Fletcher Halliday,blogging at BioDiverse Perspectives, wrote:
“My original intent in writing this post was to compare the 5 most-cited papers on biodiversity to the 5 most blogged-about papers on biodiversity to address the differences between what we value as researchers versus what we value as general science communicators.”
What struck me throughout this post was this, maybe implicit, need to distinguish between blogging and publications. I always approach a publication as a communication of ideas.
Ingrid is featured in theAt Guelph! I repeat, Ingrid is featured in the At Guelph! It is not her whole story, of course, but it does provide key aspects of her story.
The story telling is just happening in a different spot: http://churchillscience.blogspot.com/2011/11/and-results-are-in-at-least-this-round.html. But it is still the heady combination of field research, guns, and statistics…
It is finally online, the first publication from the Brazilian side of the lab ;-). In this article, we made competing predictions about how common and rare species should behave in a metacommunity context. The, very surprising, result was that both common and rare species reacted very similarly to environmental gradients, which was very counterintuitive from both a metacommunity and macro-ecology point of view.
Another side effect of this study was our new definition for rareness, based on a slightly subjective but less arbitrary definition compared to other studies.
I recently gave a presentation at the University of Toronto - Mississauga, and that was the perfect opportunity to summarize the research results from our lab in Churchill of the last couple of years. Below you can see the slides of that presentation.
“The federal government wants to put a price tag on polar bears,” begins this recent Globe and Mail article. It goes on to explain that Environment Canada wants to determine the socio-economic value of the iconic arctic species. This includes things like the bear’s consumptive value, cultural value, scientific value, educational value, aesthetic value, existence value, and so on. How much does each “additional unit of polar bear” or each “additional hectare of habitat” bring to the nation?
The recent nature issue had an interesting point-counterpoint series of 2 articles as a reflection on 10 years of the human genome project. The first article argues that hypotheses should come first because little progress has been made in the last 10 years as a result of the abundance of data from these different genome projects. The second article argues the exact opposite, that this data-driven approach has resulted in a series of break-troughs that could not have been possible with a hypothesis-driven approach.