Hunting in the tropics: examining hunter rationality [Wed, Feb 3]

Excessive hunting pressure is a major threat to tropical vertebrates. Research on hunters has broadly assumed that hunters are rational economic agents, willing to switch to more attractive alternative activities. However, my study in Southwest China demonstrates that villagers may be highly unwilling to stop hunting, despite low expected catch rates and stiff penalties for hunting and gun ownership. I will primarily discuss a project that used quantitative and qualitative interviews to elucidate the behavior of hunters, as well as the application of novel techniques to analyze these data. I will also discuss ongoing research that combines field data with theoretical models to explore how resilient prey may subsidize the continued harvest of rare game species. I am eager to receive feedback and share ideas with audience members.

Charlotte Chang
PhD candidate | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Princeton University
chc2@princeton.edu

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Barriers to Diversity in Higher Education and the Promise of Diverse Scientific Teams [Wednesday, Jan 27]

This Wednesday’s roundtable will be led by Dr. Barbara Endemaño Walker and Professor Kyle Lewis from UCSB.

The Center for Research, Excellence and Diversity in Team Science (CREDITS) at UCSB is an integrated research and training program to increase and enhance the capacity and effectiveness of transdisciplinary scientific teams in California.  Diversity on teams is known to have positive effects on creativity, innovation, and productivity.  Apart from its contribution to scientific breakthroughs and grand challenge problems, collaborative transdisciplinary science – “Team Science” – has beneficial impacts on individual research careers.  Team Science projects garner more funding, and yield greater publication productivity and higher impact publications.  Despite the benefits of diversity to teams, women and URM scientists are less likely to participate in team science collaborations, and their participation in these networks develops later in their careers.  In this presentation we will provide an overview of key interventions to increase the broader participation of women and URM faculty in higher education, and summarize the research on diversity and collective intelligence.

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Kyle Lewis
Professor of Technology Management
College of Engineering, UCSB

Barbara Endemaño Walker
Special Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor for Diversity Initiatives /
Director of Research Development for the Social Sciences, Humanities and Fine Arts
Office of Research, UCSB

 

Kyle Lewis is Professor of Technology Management in the College of Engineering. She holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, an MS in Industrial Administration (MBA) from Carnegie-Mellon University, and degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Duke University. She joined the faculty of UCSB in the Fall of 2014. Prior to joining UCSB, Dr. Lewis was a tenured professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Lewis’ research examines how organizations leverage individual and collective knowledge. She examines the performance of teams, especially those teams engaged in knowledge work such as professional services, new product development, and project-based tasks. She has published articles in the top journals in the field of Management, including Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Management Science, Journal of Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Group Dynamics. Dr. Lewis served as Division Chair in the Academy of Management (Managerial and Organization Cognition Division) and was a past senior editor for Organization Science.

 

Barbara Louise Endemaño Walker is the Special Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor for Diversity Initiatives, and the Director of Research Development for the Social Sciences, Humanities and Fine Arts in the Office of Research at UC Santa Barbara. Walker’s research on the gendered political ecology of marine resources in Ghana, French Polynesia, and California has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and NOAA Sea Grant, among others. Her current research programs examine a) the intersections of team science and broadening participation in STEM and higher education, and b) alternative food networks among US fishing communities. Her work has been published in the Professional Geographer; Gender Place and Culture; Society and Natural Resources; PLOS ONE; and the Journal of Geography and Higher Education among others. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Geography from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Anthropology and African Studies from UCLA.

 

A primer on natural history collection digitization and data sharing.

Natural history collections contain both historical and contemporary
information about the ecology of our natural and urban areas. The
research and instructive potential of these data are rapidly becoming
more relevant as more and more collections become digitized.

I managed the digitization of over 3 million plant and insect
specimens for the National Science Foundation Tri-Trophic Thematic
Collection Network project from 2011 until 2015. The focus of this
high-throughput digitization effort was on the hemipteran herbivorous
insects (aphids, scales, hoppers, cicadas, and true bugs), their host
plants, and related parasitoids.  At this NCEAS roundtable, I plan to
present to review of contemporary standards in natural history
collection digitization, highlight some of the exciting derivative
research, and outline many of the ongoing challenges natural history
collection digitization still faces.

Katja Seltmann, PhD
Katherine Esau Director / Entomology Curator
Cheadle Center for Biodiversity & Ecological Restoration (CCBER)
seltmann@ccber.ucsb.edu

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Development at NCEAS, Fundraising for Ecology [Jan 13, 2016]

This round-table will be led by Jeanne Kearns who is the new Director of Development at NCEAS. Jeanne will be discussing what development is, in the context of NCEAS and how the NCEAS community can contribute to its development. In particular, Jeanne will present on:

1) Who I am and why I do what I do?
2) What is Development and What does Development look like at UCSB?
3) How does NCEAS fit into this picture?
and then answer any questions and hopefully have a fruitful discussion!
Jeanne Kearns

Director of Development

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

University of California Santa Barbara

735 State Street, Suite 300
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
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Synthetic ecology across scales: a follow-up discussion on hurdles to synthesis

This will be a follow-up to a round-table last July on hurdles to synthesis (here). Look forward to an informal discussion on the process of data synthesis, based on a poster presentation by the GoA group at the CERF meeting last November in Portland, OR. A list of questions for discussion will be posted before the round-table on Wed, Jan 6th.

Here’s a link to the full poster (pdf): CERF 2015_Poster_Large

Abstract:
Large-scale ecological syntheses are increasingly important to understanding patterns, processes, and effects at an ecosystem scale.  However, conducting such syntheses requires lots of data which frequently is considered either large data (large-scale, designed to identify broad patterns not mechanisms, often many investigators or organizational) or small data (intensive, designed to identify mechanisms, often single/few investigators).  We explored a case where we integrated large and small data to examine questions across spatial and temporal scales in the Gulf of Alaska, focusing on the impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.  However, for this discussion we will be focusing on the process of synthesizing disparate datasets rather than the actual data themselves.  Key to integrating data for synthetic analyses is the availability of informative documentation of the data.  We used Ecological Metadata Language (EML), online code sharing (GitHub), and an online data repository (DataONE) to document the data we used and to aid in transparency of these analyses.  Some of the hurdles encountered included a wide variety of poorly documented data formats, and fragmented research (through space and time).  Potential solutions include standardization of data formatting and storage across organizations, and better integration of research efforts by large organizations (government agencies, academia, etc.).  We hope to foster a discussion about these hurdles and potential solutions to synthesizing ecological data across scales.

Rachael Blake, NCEAS Post Doc
Jessica Couture, NCEAS Research Associate
Colette Ward, NCEAS Post Doc