What is ecology? What is evolution? Seems like a really simple question from an ecology or evolution perspective, until you bring a different field into the mix, e.g., transposon/genome biology. When we started the TE (formerly known as genome) ecology group, sometimes in March 2010, I had no idea we would end here, with a publication in a journal with a higher impact factor than Ecology.
Our starting point for this publication was the appeal of using ecological theory to explore the dynamics of transposable elements in the genome.
A new year, a new publication, this time with Shubha and Jurek: “Population synchrony decreases with richness and increases with environmental fluctuations in an experimental metacommunity” in Oecologia. We continued our work with specialization in metacommunities, but this time looked at the implications on population synchrony.
Key figure:
We found, as predicted, that:
the synchrony between populations of a specialist species within a metacommunity is more influenced by environmental fluctuations compared to a generalist speciesthat increasing species richness decreased individual population synchronyWhile these results make perfect sense from an ecological point of view, getting this paper published was not so straightforward because of the unbalanced experimental design we had to use.
Our first publication from the amazing spanish pond system set-up by Andy Green and his group, but especially with the hard work of Dagmar Frisch, who has the patience of a saint to keep collaborating with me: “Strong Spatial Influence on Colonization Rates in a Pioneer Zooplankton Metacommunity” in Plos One.
Each published article is unique in its calvary to publication. Most often, this is not visible to the reader, although sometimes you can tell that certain parts in the manuscript are clearly added on to satisfy a reviewer’s pet peeve.
The title of my “Teaching Philosophy” statement (that I completely rewrite every year), is “Research-Teaching-Learning Link”. In it, I try to point out the obvious and maybe not so obvious connections between these different aspects of my professional life. One of the items that is hardest to prove, though, is how teaching can inform my day-to-day research focus.
And now I can finally provide evidence for this: our comment in Trends in Ecology and Evolution “The terminology of metacommunity ecology”.
Nature has a news article on 2 free alternatives to Web of Science, including your personal citation library. Another example of serendipity, because I created one a couple of days before the nature publication, and planned to wanted to dedicate a short blog to it, i.e., this one.
You can access mine here: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lL7RlhMAAAAJ. Below is a 2011 snapshot picture:For reference, here is screen capture of the “official” Web of Science summary:Very similar, if you ask me, although the Google Scholar obviously includes more items.
Brittany’s first publication stemming from her undergraduate research project during the Algonquin field course has just been published. She was part of team IDH (for obvious reasons), and they worked their butts of to collect the data: finding an interesting question based on her previous community ecology course, interviewing park people to find stands with known time-to-logging, collecting the data, tiring out the TAs who helped them (or maybe slowed them down), breaking down her field vehicle, of course exactly on the one day I came out with them.