Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Adaptation and dispersal = (mal)adapted
In a simple but elegant experiment, Jill Anderson and Monica Geber performed a reciprocal transplant experiment, moving Elliott's Blueberry plants between two habitats. One population was from highland, dryer habitats and the other from moist lowlands. They further evaluated performance in greenhouse conditions. Their results, published in Evolution, show that these two populations have not specialized to local conditions. Rather, due to asymmetric gene transfer, lowland individuals actually performed better when planted in highlands than compared to their home habitat. Further, in the greenhouse trials, lowland species did not perform better under higher moisture conditions. While genetic or physiological constraints may also limit adaptation, Anderson and Geber present a fairly convincing case that gene flow is the culprit.
These results reveal that populations may actually be relatively mal-adapted to local conditions, which has numerous consequences. For example, we need to be cognizant of adaptations to particular conditions when selecting populations for use in habitat restoration and when trying to predict response to altered climatic or land-use conditions. Importantly what does this mean for multi-species coexistence? Dispersal seems to limit the ability to adapt, and thus, better use local resources or maximize fitness, making for a better competitor. At the same time, dispersal can offset high death rates, allowing for the persistence of a population that would otherwise go extinct. Understanding how these two consequences of dispersal shape populations and communities is an interesting question, and work like Anderson and Geber's provides a foundation for future studies.
Anderson, J., & Geber, M. (2009). DEMOGRAPHIC SOURCE-SINK DYNAMICS RESTRICT LOCAL ADAPTATION IN ELLIOTT'S BLUEBERRY (
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Evolution DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00825.x
Mycorrhizal Networks: Socialists, capitalists or superorganisms?
van der Heijden, M., & Horton, T. (2009). Socialism in soil? The importance of mycorrhizal fungal networks for facilitation in natural ecosystems Journal of Ecology, 97 (6), 1139-1150 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2745.2009.01570.x
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The making of an open era
However, not all researchers have completely embraced OA journals. There are two commonly articulated concerns. The first is that many OA journals are not indexed, in most notably Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, meaning that a paper will not show up in topic searches, nor will citations be tracked. I for one do not like the idea of a company determining which journals deserve inclusion, thus affecting our choice of journals to submit to.
The second concern is that some OA journals are expensive to publish in. This is especially true for the more prestigious OA journals. Even though such OA journals often provide cash-strapped authors the ability to request a cost deferment, the perception is that you generally need to allocate significant funds for publishing in OA journals. While this cost may be justifiable to an author for inclusion in a journal like PLoS Biology, because of the level of readership and visibility. However, there are other, new, profit-driven journals, which see the OA model as a good business model, with little overhead and the opportunity to charge $1000-2000 per article.
I think that, with the rise of Google Scholar, and tools to assess impact factors (e.g., Publish or Perish), assessing difference sources for articles is available. The second concern is a little more serious, and a broad-scale solution is not readily apparent.
Number of Open Access journals
Regardless, OA journals have proliferated in the past decade. Using the directory of biology OA journals, I show above that the majority of OA journals have appeared after 2000. Some of these have not been successful having faltered after a few volumes, such as the World Wide Web Journal of Biology which published nine volumes with the last in 2004. I am fairly confident that not all these journals could possibly be successful, but I hope that enough are. By having real OA options, especially higher-profile journals, research and academia benefit as a whole.
Which journals become higher profile and viewed as an attractive place to submit a paper is a complex process depending on a strong and dedicated editorial staff and emergent property of the articles submitted. I hope that researchers out there really consider OA journals as a venue for some of their papers and become part of the 'win-win' equation.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Nobel prize and the grandeur view of life
However, in the interviews with these great scientists, there was a common thread in what they said. They reiterated the need to support basic science and that the pursuit of curiosity-driven science is a worthy and valuable enterprise. I found the fact that they found it necessary to reiterate this to be interesting and something that interviewers thought worthy of reiterating themselves. I know that news stories need to relate to a person’s everyday experience, but, I think, basic science offers something more. To quote Darwin “There is grandeur in this view of life”. That is, while the products of science have surely improved our quality of live, science has given us something deeper and more meaningful. Basic curiosity-driven research has changed our understanding of the world and our place in it. We now look up at the stars and have a pretty good idea of what they are. We know what causes thunder and lightening. We understand why our pet cat looks kinda of like a lion and gorillas like people. We no longer look to superstition and myth to explain these aspects of nature. To me, this is the fundamental contribution of science to humanity, and I wish this were as celebrated as technological advances. Though being able to take 2 gigabytes of photos and movies when my daughter is doing something cute is pretty cool too, I guess.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Blog your way to North Carolina!
Science in a web-base universe now has the potential to link vast numbers of researchers together and be communicated to the global citizenry. Exploring the power of the web in science is the fourth annual Science Online 2010 conference, which will be held from Jan. 14-17 in the Research Triangle Park, NC. The conference is free, but of course you still must pay for travel and housing. Unless of course you've written an outstanding evolution blog post! NESCENT, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, is offering two $750 awards for the best evolution blog post about an evolutionary-oriented paper published in 2009.
For more details see the Deep-Sea News post. Be sure to tell your blogger friends!
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Exotic plants integrate into plant-pollinator networks
They studied invaded plant communities across Europe, observing pollinator visits to flowers in multiple 50 x 50 m plots. They calculated connectance as the number of interactions standardized by network size. They showed that exotics fully integrated into plant-pollinator networks. Exotic species accounted for 42% of all pollinator visits and 24% of all network connections -a testament to the overall abundance of exotics in many communities. However, these exotics did not affect overall changes in network connectedness, revealing that these networks are quite robust to invasions.
That said, researchers must now ask if this is true in networks that do contain high numbers of specialists (e.g., orchids) or if the relative few specialists in generalist-dominated systems are more susceptible to changes from exotics.
Vila, M., Bartomeus, I., Dietzsch, A., Petanidou, T., Steffan-Dewenter, I., Stout, J., & Tscheulin, T. (2009). Invasive plant integration into native plant-pollinator networks across Europe Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276 (1674), 3887-3893 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1076
Friday, October 2, 2009
How to keep up on your favorite journals
The simplest way to do this is to make sure you have a Google account and use their Google reader. If you go to a journal's website you click on either of these symbols:
You'll be sent to their RSS feed page and at the top is a subscription option and you can select Google to subscribe using:
When you click on 'Subscribe Now', it prompts you to select the Google homepage or reader -I use reader, but that just depends on your preference. You can subscribe to as many Journals as you want, and I think that all the major ones have RSS set up. Then to keep up on recently published papers, you simply go to your Google reader and scroll through the journals you have RSS subscriptions. Or if you check it more often, the reader keeps a list of the most recent items from all your subscriptions. No more getting e-mail alerts and no more going to a bunch of different journal pages.
By the way, you can also subscribe to this blog in the same way (see 'subscribe to' links on side panel).
Friday, September 25, 2009
Global warming and shifts in food web strucutre
O'Connor and colleagues experimentally warmed marine microcosms and tested two alternative hypotheses on food web structure: 1) that productivity increases with warming; and 2) warming increases metabolic rates, thus changing consumer-autotroph (i.e., primary producers) interactions. What they found was that warming indeed altered consumer-autotroph interactions. Warming increased base metabolic rates of consumers, as well as primary production, and the net effect was that food webs shifted towards increasing consumer control (i.e., top-down control).
What this research means is that global warming may alter food web interactions by increasing resource needs of organisms as their metabolic rates increase. This may increase the stress on communities and change diversity patterns as increased needs may shift competitive hierarchies or affect autotroph's ability to withstand consumer effects.
O'Connor, M., Piehler, M., Leech, D., Anton, A., & Bruno, J. (2009). Warming and Resource Availability Shift Food Web Structure and Metabolism PLoS Biology, 7 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000178
Monday, September 21, 2009
Everything but extinct: invasion impacts on native diversity
In a forthcoming paper from Heinke Jäger and colleagues in the Journal of Ecology, Cinchona pubescens invasions on the Galápagos Islands were monitored in long-term plots for more than seven years. What they found was that there was a four-fold increase in Cinchona density as the invasion progressed and that this increase had measurable effects on native species abundance. While they did not observe any native extirpations in their plots, native densities decreased by at least 50%. Of the greatest concern was that Island endemics appear to the most susceptible to this invasion.
What these results show is that, while there were not any observed extinctions, there were serious deleterious changes to native diversity. Further, the native species, and especially the endemics, are now more susceptible to other invasions or disturbances due to their lower abundances. The impact of exotic invaders may not be readily apparent but may be a major contributor to increased extinction risk.
Jäger, H., Kowarik, I., & Tye, A. (2009). Destruction without extinction: long-term impacts of an invasive tree species on Galápagos highland vegetation Journal of Ecology DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2745.2009.01578.x
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
BES day two...
- Ian Wright gave an interesting talk about the history of functional plant ecology. Basically, covering where trait ecology has been and where we are now. It is really amazing to see the truly large scale analysis and collaborations currently driving modern trait analysis.
- In another overview type talk, Gerlinde De Deyn, talked about carbon sequestration in soils. I'm sure to many ecosystem ecologists this maybe well known, but I found it fascinating. Did you know that tundra ecosystem have as much soil carbon as tropical rain forests? The reason is that tundra has very slow process rates (cold) while rain forests have fast production rates. In fertilization experiments, soil carbon is reduced, so in order to manipulate soil carbon stores one must understand the interaction between plant traits and soil organisms.
- Finally, Kyle Dexter, in a great field survey of Inga tree species in a region of Peru, showed that different functional diversity metrics show differing patterns of over- and under-dispersion. For example, phylogenetic diversity tends to be under-dispersed for Inga assemblages, while chemical and anti-herbivory traits are over dispersed and leaf size measures are under-dispersed.
Also, there was the annual general meeting, which was rather somber as three obituaries were read aloud. The three deceased, John Harper, Bob Jefferies and Simon Thirgood, were all superb ecologists who absences were obviously felt. Harper (my Master's advisor's advisor) and Jefferies (my colleague at Toronto) were both eminent ecologists with long and distinguished careers, while Thirgood (a fellow Senior Editor at the Journal of Applied Ecology) was in the prime of his very successful career.