Modernising Ecological Data Management: Reflections from the Living Norway Seminar
Ecological data is constantly being collected worldwide, but how accessible is it? (Image Credit: GBIF, CC BY 2.0)
Category Archives: Opinions
Knocking Down the Paywalls: The Quest for Accessible Science
Scientific understanding is constructed, developed and advanced through open sharing of knowledge generated by scientists worldwide. Yet for years that collective knowledge has only been accessible to those who pay exorbitant amounts of money. Now the pressure is building for publishers to change the system, as more and more scientific communities push to bypass or break down the expensive paywalls that restrict access to global scientific progress.
Life Under Lake Ice: A Mysterious (and Threatened) World
Ice has become (pardon the pun) something of a hot topic lately.
Professional and amateur scientists alike have studied the timing of seasonal ice formation on lakes and rivers for hundreds of years, and the patterns that have emerged from these studies provide a window into the progression of climate change. Overwhelmingly, the data show that lakes and rivers are freezing up later in the winter and their ice cover is melting earlier in the spring than in the past.
Why Australia is Approaching a ‘Climate Change’ Election
Image Credit: Tim J Keegan, CC BY-SA 2.0
This weekend, Australia will have a federal election. My country will vote, not on an individual leader, but on the party that will form government for the next 3-4 years. We’ve been led by the conservative Liberals (yes, the right-wing party are called the Liberals, it’s stupid) since 2013, and that time in Australia has not been kind to the environment. A tax on carbon was repealed almost as soon as it was implemented, prioritising large businesses has caused potentially irreversible damage to iconic ecosystems around the country, and a disregard for the potential impacts of climate change have been a trademark of the present government.
Idealism and Environmentalism: The Green New Deal
American politicians Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, champions of the controversial environmentalist bill, the Green New Deal (Image Credit: Senate Democrats, CC BY 2.0)
If you’ve lost track of what’s going on in US politics (very excusable), you might have missed out on yet another issue that is dividing people. I’m not talking about the Mueller report, or gun legislation, or health care. I’m talking about the Green New Deal, named after the New Deal, a compilation of programs and projects that gave Americans jobs after the Great Depression and built quite a lot of infrastructure. The newest “Green” version is meant to do the same following the Great Recession that America has been suffering the aftershocks of since late last decade. An initiative sponsored by Democrats, the Green New Deal has come under fire from both sides for a wide range of reasons. While the movement for action against climate change is a global phenomenon, I am going to give a brief synopsis of what the Green New Deal represents in the US, and why it has been the subject of so much controversy.
Interdisciplinarity in the Classroom: The Experts in Teamwork Approach
Image Credit: Liliann Eidem, CC BY-SA 2.0
The concept of interdisciplinarity (essentially, scientists from different backgrounds working together to solve scientific questions) has played a major role in the development of ecology, and science in general, in the last few decades. As odd as it sounds, working across disciplines, even those as closely related as population and behavioural ecology, wasn’t a regular occurrence. Papers with one author were fairly commonplace.
What About This Cathedral? The ‘Environmentalist’ Response to Notre Dame
