EVOS/GoA data projects: challenges and successes

Posted on April 30, 2015 by snarayan

Ever wonder that the Gulf of Alaska projects are and why we care about such a specific region here at NCEAS? Come find out at the next NCEAS roundtable! I will give a brief overview of the Gulf Watch Alaska Project and the role NCEAS has played in the ecological research up there.

Data archiving and maintenance was rather prehistoric in the 1980s when the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Price William Sound. Therefore, wrangling historic data in “the last frontier” has proven to be quite the adventure! Our group will be writing two papers based on our experiences: 1) data recovery and archiving and 2) data collection for synthesis work . I’ll be introducing these papers and asking for feedback and suggestions on direction, format, etc. Hope to see you there!

Jessica Couture, MS
National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis
University of California, Santa Barbara
couture@nceas.ucsb.edu

Meat, Demand, and Development

Posted on April 23, 2015 by snarayan

Global meat consumption is expected to rise dramatically in coming decades as consumers from emerging nations increase the amount of meat and animal protein in their diet. The “ecological hoofprint” of the livestock industry is already enormous, and it is expected to increase. Influential explanations on rising meat consumption (“livestock revolution,” “nutrition transition,” “hamburger connection”) assert a correlation between meat demand and rising income. The concept of demand requires elaboration in order to comprehend increasing global meat consumption and associated environmental and health impacts. I will discuss the political-economic processes and cultural considerations that contribute to demand in the emerging nation of Brazil, with a secondary emphasis on China. The aim of this project is to begin to build toward an enhanced understanding of the factors that structure the demand for meat in emerging countries and to better understand the material and discursive dimensions of development as revealed through meat.

Jeffrey Hoelle
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara
Hoelle Culture and Environment Lab

Modelling ecosystem services to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

Posted on April 7, 2015 by snarayan

There is a new SNAP Working Group in town, at NCEAS, and we’re going to use this round-table to interact with the group, find out what they’re doing, and offer our ideas as well. This will hopefully be the first of several such interactions with visiting working groups, so please do come along, participate, and give us your suggestions! Here’s a description of this week’s interaction, which is being led by Sarah Jones from Bioversity International:

The SNAP workshop group on Making Ecosystems Count in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be meeting in Santa Barbara 13-16 April to define the modelling steps that are needed to make the Natural Capital Project ecosystem service assessment toolkit (InVEST) feed into selected ecosystem service indicators. The aim is for these indicators to show relative progress towards SDG targets as mediated by ecosystem services, when these services are altered by different national land use policy and infrastructure investment scenarios.

We will present the project progress so far, our target indicators and draft model workflows, then we will open it to the floor for a discussion on how these models might be strengthened and delivered within project timeframes.

Sarah Jones
Ecosystem Services and Resilience Research Assistant
Bioversity International Montpelier, France

Implications of food web constraints for community assembly in space

Posted on April 1, 2015 by snarayan

Spatial variation in diversity and community composition is challenging to interpret within an ecological framework that was conceptually built for local disconnected populations. The meta-community concept was, in this regard, an important achievement in community ecology. However, there remains a considerable gap between theoretical developments and empirical tests of the concept, especially for complex communities with multiple trophic levels. Using the classical Theory of Island Biogeography as a starting point, I extract predictions from theory and test these in a multi-trophic plant-insect grassland assembly experiment evaluating multiple stressors associated with landscape-level anthropogenic perturbations. In the current context of global environmental change, I argue that it is time for ecology to scale up current meta-community knowledge to the ecosystem function level, thereby providing the basis for a stronger meta-ecosystem theory.

Eric Harvey

University of Zürich, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Department of Aquatic Ecology

Impacts of anthropogenic stressors in vegetated coastal habitats

Posted on March 25, 2015 by snarayan

Anthropogenic stressors are increasingly changing conditions in coastal areas and impacting important habitats. But, when multiple stressors act simultaneously, their effects on ecosystems become more difficult to project. Stressors from climate change, coastal development, and pollution are currently impacting coastal habitats, but understanding the interaction of these stressors is critical to knowing how vulnerable coastal habitats and the critical ecosystem functions they provide may be maintained or changed in the future. Seagrass bed and saltmarshes are two habitats that are vulnerable to stressors yet provide many things we humans value.

My research to date has shown that stressors can impact foundation plant species in predictable ways, but those impacts can vary with temporal and spatial scales. In addition, the composition and diversity of these communities varies but can buffer certain ecosystem properties against stressor impacts. Overall, in these habitats stressors can be context specific, non-interactive, and vary with spatial and temporal scales.

Rachael E. Blake

A roundtable on roundtables

Posted on February 10, 2015 by snarayan

We have had a few informal discussions here at NCEAS on round-tables and the form/structure that they could take in order to be both engaging and useful. There is a dichotomy apparent, between ‘talks’ and ‘discussions.’

The more one-way, information providing ‘talks’ are a very useful way for researchers in different fields to explain and learn about on-going work, though time constraints generally mean that this leaves less room for questions and discussion.

On the other hand, more participative ‘discussions’ that address a broad topic, and have a loose structure to help keep them moving are a very good way for all of us to brainstorm about common ideas and concepts and hopefully leave us with more ideas (and questions!) than we started with!

The question then is – how do we strike a good balance? On Wednesday, February 18th, we will have a round-table session on…round-tables(!) to get ideas and brainstorm and discuss this.

As very good food for thought in preparation, here are some tips from Chris Lortie on how to provoke thought and and manage discussions:

http://www.christopherlortie.info/enabling-scientific-discourse-how-to-make-a-square-table-round/

Roundtable

An information-sharing forum for the NCEAS community.

Author Archives: snarayan