Language is important. It’s a lesson many biological scientists would have learned a long time ago if we hadn’t kept social sciences at such a wary arm’s length. Ecologists have a tendency to label and relabel ecological concepts (anyone up for a debate about the word ‘niche’?), species and even global phenomena (think global warming vs. climate change) based on anything from shifts in public perception to new findings that challenge our earlier labels.
Woe betide my fishy ancestors, for I am come here today to vent my grievances at a paper so dastardly it has cast a tepid patina of anxiety on a LOT of the structured squabbling my colleagues and I call ‘research’. Actually, I shouldn’t vent too harshly on the sarcopterygiites, those ancient lobe-finned ancestors of ours and their close cousins the regular fish. Birds, as always, are the main culprit here. An abhorrent series of mutations that messed up a perfectly good reptile.
Image credit: Joint Base Langley-Eustis,Va, CC0 1.0 Scientists face many challenges during their professional lives, but one prevalent problem that doesn’t get the attention that
People love watching birds. They’re diverse and beautiful in appearance and behaviour, and bird watching appeals to the very human quirk to categorize and collect. It is therefore not so strange that nowadays hundreds of thousands of people go out, be it in nature or in the city, to spot and record their observations of birds. So how can this knowledge be tapped into, and who can it benefit?
A common goal of ecologists is to understand the population abundance of a particular species. We might be looking for the California condor as part of assessing how well the recovery project is going. This requires some field work, going out to a variety of sites and counting animals that we see. How do we choose which sites to go to? Even in the era of camera traps, we still need to know where to put our extra set of eyes. It would be a shame to have a particular camera not get any action due to an unlucky placement. We don’t have infinite time and money after all!
More than perhaps any other taxa, birds have managed to associate themselves with the beauty of nature. The bird-watching community worldwide is massive, and ranges from casual backyard birders to those who are willing to travel far and wide to see a new species. I spoke to Professor Dan Baldassarre recently about our relationships with birds, some of the positives that have come from it, and how our perception of them may have blinded us to some of the realities of their lives.
My lord Iceland is gorgeous. There could not have been a better setting for the 2020 Nordic Oikos Society’s Annual Meeting. Driving through deserts of snow that ring of the kind of quiet isolation you’d expect from a town in a depressing British murder mystery was a wonderful experience. As was the conference itself, of course. So let’s recap some of my highlights from this year’s meeting, titled ‘Ecology in the Anthropocene’.
This week we look at a novel paper that tries to assess which types of North American birds are popular with the public, and whether that popularity is confined only to their home states, or whether it is shown in surrounding areas as well.
The Fisheries Blog: Six fish scientists discuss fun and interesting topics about fish.
Boldly going where no forest ecologist has gone before
Discovering Dynamic Distributions - The virtual lab around Jonas Lembrechts
Advice. Staircase Wit. Faux Pas. Movies.
Bridging the gap between researchers, practitioners and policymakers
The Plankton and Policy Research Group at Plymouth University. PI: Dr Abigail McQuatters-Gollop
Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences
Science for the Environment
ice age ecology, early career academia, and diversity in STEM
