Biodiversity Trauma

My last week was largely structured around another bruising round with illness, lots of time in bed, plenty of spatial ecology readings, and inordinate amounts of ginger tea. With all this time to sit an think one might imagine that I emerged with some interesting thoughts on the role of space in ecological dynamics, but after two days of papers on dispersal induced population desynchronization, quasicyclic population dynamics, and spatial moment equations I felt decidedly uninspired.


Was the fault mine (i.e. do I have endogenous disinterest (little spatial ecology joke there)), or could my lack of inspiration be the result of the material too? Am I simply indifferent to ecological concepts like biodiversity, or is our approach to science is so abstract that one can hardly see the forest for the experimental trees? Are two-species reaction-diffusion models realistic portrayals of ecologic systems, and does their potential for spontaneous pattern formation help explain the origins of patchiness in the real world? How could go about addressing these questions?


I have also been reading a bit of Gilles Deluze’s Cinema 1: The Movement Image, and his commentary on Bergson’s thesis of “the whole.” Briefly, the “whole” is defined by relations, and is an indivisible continuity (i.e. it has no parts as subdivision would inevitably change it). How could this concept of the ‘whole’ relate to the scientific method, and in particular to ecology which is characterized by a phenomenal amount of relations? Are ecologic systems are in themselves ‘wholes’ in that they are defined by relations between components that work together to create the realities we perceive? And in such a case is it possible to exert a scientific focus without removing ourselves from the study of this ecologic ‘whole?’


Any theoretical ecologist will (justly) tell you that models are always approximations of reality, and that to be able to deal with analysis at all we have to keep things simple, and address the relevant questions. The same comment could, of course, be made about experimentation: in doing an experiment we remove as many extraneous interactions as possible so that we can better address the questions that we’re interested in. All of this to show that in some realities, at least, the phenomena of interest are possible, but what of our reality, the world outside that we are ostensibly interested in?


It is along these lines that I’ve been playing with the concept of a film exploring how the science of ecology is removed (alienated even) from the world it attempts to describe. The pictures here are the first stills I pulled off of some footage shot toward this aim.


Of course, my general complaint is not new, nor restricted to the sciences. In order to study anything we necessarily restrict our focus, and tend add context retrospectively: considering how other processes interact with our focal process, or adding a historical (marxist, feminist, queer, etc.) perspective to our analysis. I’m not super sure what the goal of the academy is, but let us for now assume it is to create an understanding, a narrative of consensus, that we can use to interact with the world. Certainly science has something to contribute to this understanding, but there is also a need for other epistemologies to contribute towards our understanding of ecologic concepts (and indeed other epistemologies have contributed). I suspect my bout of illness will have been the beginning of a long inquiry into just how all of our epistemologies might fit together.

The Cat's Away

With our fearless leader away in South Africa at Diversitas, followed by safari and some home time, the little Gonzalez lab mice have the run of the lab for three weeks. What sort-of rogue biodiversity science are we up to?
Here’s a list of a few things I’ve been working on, or thinking about working on.

I’m thinking about writing a review manuscript on how ecologists just flip-flop between niche and neutral ideas and never actually make much progress because no one wants to cite anything more than ten years old - A love story.

I have a suite of samples collected this summer that I’m playing with, and getting some surprisingly good data from. Depending on how the final data turn out, Jon and I will be collaborating to write a manuscript from these samples in the next few months. Should be exciting.

I’m thinking of writing a popular-style book on temperate rainforest mites. Wouldn’t your friends and family be impressed to find that on your coffee table? Lots of pictures and loaded with interesting facts. Low, low price of $19.99…maybe I’ll hold off until I find a publisher.

And, lastly, something that Michael and I have been working on (struggling with) for some time now, is a plot for our biodiversity movie. I want it to be funny, but Michael is pushing for a more serious tone. Unfortunately the rest of the lab has been reluctant to get involved (maybe they saw our last movie?) What do you think about a remake of ‘Casablanca’ using a cast of mites and collembola?

Feedback, collaborations and new ideas are always welcome.

Journal of non-significant results

Following the recent controversy surrounding publishing policies at PNAS, I got into a discussion with members of the Abouheif lab about the many quirks of scientific publishing, and some of the problems they cause for science in general, in particular:

• Loss of confidence in scientific integrity
• Publication biases

I'll focus on the second issue, which is perhaps a bit more subtle and more relevant to all scientists without getting too far into the sociology of science.
Publication bias is a concern for anyone who's ever written a review paper, conducted a meta-analysis, or interested in complex problems that require multiple experiments to tease apart interactive effects. In a nutshell, the reality is that journals aren't interested in publishing studies about non-significant results. If your study or experiment found no significant difference between treatments of interest, that's less likely to get attention (and thus improve the journal's impact factor), than statistically significant results. You can see how this can skew our perceptions of phenomena, if the only observations we are exposed to are the "interesting" ones.
Given how much we know about publication bias and the problems it causes, it has occured to Zoë and myself that what is really needed is a forum to publish all these non-significant results that no 'respectable' journal would sully their pages with. Given how easy it is to find even 'obscure' results via article databases, impact and significance may be more relevant at the scale of an individual article, rather than an entire journal (" the times, they are a-changin' ").

So, Zoë and I want to start 'the journal of non-significant results' to publish and provide access to all those results of experiments, studies, and methods that just didn't work out, or at least gave statistically non-significant, but perhaps scientifically interesting, results. Unless PLoS beats us to it (which would probably work better, actually).
Think about it for a moment:
How many grad students and research assistants have tried the same doomed method, without knowing that several people have already tried it before? How much better would results of meta-analyses become now that all the non-significant results could be included?
This is not intended to be entirely tongue-in-cheek (unlike the 'journal of irreproducible results' - that's totally different). Although it sounds cheeky, may not ever achieve the impact factor of Nature or even Ecology Letters, it would still provide a valuable and novel function in scientific publishing, with no shortage of suitable material. I think it's time to make science a little less sexy and a whole lot more practical and accurate.
In fact, this idea is not without precedent: there is already a Journal of Non-Significan Results in Education. Once again, education scientists are ahead of the curve (though apparently lagging in follow-through as the journal has yet to post it's first issue).

We also thought of the first spin-off sister journal: 'the journal of insignificant results' for results that are statistically significant, but biologically uninteresting.

Scientific revival tent

September, September, September. No month signals scholastic pursuits quite as much as the month that typically sees students of all ages returning to classes. Granted, there is really no such thing as summer vacation in biodiversity research, but September does generally mean an end to conference season, an end to field season, and the revival of campus life.

Nowhere is this revival more evident than the Gonzalez lab. After long months of separation, all of the lab members again find themselves under the same roof, and with no lack of things to do. Samples have to be processed and diagrams have to be drawn, but there are also social aspects to the return of lab-mates. Some of the lab-bonding highlights for the Gonzalez lab this fall include the following:

Lab-logo contest:

Lab members should endeavour to make a logo for the Gonzalez lab! Deadline Oct. 1, with a potential prize for the winning submission!

Biodiversity film contest:

This fall the auteurs of the Gonzalez lab have a hefty challenge on their plates, with an award for the best short made in the lab on biodiversity. Submission deadline is December 1.

Everybody put on your creative-science hats and have at it!

Working Vacation

It’s been a great month for me, here on the westcoast. I’ve been visiting friends, family, cat, car, etc. on Vancouver Island, and doing some canopy sampling while I’m here also. The project, called ABASS (Arboreal Biodiversity Across Spatial Scales), was initiated at the end of my PhD, and this year I went into the field to collect HoBo dataloggers and a few arboreal moss samples. So, it’s a working vacation of sorts. But it’s the kind of work that I love to do. Firstly, the field sites are some of the most spectacular in the world. And secondly, because it’s an area that I have a connection to, as a scientist, and also because it’s home and I have history here.

This year I visited three sites in Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island, just north of Tofino, BC. This is ancient temperate rainforest, and canopy samples are collected from 60m Sitka Spruce trees of coastal estuaries.

Of the three sites (Sydney, Watta, Moyeha), the Sydney is my favourite; mostly for it’s pristine forests, amazing wildlife, and sheer isolation. It’s located 1.5 hours by boat from Tofino, and about 45 minutes north of the village of Ahousat, where the new national chief of the Assembly of First Nations was celebrated just last week. In the Sydney it’s just water, rock, trees and sky as far as you can see.

A typical day in the field started with collecting Blue and Huckleberries from around the camp site before canoeing off to the estuary. This year has been phenomenal for berries all over Vancouver Island, and the Huckleberries were the biggest I’ve ever seen. I work with a professional tree climber (Kev the arbornaut), who has climbed over an estimated 15,000 trees in his career (he stopped counting at 10,000). Our task is to climb 12 Sitka Spruce trees in each of the three watersheds, and collect dataloggers and moss samples for extraction of microarthropods (mainly mites). Climbing big trees, it always amazes me that they are just plants, related to a piece of celery or an African violet, and here I am clumsily climbing up them like an ant crawling up a blade of grass. At the top you can feel them sway in the wind.

Of course, also on a typical day in the field, you need to accept the good with the bad. Good parts were napping and swimming in the estuary, and watching a Humpback whale lunge feed for pilchards in the inlet for 4 hours, while we sat on the rocks, drinking beer and eating oysters. The bad parts were falling down and bashing my knee on the rocks in the dry riverbed, getting stung by a bee and having my whole arm swell-up to the point where I couldn’t bend my fingers, and stabbing myself with my pocket knife.

But, it’s almost time to wrap-up and return to Montreal. I’m anxious to get back into the lab and start some new experiments, play with moss, and see some new mites. We have at least one new addition to our lab starting sometime this fall, so it should be an exciting time in the Gonzalez lab as some people finish up their projects and new ones get underway.

I hope everyone had a great summer, and I’ll see you all soon.

Farewell to Albuquerque

Well, ESA isn't over, but the Gonzalez lab contingent is pulling out this morning, leaving the Friday sessions to hardier folks than we. And while the conference certainly felt like it was winding down tonight, ESA definitely went out with a bang.

Overall the last two days offered fantastic talks, with a particular emphasis on competition (especially among plants). Whole sessions were devoted to long-term data sets like the censused plots of Barro Colorado Island and more experimental set ups like Cedar Creek. While I definitely agree that there is much that can be learned from long-term study sites like BCI and Cedar Creek (indeed, much research would be impossible without them), I wonder as to whether there might also be a problematic side to such awesome resources as these. For example, I went to countless talks over the last two days about tropical forest dynamics, probably 90% of which were conducted on BCI. Now, it's not that BCI isn't an appropriate place to study, it's just that it seems to be the only place that is studied, which may lead us to accept idiosyncratic patterns of BCI as typical universal tropical forest trends. Similarly, it seems that so much of our knowledge on the effects of diversity on ecosystem functioning (representing another big chunk of talks I saw over the last two days) comes from Cedar Creek; and while it is an awesome study site, it seems dangerous to let just one experiment inform us so completely on a topic that is so important.

All that being said, it was one of the talks on BCI that caught my eye today, given by none other than Stephen P. Hubbell, who was at once lucid, clear, concise, and humorous. His talk also had me thinking about the nature of star power in science - as the lecture theatre was packed to the brim. People even took pictures of him. It was off the hook.

And on that note, a farewell to Albuquerque.

Dispatch from Albuqerque

The 94th annual Ecological Society of America meeting kicked off this Sunday with two, count them, two Gonzalez lab members in attendance. The theme for this year's meeting is "Ecological Knowledge and a Global Sustainable Society," and while there is some deal of murmuring that the theme is particularly ironic for a relatively isolated location that happens to be in a desert, the unique setting has inspired some interesting conversations on water issues and other elements of sustainability.

External to the meeting theme there have been some genuinely interesting talks in the desperately over-air-conditioned Albuquerque convention center. In particular over the last two days I have enjoyed an interesting special session calling for the emergence of a fully formed discipline of "warfare ecology" to address the unique and prevalent ecological challenges presented by war, and a symposium looking at interactions of ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Indeed, there have been a few shards of inspiration capable of piercing even my bitter and withered heart.

One thing that strikes me about a lot of the talks is the value of a charismatic study system, by which I simply mean a clear cut relationship to nature. I think it is a weakness of my talks, and indeed of many other theoretical talks, that they fail to sufficiently highlight the organisms involved, treating the model systems as abstractions unworthy of particular merit or attention. The problem strikes me as twofold: on one hand I think that such naturalistic exhibitionism keeps the audience's attention better than sheer theory, but also reminds us of the tendency for nature to act in idiosyncratic and contextual ways.

Of course, the talks are only half the conference. Come nightfall there are always interesting people to talk to, and you really never know who you'll end up eating with. Never have I talked to so many people from so many countries.

Albuquerque out.