) framework, the processes of selection, drift, speciation, and dispersal are part of any ecological system. What differs is their importance, and their importance differs for reasons related to the ecological context and evolutionary history a species experiences. This is the reason that comparing Mark McPeek’s work on neutrality in damselflies with Jonathan Losos’ findings about adaptive radiation in anoles is so interesting. No one questions that adaptive radiations may drive one set of species and neutrality another, the real question is what about their contexts produces to this result. Unfortunately, if our current set of focal species is small, we are limited in our ability to make such informative comparisons.

Many of the limitations on species have been methodological: popular systems tend to involve amenable species. Other species may be very small, very mobile, very difficult to identify, or highly specialized in their habitats. This creates difficulties. But when we overcome them, the results are often revolutionary. For example, consider the current burst of interest in belowground interactions, once their incredible importance to plant community interactions became clear (e.g. Klironomos 2002, Nature). Further, techniques are continually improving in ways which make new systems tenable.

So we should continue to focus on a few well-understood systems, attempting to perfect our understanding and predictive abilities. There is much value in understanding a system as completely as possible. But on the other hand, we can limit ourselves by focusing too much. It seems like one of the big areas for growth in modern ecology is simply to expand into novel ecological systems.

(**It's probably too general and a bit unfair to refer to all plants and all insects as though they are monolithic groups, since they are each large and varied (which is part of the reason they've been useful thus far). And some of their great representation may in fact relate to the number of species available to study. But I do think the general point about the problem of focusing too much holds.**)

Everything you wanted to know about peer review (but no one mentions)

Since the British Ecological Society has published an introduction to reviewing successfully, here’s a short list of additional, less noted, observations about the reviewing process.

For example, excitement for reviewing is proportional to the number of reviews you have done

• When you are first asked, reviewing feels like a great honour. It is one of the first signs that some group larger than your lab or department recognizes your existence. You will spend an unreasonable amount of time perfecting your review.

This plot would not survive peer review.

• The novelty will wear off, and your enthusiasm upon receiving a review request will decline, usually in relation to your increasing workload. 

• Sadly, the urgent need to complete a review may also wane. You will probably submit the first review early, but after that… 

Despite declines in enthusiasm, review quality usually increases with the number of reviews you have done. Practice and experience make a difference. It is also a confidence boost to see your suggestions actually instituted and valued by the authors or editors.

Manuscripts fall broadly into only a few categories. They might be deeply flawed and unpublishable, and therefore easy to review; or they might be uniformly excellent and therefore easy to review. But these are the least common types you will experience. Most manuscripts have both strengths and weaknesses and fall somewhere on the spectrum between “accept” and “reject”. These are the papers that take the most time, since you must weigh the flaws against the strengths, agonize over what changes to suggest, what suggestions might get them around the biggest issues, and what recommendation to give the editor. It’s also easy to fall into Monday morning quarterbacking and make impractical suggestions - why didn’t you design your experiment like this? Why didn’t you measure that? While these points might be reasonable and relevant, but it is important to be clear as to what is within the scope of a revision and what is a bigger picture problem.

Reviewing is of course an important service to ecology. It can also makes a number of subtle contributions to your own professional development. Once the novelty of someone caring about your opinion has worn off, the best part of reviewing may be things you don’t expect.

• For example, one of the best parts of reviewing a paper in the same area as your research is seeing what literature the authors cite and how they cite them– some real gems you've missed can show up. 

• Reviewing a paper that falls so exactly in your body of knowledge that you feel completely qualified is a great feeling. It’s nice to be reminded that you have (mostly) mastered a topic you care about.

• When you are asked to review a paper that combines some topic or method you are well-versed in with ideas or systems or methodologies you are not familiar with, it can be truly eye opening. The funnest papers to review are the ones where you think “I never thought of that!”.

• Reviewing can give you the clarity to recognize the weaknesses in your own work.

Quotes that stick. #INT13

I'm back in Toronto now, and here are some quotes from talks that have really stuck with me. INTECOL was a great meeting, it was very interesting to hear about all the research from around the world. I hope all the attendees had a great time.

Sandra Diaz: “We just don't know enough to understand how functional diversity links to environmental change and ecosystem services.”

Erika Edwards: “big phylogeny, big trait data set analyses leave me feeling a little empty”

Erika Edwards: “carbon economy is part of the whole organism, not single traits.”

Joel Cohen: “Mathematics is like sex, you can talk about it but you shouldn't do it in public.”

Enrique Chaneton, Describing what happen during a study looking at the effects of grazing on ecosystem decomposition rates: “A volcano erupted during the study and sometimes shit happens, ….. the volcano killed many of the cattle.”

Carsten Meyer, Talking about global data availability in large databases: “Countries that under report are large emerging economies (china, India, Brazil, Russia) which could finance these efforts but for some reason do not.”

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, ‘To get change we need to reach more than the brain, but the human heart”

INTECOL & the future of community ecology for infectious diseases – August 21st 2013 - #INT13

This year's conference has a strong focus on infectious disease which included today's symposium Community ecology for infectious diseases organized by Joanne Lello.

Throughout the symposium a great deal of interesting questions related to host-parasite interactions being addressed with a diverse set of methods ranging from the mathematical biology of Andy Dobson, to the experimental C. elegans / pathogenic bacteria systems of Olivier Restif and Gregg Hurst, the wild rodent systems of Heike Lutermann, Andy Fenton, and Owen Petchey, and the next generation molecular techniques employed by Serge Morand.

However, it was Robert Poulin the keynote speaker who set the theme of the symposium to which many of the speakers kept returning: What are the future directions of parasite community ecology? Dr. Poulin began the session with an overview of the recent trends in parasite ecology over the last few decades and Lawton's view that community ecology is a mess (Oikos 1999 – 84: 177-192). The initial research done on host-parasite interactions was centred within the one host – one parasite framework, often dealing solely with the effect of the parasite on its host. This was then expanded to the one host – multi-parasite level, often investigating drivers of parasite species richness among hosts via comparative analyses and occasionally extending to parasite-parasite interactions though the use of null models. Although the data were available beforehand, only recently has the field moved into the domain of multi-host – multi-parasite interactions, now focusing on questions of infection dilution, meta-analyses of parasite richness, and describing the networks of interactions within these communities.

Looking ahead into the future of this discipline, Poulin suggested that researchers should expand beyond simple topological networks of associations to include the strength of interactions, potentially via energy flow, and the use of network analyses on smaller scales using individual hosts. Serge Morand also highlighted the need to develop and incorporate parasite phylogenies into these multi-host - multi-parasite communities. His talk highlighted recent advances in next generation sqeuenceing and how these techniques can be applied to parasite communities. One obvious advantage is that through molecular phylogenetics researchers will be able to define and quantify a higher degree of parasite diversity, but additionally molecular markers can be used to uncover unexpected host diversity or identify species that may be difficult to distinguish through traditional taxonomic keys. Morand continued to press the application of new techniques in immunogenetics and the integration of methods in molecular epidemiology with the theory of transmission and community ecology.

Finally Andy Dobson posited that in addition to pressing forward with our research into infectious disease, it is imperative that contemporary researchers revist the “best hits” of the past and address important issues that have fallen to the wayside. Primarily Dobson pointed out that mathematically, aggregation and virulence of parasites have been shown as important factors for determining parasite co-existence. However, the concept of aggregation is often left out of contemporary discussions although it will be important to determine natural forms of the aggregation distribution and also to attempt to make the link between immunity and aggregation of parasites in a multi-host – multi-parasite community.

Whether incorporating novel molecular and statistical techniques, exploring previously unstudied model systems, or revisiting the context of contemporary research, it is clear that community ecology and infectious disease has a promising future and that it has progressed greatly from the mess Lawton made it out to be in 1999.

INTECOL day 2: Plenaries to rock you. #INT13

Today I had a number of journal related obligations (for the Journal of Applied Ecology -which is celebrating its 50th anniversary here at the conference) and I had time to attend just a few talks. I saw some great talks -especially by Tad Fukami on evolutionary priority effects, but I decided to only post my (inadequate) notes about two of the plenary talks today. They were great talks, and both of them really expanded my perception of human-caused effects on natural systems, in very different types of habitats. 

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. Corals reefs and global climate change. Coral reefs occupy less that one percent of ocean area but one in four fish caught come from reefs, supporting 400 million people. In the Caribbean coral cover has drastically declined from 80 percent cover to about 10 percent. This has happened elsewhere too, Asia and Australia. In Australia, where coral reefs are well protected and financed, they are still declining. Human development, pollution from agriculture and over harvesting are the common local causes, but global warming and ocean acidification are major global changes. Marine systems are greatly warming, more than land, but very few studies in marine systems. Increases in sea temperature can result in mass coral bleaching and death of corals. Major bleaching events over the past two decades, killing significant proportions of coral. Even though temperature is the best predictor of bleaching, mortality is more variable and other factors may help corals recovery, and these other factors are what managers can influence. In the coming decades, warming temperatures will mean common widespread bleaching events, with some areas becoming too warm for corals. Based on large mesocosms that track local ocean temperature and co2 concentrations. With warming, the mesocosm reefs change into algal dominated systems, with fewer other types of species (e.g., sea cucumbers). Two scenarios to deal with climate change -mitigate or adapt. We need to mitigate within twenty years, reduce co2 emissions. To get change we need reach more than the brain, but the human heart. Partnered with Google to have street view for reefs (this is completely awesome -check it out here). This initiative is both science (mapping reefs) and important outreach, letting people experience diving. One billion people have visited with almost two million people 'dived' in the first week.

Nancy Grimm. Water systems in urban habitats. Populations around the world are moving to cities, and projections have over 650 cities with over a million people by 2025. Creates multiple stressors in urban ecosystems, and there is a new need to build knowledge capacity. Large proportions of people already live in urban areas with limited water supply, quality and delivery capacity. Eighty percent of the population lives in areas under threat of water scarcity, but some people have access to technological solutions that minimize this (e.g., arid USA). For others, ecological knowledge may help reduce this threat. Areas around the world are experiencing more heavy rainfall and flooding. The way municipalities deal with storm water is building hard channels and surfaces, but building ecological systems can better handle water and pollution. In the arid southwest, there are opportunities to retain storm water in semi-natural systems. Provides ecosystem services and denitrification.

Sorry for the brevity of the talk summaries -I'm working on a very full schedule!

INTECOL day 1: A day full of ecosystems #INT13

Note: These are some thoughts from the first day of INTECOL. –Sorry for the abruptness and lack of polish on these entries, there were many talks and I have little time for a proper composition.

*acronyms: BEF = Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function; GBIF = Global Biodiversity Information Facility

It is clear to me that INTECOL is the premiere ecological meeting. There are delegates from countries all over the world from 67 countries , with especially strong European contingents. The next INTECOL meeting will be in Beijing in 2017. This is a special INTECOL as this is the 100th anniversary of the British Ecological Society. The opening talk by Sandra Diaz was held in an immense auditorium at the ExCeL centre, with a couple of thousand in attendance.

Morning plenary:

Sandra Diaz: functional traits are at the core for understanding changes in biodiversity and how species contribute to ecosystem function. Theophrastus, Greek philosophers, created first functional groups. Looks at key traits for tens of thousands of species, only possible through TRY data base. Most variation explained by size ( height, seeds, etc.), second was leaf economy ( leaf N, Leaf area, etc). These traits define plant functional design. Densities low on the fringes of this trait space -physical challenges, and many of these species use human help for success (crops and weeds). Two dense areas in the trait space -big slow growing trees, and small species. Effect and response traits are important for linking environmental change to ecosystem services. These traits can be linked or decoupled, and could change management options.

Linking trait dispersion and values to ecosystem function is a new area, and so few studies. We just don't know enough to understand how functional diversity links to environmental change and ecosystem services.

 Sandra Diaz giving her plenary lecture

Tree of life in ecosystems symposium:

Lisa Donovan: how selective pressures influence evolution of biogeochemical cycling. Traits appear evolutionary labile, and reported on a common garden experiment to find genetic differences controlling traits. Nitrogen has phylogenetic signal but few differences between close relatives. Major differentiation within species and especially for different agricultural lines.

Erika Edwards: Need to move down to small scale to truly understand the evolution of traits that affect ecosystem function. She looks at the genus Viburnum. Need to think about whole organism traits. E.g., branching and growth pattern. This originates from tropics and reinvaded temperate regions repeatedly, and a mix of different and similar strategies emerged. growth patterns highly conserved, but leaf spectrum traits were not. Flowering time seems linked to carbon economy traits.

Amy Zanne: Evolution and biogeography of leaf and stem traits. Angiosperms originated in the tropics and understory woody species and spread everywhere and all types of morphologies. Most species are woody and not exposed to freezing, and lineages move back and forth in climate species but less so with growth form. lineages shift growth form first, followed by climate changes.

Cornwell. Evolution of decomposition. Differences in decomposition rates among different phylogenetic lineages. Did plant life go from fast cycling world to slow one during evolution. Experiment in common garden for decomposition rates. basal angiosperms (magnolias) has lower decomposition than eudicots, which has fast decomposition rates.

Afternoon plenary:

Joel Cohen. Taylor's law after half a century. Taylor's law has been verified but we don't understand it. Taylor's law states that the variance of a population is positively related to the mean population size. Further mean population size is correlated with body size. He showed that tree data supports a body size-variance relationship. Does it apply to food webs? Data from aquatic systems show this pattern across species. Why do we care about Taylor's law? Used for understanding fluctuations in epidemiology, conservation of endangered species and management of forestry resources. Can see the same variance-mean relationships in nonbiological data -computer data packets, weather data and stock market trades. No underlaying theory to explains these. Previous attempts, such as affects of competition, do not seem to affect pattern.

Biodiversity & Ecosystem function session:

Enrique Chaneton. Movement of large herbivores around the world, introduction of cattle versus reintroducing native extirpated herbivores. Little is know how these large herbivores influence forests. Multiple pathways of effect from changing plant composition and waste excretion, affects decomposition. Within an Argentinean park, sites on lake islands do not have introduced herbivores and compared to nearby mainland sites. Herbivores reduce vegetation cover by sixty percent. Trees and shrubs were particularly affected. Distinct composition shifts. Litter layer was substantially different. In dry sites, higher decomposition in ungrazed sites. Volcanic eruption during research 'sometimes shit happens' killed many of the cattle.

Carsten Meyer. Examined the completeness of species point data inventories. Looked at GBIF records and compare to known distribution maps. GBIF records are highly biased to North America, Europe and Australia. Species rich areas are almost absent from GBIF records. Not adequate for research or conservation. Funding, accessibility and human safety all at play for biases. These factors seem to differ among taxonomy, interestingly. Countries that under report are large emerging economies (china, India, Brazil, Russia) which could finance these efforts but for some reason do not.

Julia Koricheva. Tree species richness and genetic diversity on leaf miners. What is the relative importance of these two effects. Two experiments, one manipulating tree richness -up to five species, and another with up to eight clones of silver birch. Silver birch was in both experiments, so was the focus of leaf miner surveys. Tree richness affects miner richness, but not abundance. More leaf miner species with higher tree richness in first year, but not second. For genetic diversity, miner richness also increased with number of clones. Looked at effect sizes of two experiments and genetic diversity appeared to have a stronger effect on leaf miner richness.

Tommaso Jucker. Complementarity in functional groups enhances wood production. He noticed that there were eighty talks on BEF at INTECOL. Four species combinations two pines and two oaks. Biomass increased with richness, but looked at more detail, growth over the past ten years from wood cores. Both pines grew much better in mixture, but oaks only increase growth when other oak is present. Tree that benefit the most are small trees. For pines, wet year showed largest increase in growth, most room for complementarity.

Eric Allen. Direct and indirect effects of landuse on multifunctionality. Landuse intensity changes functions, it increases biomass but reduces bird diversity, flower cover, increases pathogens, etc. Used path analysis to compare landuse and biodiveristy as well as environmental variables. from this analysis, plant richness seems negatively correlated with multifunctionality. looked at groups of functions (e.g., production, soils, cultural). some plots shows strong indirect effects of richness for some functions.

Siobhan Vye. Responses to multiple stressor change. Examined stressors in coastal systems. Looked at how an invasive species affected community response to stress by experimentally combining species in mesocosms and manipulated nutrient enrichment and temperature. Invader increases productivity. The presence of the invader determined how the stressor influenced community functions.

Sebastian Meyer. BEF changes over time. A number of studies show that BEF experiments increase in strength over time. Examined how functions change over time using Jena experiment. How many different functions show changes over time? Over half of functions are influenced by diversity generally. He regressed the richness-function slopes across time, and about one third of functions showed increasing diversity effects over time. What are the mehanisms? The stronger relationships are driven by a combination of changes in high diversity treatments and changes in low diversity treatments.

Everything you ever wanted to know about peer review, but were afraid to ask

The thing about peer review is that there isn't much of an education process. Maybe you've published a paper or two and experienced the process as an author, and then you're asked to start reviewing for other authors. It's a bit like the telephone game - you mimic the reviews you received, maybe noting what you liked and avoiding what you didn't like. But that's often all you have to go on, and when you're just beginning a little advice might come in handy. To that end, the British Ecological Society has just published a pretty useful Peer Review 101 text. This should be required reading for new reviewers.

http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/Publ_Peer-Review-Booklet.pdf

#esa2013 What ESA tells us about where ecology is going

The annual ESA meeting functions in a lot of different ways. There are the obvious: the sharing of ideas and work, the discovery of new ideas, methods or sources of inspiration, networking and job finding, social reunions. But it also functions as a kind of report on the state of the field (and that's not even considering sessions meant to explicitly do this, like the panel “Conversations on the Future of Ecology”). The topics and methods presented say a lot about what ideas and methods are timeless, what is trendy, and over many meetings, where ecology appears to be going. If you go to enough ESAs, you are participating in a longitudinal study of ecology (or at least your subfield).

I went to my first ESA five years ago in Albuquerque, NM. One of the things that struck me was that there were two Community Assembly and Neutral Theory sessions and many talks in those focused on tests of neutral theory, particularly looking at species abundance distributions (SADs) and various iterations of neutral models. There are usually still one to two sessions called Community Assembly and Neutral Theory, but five years later, I don't think I saw a single talk that looked at SADs for evidence of neutral theory (and only one or two talks that were named to explicitly include neutral theory). Instead, the concept first introduced by Hubbell has morphed from "neutral theory" in to something slightly more general, designated "neutral dynamics". This gets used in a lot of ways – most precisely, neutral dynamics are in the spirit of neutral theory, suggesting that population demographic rates are similar, allowing long-term co-occurrence. Sometimes this is cited with reference to equalizing fitness effects in a Chessonian framework, where similarity in fitnesses prevents exclusion despite overlap in species niches. But it also seemed to get used in a default sort of way, as the explanation for why niche differences between species weren't discovered by a study, or else "neutral" was used interchangeably with "stochastic". In any case, the pattern appeared to be a move from highly specialized and precisely defined usage of the term, to broader incorporation of the concept that had suddenly acquired several, often less precisely defined meanings. Instead of being the central focus of a few specialized talks, neutrality was commonly invoked as a minor theme or explanation in many more talks. It is not what I expected, but its continuing usage suggests that neutrality has developed a life of its own.

Other topics similarly seem to have taken on separate lives from their initial application; even over the short time I've been attending ESA. For example, sessions focused on simple applications of ecophylogenetics methods (overdispersion, clustering, using different systems) were relatively common 3-4 years ago, while there wasn't a single contributed session specifically named for phylogenetics this year. There was however many sessions in which phylogenetic work formed the backbone of talks that were about broader questions, including in the "Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Function" session and the “Coexistence of Closest Relatives: Synthesis of Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives”. In the best case scenarios, it seems like even over-hyped approaches may be used with more nuance in time, as people recognize what information these methods can and cannot provide.

Sometimes it did seem that there is a lag between when critiques of certain methods or ideas are expressed and when they actually get incorporated into research. I could be wrong, but it seems this is most common where the research is focused on particular study systems or species, and methodology may be driven more by precedent in the literature and criticisms may take longer to infiltrate (since they aren’t the main focus of the work anyways). And unfortunately, the topics and sessions which appear to be timeless are those on human-related applications (restoration, climate change, invasion). Those pressures are sadly unchanging.

*The great thing to do would be map out changes in keyword frequency over the ESAs that have archived programs. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time/motivation.