Meeting | Ecology of the past

Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting 2016 – day 2

February 10, 2016
WDG

Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting (NAEM) 2016
10 February 2016
Conference Centre “De Werelt”, Lunteren

Day 2 of the NAEM breakfast 07:30, first lectures at 08:30… Two keynotes today thinking about ecological stoichiometry the first by Stan Harpole (Martin-Luther-Universitat-Halle-Wittenberg) focused on resource ratio theory, and then Martin Wassen (Utrecht University) thinking about N and P limitations. I also attended, parts of, three sessions today “Linkages between fire, vegetation, soil and ecosystem services”, “Novel ecosystems”, and “Scaling from trait to environment and back”. My top talks for today were:

Elmar Veenendaal (Wageningen University) Fire effects on tropical woody vegetation structure have been exaggerated?
Working on long-term fire study plots (Kokondekro since 1932) suggest that for forest-savannah transition zones fire alone is insufficient to mediate a change between states; human manipulation of ecosystems is required as well to trigger the change.
Frank van Langevelde (Wageningen University) Feedbacks between fire and patches of woody vegetation in tropical grassland savannah
Examination of tree distributions and fire within the Kruger National Park shows that landscapes contain more clustered tree populations when fire frequency is higher.

Plus today I have done lots of talking and made many new contacts. I have lots of follow up emails to write and promised papers to send around! Overall this has been a super meeting for meeting people – perfect for expanding my network of Dutch based ecologists – in a nice location, with good food and beer. Looking forward to next year already.

Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting 2016 – day 1

February 10, 2016
WDG

Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting (NAEM) 2016
9 February 2016
Conference Centre “De Werelt”, Lunteren

The annual Dutch ecology conference is being held over two days at the in “remote” Lunteren and I am pleased to be able to attend all of the conference this year. The conference was kicked off this morning with a recognition that this year is 150 years since the birth of ecology as a science (Haeckel, 1866). The opening two keynotes focused on aspects of ecology which have sometimes been overlooked firstly, parasitism (Peter Hudson, Penn State University) and secondly, immunology (Irene Tieleman, University of Groningen). Following these I focused on just two sessions in the morning “linking diversity to function”, and in the afternoon “ecosystem cascades”. From the range of excellent talks in the sessions I have picked one from each as my favourite:

Masha van der Sande (Wageningen University) The role of biodiversity and environment on productivity in tropical forests; evidence across scales
By examining long-term tropical forest monitoring data van der Sande demonstrated that through time ecosystem traits changed significantly. She hypothesised that the lack of stability in ecosystem traits was due to past disturbance; although it is unclear what caused this disturbance (climate or humans), or when it occurred.
Dries Kuijper (Mammal Research Institute, Poland) Landscapes of fear in Europe: Wolves and humans shaping ungulate top-down effects
By tracking Wolf pack distributions in the Bialowieza forest (Poland) Kuijper showed that ungulates avoided Wolf pack “core areas” for fear of predation, that the exclusion of ungulates lead to reduced browsing of the vegetation, and so consequently forests regenerated faster in Wolf pack core areas.

The evening lecture was given by Bart Knols (in2care) who gave an impassioned talk on the importance of communicating science beyond the academic sphere. Arguing that now is the time for ecologists to have an influence on policy making, politics and business, as well as showing us how he has done this.

Great day.

BES annual meeting: Top talks

December 17, 2015
WDG

I am just back from a fabulous British Ecological Society (BES) annual meeting in Edinburgh. Both the city and the science were interesting and exciting. The Science Slam was certainly my highlight “fringe” event and I believe all the slams will be avaliable to view soon on the BES Youtube channel. But you can watch the winner, Rosie Woodroffe, now…

Of the many great science talks I would like to highlight just four here which I found particulalry interesting, by: Stephen Prentice (Queen’s University Belfast), Althea Davies (University of St. Andrews), Tom August (Cente for Ecology & Hydrology), and Kimberly Simpson (University of Sheffield).

Palynologendagen 2015

October 13, 2015
WDG

Palynologendagen
“Een historisch-ecologische benadering van het landschap in noord-oost Twente”
(“A historical-sociological approach to understanding landscapes in north-east Twente”)
8-9 October 2015
Organized by: Harm Smeenge, Bas van Geel & Stefan Engels
For the: Palynologische Kring

Last week I took part in my first “palynologendagen” (pollen days) with the Palynologische Kring (Dutch palynology society). Unfortunately, due to a prior commitment (Chairing a British Ecological Society careers webinar) I was only able to take part on the second day.

Day two of the pollen days was “op de fiets” (on bikes) in true Dutch style. We met at Twente Fiets to pick up 36 bicycles and one tandem and headed out into the countryside!

Figure 1: Route of the bicycle tour (max speed 21.8 kmph, distance 23.24 km)

Our route (Fig. 1) took in around 14 point of interest. At each point Harm provided interesting insights into the landscape history and how humans had interacted and shaped it. The presentations were in Dutch so I had to concentrate hard to get 50% of the information.

Two particularly nice sites (which I think I understood) were:

the site of an old toll house at the split in the old road to Germany (east) and Scandinavia (north), and
a sedimentary cross section, revealed by river down cutting, which showed the impact of cart wheels on the sediment along the site of an old road.

In addition to the tour it was also fantastic to meet many other fellow palynologists based in the Netherlands. I looking forward to being able to participate in many future Palynologische Kring events, and I am also pleased to say attending this years event has inspired me again to try and push on with learning Dutch again!

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Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting 2015

February 13, 2015
WDG

Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting
10-11 February 2015
by William Gosling

On Wednesday I attended my first Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting (NAEM) unfortunately, due to prior commitments, I was not able to attend the whole event, but I still managed to get a nice insight into the vibrant Dutch Ecological research community. Particularly exciting for me was the “Biodiversity in Space and Time” theme. Plenary sessions by Alexandre Anotonelli (University of Gothenburg) and Hans ter Steege (Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden) focused on the Amazon ecology past and present. The subsequent session on the same theme, organized by Daniel Kissling (University of Amsterdam) and Niels Raes (Naturalis Biodiversity Center), was also excellent and ranged from species richness patterns past and present in Gabon (Andre van Proosdij, Naturalis Biodiversity Center), through soil microbes (Kelly Ramirez, Netherlands Institute of Ecology) to the role of sea level change on island biodiversity (Kenneth Rijsdijk, University of Amsterdam). I am looking forward to attending more of these meetings in the future and getting involved with the NERN community.

International Biogeography Society Conference – Bayreuth, Germany

January 28, 2015
Erik de Boer

International Biogeography Society
7th biennial conference
January 8 – 12, 2015
University of Bayreuth, Germany
Report by Erik de Boer

Two weeks ago I attended the biannual International Biogeography Society (IBS) conference in Bayreuth, together with 600+ other people from more than 50 different countries. This IBS conference, my first IBS meeting, proved to be an exciting event during which I met scientists from many different disciplines and heard talks on cutting-edge biogeographical research.

The IBS conference was held in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth, in the middle of the biodiverse landscape of Upper Franconia. This landscape provided the training ground for Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of the field of biogeography. The 4-day conference included a wide variety of symposia and many, many posters. The conference dinner in the German Steam Train Museum was highly memorable. The conference was closed by a lecture from Daniel Simberloff, once a doctorate student of Edward O. Wilson, who received the Wallace Award for his outstanding contributions to invasion ecology.

I had a talk in the plenary symposium of ‘Ecosystem response to past climate change’, organized by David Nogués-Bravo and Francisco Rodríguez-Sánchez. The symposium covered the dangers of climate change to biodiversity and tried to assess if the range and rate of adaptation, migration, persistence, or extirpation, that are registered in deep-time records, palaeorecords, and the recent past, are adequate responses for predicted climate change in the future. I addressed this issue from the point of view of a small remote island, where migration is obviously a limiting factor. I showed how I reconstructed climate and its effect on island biota during the last 40,000 years using long-term palaeoecological records from Mauritius (de Boer et al, 2013 & 2014). These records show that different climate regimes result in different ecosystem response to climate change in the past. Local extirpation or population collapse of larger vertebrates was a natural phenomenon in the lowlands of Mauritius due to frequent climate extremes (I will discuss this in more detail in my next blog; de Boer, 2015). Despite these population collapses, island biota have always (in the timeframe of my records) survived natural climate change. Therefore, my take home message was not to focus on the effects of (future) climate change alone. Other key components of global change, such as invasive species and habitat destruction, are more imminent threats to the biodiversity of many islands. For more information on my research, including publications, click here.

More information on the IBS read on (below) or visit the IBS website or blog. All abstracts and other details of the IBS conference in Bayreuth can be found here. The next IBS meeting will take place in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) in March 2017.

3rd BES Macroecology SIG meeting

July 23, 2014
philjardine

Last week I went to the University of Nottingham for the third BES Macroecology Special Interest Group annual meeting. Macroecology concerns itself with ecological patterns and processes at large spatial and/or temporal scales, and so is a natural place to link palaeoecological research with that of modern ecologists and biogeographers. The conference took place over two days, and comprised a mix of 5 minute lightning talks, longer invited talks (including two keynotes by Catherine Graham of Stony Brook University, New York) and discussion sessions.

The lightning talks covered a wide range of subjects, including maximising phylogenetic diversity in the Kew Seed Bank, outstanding problems with species distribution modelling, morphological variability in Madagascan tenrecs, and latitudinal gradients in pollination mechanism. The breakout discussion groups focused on questions inspired by Edge.org, such as ‘Which ecological concepts are ready for retirement?’ and ‘What should worry macroecologists most?’; I led a group discussing ‘Should macroecology be more interdisciplinary?’ (yes, but with caution was our rather non-committal answer).

There are plans to hold next year’s Macroecology SIG meeting at the Centre for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC) at the University of Copenhagen, and I’d like to encourage palaeoecologists to consider attending. Chatting to the delegates at the Nottingham meeting, there certainly is a growing interest in ecological change over longer timescales and the role of history in shaping modern biotas, and so palaeoecologists have a lot to offer to these sorts of research areas. Copenhagen’s got to be a nice place for a conference as well…

6th Workshop on Non-Pollen Palynomorphs

July 9, 2014
encarnimontoya

OUR POSTER: Non-Pollen Palynomorphs in Ecuador: Starting from scratch

Tallinn University
18-20 June 2014

Last month I had the opportunity of attending the 3-days non-pollen palynomorphs (NPP) workshop that was held at the Tallinn University, Estonia. It was perfectly organised by Tiiu Koff and Egle Avi among other members of the university, as it was a join workshop of Cladocera remains (XII Subfossil Cladocera workshop; 16-18^th June) and NPP (18-20^th June). Unfortunately, I was just present in the NPP workshop, so my comments will be focus on it.

With around 40 participants, we greatly enjoyed the discussions that came up about the state-of-the-art of this broad and interesting proxy and its implications for archaeology, palaeolimnology, and different aspects of ecology like human landscape management, biodiversity and conservation, or community assemblages. Current methodological problems like taxonomy, standardisation of lab techniques, etc., were also debated.

Opening and key lectures were from Bas van Geel and Emilie Gauthier, showing the development of this discipline over the last 40 years, and a great example of multi-proxy project aimed to study the human arrival and impact in Greenland respectively. Besides oral and poster presentations, last day there was a microscope session, very useful for sharing knowledge and uncertainties! In our specific case, Will, Hayley and I contributed with a poster titled “Non-pollen palynomorphs in Ecuador: starting from scratch”.

Personally, among the things I most like from the NPP meetings is the friendly and close environment, where everyone is more than glad to help others, regardless the experience. Following this feeling of small and scattered group of people dealing with the same issues, we used to do a final remark session every workshop raising the advances and inconveniences found so far, updating our NPP papers repository (managed by Antonella Miola), and addressing future directions as a group (for instance, we have now our own project in ResearchGate, thanks to Lyudmila Shumilovskikh!). In this particular workshop, I was very happy when I found out that Tallinn University has a green policy (paper free), and they replaced book abstracts etc., by iPads to follow the workshop schedule.

Although these meetings are normally biannual, next conference location and date is yet to be decided, but we hope to have the chance to join this very friendly and supporting community again. In addition, there will be a NPP session in the next European Palaeobotany and Palynology congress, tobe held in University of Padova (Italy), next August 2014. We encourage people with all kind of experience (or lack of) to attend further events.

Macroecology workshop

April 9, 2014
encarnimontoya

Phil Jardine taking charge at the macro-ecology meeting

On 1^st April, Alice, Encarni, Hayley and Nick attended the joint British Ecological Society Macroecology Special Interest Group and Palaeontological Association workshop held in the Natural History Museum, called Challenges in Macroecology – Scaling the Time Barrier. The workshop was co-organised by our member Phil Jardine (jointly with Victoria Herridge, Adriana de Palma and Isabel Fenton), and it was a mix between deep and shallow time, neoecologists and other researchers interested in any kind of macroecology topics.

We enjoyed so much how this one-day meeting was scheduled, with some formal approach including four plenary and lighting talks, and other informal initiatives such as speed dating and discussion groups. This way, all participants could interact with other non-directly related researchers.

The focuses of the plenary talks were related to different fields within macroecology. In this sense:

Andy Purvis opened the session with the definition of macroecology, the trends and shifts of study topics it has carried out since the discipline began and ended with what macroecology is not any longer.
David Jablonski explored through examples of bivalves studies how climate in time and space affects the studies of diversity dynamics, mainly addressed to three key questions: a) Extinctions, b) Latitudinal Diversity Gradients, and c) Geographical ranges.
Lee Hsiang Liow encouraged us to evaluate both processes and observations, and highlighted the importance of modelling both to take into account the “unobservable” or latent truth including examples of capture-recapture and occupancy methods.
Kathy Willis gave a review of the trends followed for conservation strategies since 1980s, until the development of the “ecosystems services” idea of given an economic value to biodiversity. Her main statement was focused on how palaeo-data can help in providing information to some “knowledge gaps” related to human resources including: a) trends in biomass, b) trends in nutrient cycling, c) trends in in final ecosystems services, and d) sustainability of ecosystems services.

Lighting talks were related to more specific study cases of macroecology, including specific researches about turtles, fungi, beetles, crocodiles, foraminifera or dinosaurs, in several spatial and temporal scales .

We would like to thank again Phil, Victoria, Adriana and Isabel for the great day that finished with a nice and warm wine reception sponsored by BMC Ecology. We hope to attend further events like this soon.

For more on this meeting see blog post by @protohedgehog “Macroecology – scaling the time barrier” and storify of the twitter feed, click here.

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual international conference – 2013

August 30, 2013
HayleyKeen

Palaeo-people at the RGS-IBG meeting plotting future papers and grants. Left-right: Encarni Montoya, Joe Williams, Hayley Keen and Frazer Bird.

RGS – IBG Annul International Conference 2013
27^th – 30^th August, London

Yesterday (29^th August) four members of the Palaeoenvironmental Change Research Group (PCRG) went down to London for the third day of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG (RGS – IBG) international conference for a day of informative talks. Two of the morning sessions were of particular interest to us with the sessions entitled ‘Human – environment interactions in the Neotropics: historical impact to current challenges’ organised by John Carson, Lizzy Rushton and Sarah Metcalfe.