Community (ecology) Puns

Hi all,

I'm really glad this forum was created. To know how bad things are and not be able to take any action to make things better is such a burden. So I'm sharing a project and great widely dispersed group that I've connected with that has a goal of getting a million chestnuts planted over the next 10 years. Other staple food trees are great too if chestnuts aren't suited to your area (mesquite, carob, breadfruit etc.) but this group is largely focused on the ways we can be responding to climate change and biodiversity loss in ways that build soil, community, and resilience.

So: Why chestnuts? I'm going to reference the group's wiki here:

We're often asked why we've chosen to place focus specifically on chestnuts.

• For much of the northern hemisphere, beech-family ecosystems are an important carbon sequestration landscape. They share a niche that provides food and habitat for many organisms, and many are compatible with regenerative human food systems. Oaks and beeches are not consistent producers, and they require some processing. Chestnuts, however, produce nuts annually and often for centuries. Chestnuts have been integral to food systems all over the Northern Hemisphere, including in Italy, Spain, Corsica, Korea, China, and the Eastern forests of North America.
• Chestnuts are perennial. If you plant corn or wheat, you have to do it again next year. If you plant chestnuts, you can produce food for the next 5000 years.
• Chestnuts are nutritious, more like a grain than a nut. They can be eaten roasted or dried and milled into flour for bread, pasta, and desserts.
• One chestnut tree can provide around half the grain needs of an adult human. This means that chestnuts trees can help replace soil-damaging and tillage-intensive annual grain agriculture, which is currently contributing to erosion, soil death, carbon loss, nitrates in groundwater, and dead zones in oceans.
• Chestnut population can be quickly increased, because they start producing nuts in 2-5 years.
• They produce a staple crop with room underneath. Mature chestnut trees can produce the same amount of food as a cornfield, but unlike corn, they produce in a canopy. There is room underneath them to grow other crops, foster native plant restoration, or to walk on streets and sidewalks. Because of this quality, chestnuts have the potential to bring staple food production into urban and residential spaces. This would allow us to shift the large landscape back to wild systems,

I've been thinking lately about the lack of science education in the world - I live in the US, specifically - and how divorced most people are from ecological thinking. Most people don't reflect on how our cities are designed around cars, or how we lack natural tree shade, or how the materials in your phone - which you're always being pushed to upgrade - requires an extractive, exploitative economic system.

I think teaching basic ecology would be important to a true solarpunk future. But what would that look like? For those of you who have taken classes on or been exposed to classes on ecology, what would a starting point be? What do you think would need to change in those classes to make them more accessible to the lay public, who doesn't have much grounding in science?

I feel like this is one simple way that communities could come together and affect real change. Understanding how climate change affects your day-to-day life and neighborhood would make this especially relevant to everyone - your voters, workers, activists, everyone.

Hi everyone, hope you are all doing well! I have a new open ecology article of the week, and this week it's maybe a first for The American Naturalist.

You can find the open access link here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716927

As always, please feel free to discuss this article in the comments below if you like. Questions, comments, or anything remotely relevant is fair game!

Abstract: Species interactions mediate how warming affects community composition via individual growth and population size structure. While predictions on how warming affects composition of size- or stage-structured communities have so far focused on linear (food chain) communities, mixed competition-predation interactions, such as intraguild predation, are common. Intraguild predation often results from changes in diet over ontogeny (“ontogenetic diet shifts”) and strongly affects community composition and dynamics. Here, we study how warming affects a community of intraguild predators with ontogenetic diet shifts, consumers, and shared prey by analyzing a stage-structured bioenergetics multispecies model with temperature- and body size–dependent individual-level rates. We find that warming can strengthen competition and decrease predation, leading to a loss of a cultivation mechanism (the feedback between predation on and competition with consumers exerted by predators) and ultimately predator collapse. Furthermore, we show that the effect of warming on community composition depends on the extent of the ontogenetic diet shift and that warming can cause a sequence of community reconfigurations in species with partial diet shifts. Our findings contrast previous predictions concerning individual growth of predators and the mechanisms behind predator loss in warmer environments and highlight how feedbacks between temperature and intraspecific size structure are important for understanding such effects on community composition.

Repost: https://uol.de/stellen?stelle=68471

Professorship in Plant Community Ecology and Conservation
Salary scale W3 (m/f/x)

commencing on 1 April 2023.

For the position, we seek a researcher who will focus on plant ecology research issues related to organismal and ecosystem processes. Conceivable research directions compatible with the institute’s profile are, for example, dynamic processes in the context of global change, reactions of plants to environmental change, species interactions in their habitats, the significance of demographic processes for the functioning of ecosystems, or the connection between genotype and phenotype in ecosystem processes.

The professorship is central to the further development of collaborative research in the focal areas of ecology/environmental sciences and biodiversity/evolutionary biology, in the area of basic and applied research as well as nature conservation. Preconditions for employment are specified in section 25 of the Lower Saxony Higher Education Act. Prerequisites are excellence in research as documented by the publication record, documented relevant teaching experience in a university setting and successful acquisition of competitive third-party funding. Leading participation in collaborative research projects such as the DFG research units DynaCom, DynaDeep and follow-up proposals, and/or the joint development of new collaborative research initiatives in the context of "genes to senses to ecosystems" is required.

With respect to teaching, the professorship will cover plant ecology and nature conservation. Contributions to undergraduate modules in the Bachelor's programmes "Environmental Sciences" and "Biology" as well as the Master’s programmes "Landscape Ecology" and "Biology" are expected. Participation in the graduate school "Environmental Sciences and Biodiversity" is desired. We highly value pedagogical skills and expect relevant teaching experience in a university setting.

Junior research group leaders (Emmy Noether programme, ERC starting grant, etc.) are strongly encouraged to apply. The University aims to increase its proportion of female professors and strongly encourages female scientists to apply. Equally qualified female candidates will be considered preferentially. In case of equal aptitude, applicants with disabilities will be given priority in hiring decisions. The position is suitable for part-time employment. Newly appointed professo

Hi everyone, hope you are all doing well! I have another open article of the week and this time it's another one from Ecological Applications.

You can find the open access link here (click the PDF link): https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/eap.2460

As always, please feel free to discuss this article in the comments below if you like. Questions, comments, or anything remotely relevant is fair game!

Abstract: Although the functional trait approach can facilitate the understanding of mechanisms that underline community responses to habitat alteration, only a few studies used this way on exploring the structure of insect assemblages compared to taxon-based analyses. We compared the descriptive power of medium-term effects (2014-2018) of forestry treatments in a temperate managed oak-dominated forest on taxon- vs. trait-based descriptors of ground beetle assemblages. The treatments included rotation forestry (partial preparation cutting, clear-cutting, retention tree group and mature closed forest as control) and continuous cover forestry (gap cutting) operations. The species composition was only slightly influenced by the treatments; on the ordination biplot, the control, retention tree group and clear-cutting treatments formed relatively homogeneous groups, well separated from each other, while the others were scattered randomly in the ordination space. Over time, the species richness decreased in all treatments, but it was higher in the retention tree group treatment than in others in 2016 and 2017. The activity density also declined between years, but an immediate mass effect was revealed after the implementation of treatment types especially in the control, gap and preparation cuts. We found that assemblages in the clear-cutting and retention tree group had similar characteristics: high functional diversity, more open-habitat, generalist and omnivore species and fewer carnivore species; while those in the control, gap and preparation cutting ones had the opposite: lower functional diversity, more forest species and carnivorous. Our findings will demonstrate that the simultaneous use of the two approaches will allow the most articulate understanding of the status of ground beetles assemblages in managed forests.

(Sincerely, a clueless now perma banned r/latestagecapitalism member)

For those of you who have taken this course, what are the evaluation components?

As the title indicates, I want to give back to the beautiful science that kick-started off my career. If anyone is interested in a free live follow-along tutorials for how to best use R, please leave a comment. If there is sufficient want, I'll re-post with date and time.

Update: looks like ample interest. I'll start putting a tutorial together and will set a date and time.

After Vicki and Magnitude give their presentation, Professor Kane says to Magnitude "You know they're laughing at you, right? At least that's my theory." and Magnitude looks super upset.

Is it just me, or was that just an extremely crappy thing for Kane to say? Everyone at Greendale loves Magnitude, and Kane came in and just destroys his student without having any knowledge of how the school actually cares about him.

I wanted to hug Magnitude so bad.