Posts tagged “Ecology”

Invasive species – making the best of a bad situation

Thus they made a covenant at Beersheba. So Abimelech rose with Phichol, the commander of his army, and they returned to the land of the Philistines. Then Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba, and there called on the name of the LORD, the Everlasting God. And Abraham stayed in the land of the Philistines […]

Send me to the Ecological Society of America meeting!

By August, I’m usually more than a little frustrated with my research and feeling overwhelmed. But then I go to the annual Ecological Society of America meeting. I leave brimming with ideas and renewed excitement and motivation. ESA is awesome… I love hearing about the latest research in my particular subfield, and I’m inspired by research seemingly […]

Throwing a wrench in biogeochemical cycles

“Biogeochemical cycles” used to be a phrase that sent me running for the coffee. I know that understanding biogeochemical cycles will make me a better ecologist, and that biogeochemical cycles are fundamental for getting the big picture. Unfortunately, every time I tried to learn more about the subject, I ended up getting lost and bored […]

Always half right/wrong

From Karban and Huntzinger’s How to Do Ecology: A Concise Handbook: Unlike some other scientific disciplines, ecological principles are not universal. Finding a single counterexample will make us rethink our working hypothesis about the force of gravity. However, finding a single counterexample does not disprove our ideas about competition. Similarly, unlike other disciplines, ecological hypotheses […]

What’s wrong with community ecology?

From Karban and Huntzinger’s How to Do Ecology: A Concise Handbook: Since manipulative experiments in ecology today are almost always conducted at spatial and temporal scales smaller than our ideal, it is worth considering what effect this has on our worldview. Small-scale experiments have led us as a group to believe in local determinism, that […]

Happy Darwin Day!

Today I will finish up my application to Big Northern University, my last grad school app. After my sad rejection from a program I thought would be ideal for me, BNU has become my first choice. Three years ago, I never would have thought I would be working with someone in BNU prof’s particular subfield. […]

Communicating Science

I went to DC this weekend for a really awesome workshop on using GIS as a tool to communicate science to non-scientists.  I’m pretty excited about giving my next presentation now – it’s amazing how much more information gets across when you use colors on a map instead of a bar chart. Most of the […]