globalisation | Ecology for the Masses

Tag Archives: globalisation

Forecasting Worldwide Alien Invasions

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Sam Perrin One comment

Image Credit: Bernard Dupont, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped

Projecting the continental accumulation of alien species through to 2050 (2020) Seebens at al., Global Change Biology, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15333

The Crux

A by-product of globalisation is that over the coming decades, no matter how many episodes of Border Patrol get recorded, new species are going to find their way into new habitats and potentially become invasive alien species, exerting negative effects on the locals. We’ve seen this in the past, and I’ve beaten many a dead horse writing about these species on this site.

What this paper set out to find is whether or not we can predict at what scale this trend will increase.

Rebuilding Our Relationship With Urban Rivers With Dr. Cecilia Medupin

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Sam Perrin One comment

Rivers have played a monumental role in determining where people live. Their importance in providing water, transportation and a raft of other ecosystem services has meant that even today most of the world’s largest cities are situated close to a major source of freshwater, from Sydney to Delhi, Quebec to Karachi.

Yet despite their role in our history, urban rivers today are often facing increasing levels of pollution as a result of human activity. As well as often being a huge tourist drawcard, and an ongoing resource for fishers, joggers and portable BBQ toters, freshwater ecosystems carry a disproportionate number of aquatic species, which makes this trend increasingly worrying.

After meeting at last year’s British Ecological Society Annual Meeting, I got in touch with Dr. Cecilia Medupin, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Manchester. Cecilia works to increase peoples understanding of rivers, including the project Our Rivers, Our City. I asked Cecilia abut our connection with rivers, the challenges they face, and how to inspire research and change in urban rivers.

The Forefront

Madhur Anand: Finding Poetry in Global Change Ecology

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Sam Perrin 2 comments

Professor Madhur Anand is a global change ecologist and a poet. So how do the two combine? (Image Credit: Karen Whylie)

Image Credit: Karen Whylie, University of Guelph, CC BY 2.0

When I interview ecologists, there are two themes I always end up gravitating towards; how the earth is changing and how to improve scientific communication with the general public. So when my colleague Stephanie Januchowski-Hartley mentioned she’d recently spoken to a global change ecologist who also happened to be a poet, I jumped at the opportunity.

Professor Madhur Anand is the co-author of Climate Change Biology and the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, a collection of poems which bridge the gap between poetry and science. Along her way to picking up two Canada Research Chairs and the ICCC Female Professional of the Year award, she has worked with theoretical physicists, poets and mathematicians. I spoke to Madhur about interdisciplinarity, using poetry to connect with the general public, and the future of the planet.