Past seminars 2007

View past seminars from 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

Wednesday 21 November 2007

Christian Mulder, Head of Quantitative Soil Ecology, Laboratory for Ecological Risk Assessment, RIVM,  The Netherlands gave a seminar on the "Influence of land management and ecological stoichiometry on ecosystem functioning and soil food webs".

Summary:

Living organisms are reliable proxies for environmental quality, as they reflect the state of their habitat and the ecological changes occurring therein. Monitoring activities were performed within the Dutch Soil Quality Network, a national framework designed in 1998 to obtain ecological insight on the soil communities in 170 agro-ecosystems. Biotic data collected describe bacteria, fungi, nematodes, mites, collembolans, myriapods, enchytraeids, and earthworms in each site. Empirical correlations between management regime and belowground functional diversity can be shown, and allow us to answer the question: "How are soil fauna population dynamics and food-web interactions influenced by land use?" Strong statistical evidence supports a hypothesis explaining how soil organisms and food webs are affected by land use and nutrient flows.

To extend ecological stoichiometry to the community ecology of soil systems, we examined how the size distributions of invertebrates responded to variations in soil nutrients. For instance, the slopes of the faunal biomass size spectrum of all invertebrates occurring under organic farms sown with N2-fixing legumes, mature grasslands and heathlands closely reflected the C:N:P stoichiometry. Sites with intermediate P concentrations (most mature grasslands) and high P concentrations (organic farms) had N:P ratios below the Redfield ratio, while sites with low P concentrations (heathlands) had N:P ratios above the Redfield ratio. The higher the P concentration and the lower the N:P ratio, the higher, on average, the slope of the faunal biomass size spectrum, that is, the higher the biomass in large body-size bins relative to the biomass in small body-size bins.

The new results are discussed in relation to the definition of sustainability. Our aim is to propose quantitative indicators of community composition and function in soil communities, and to illustrate the application of these indicators to ecosystem types under increasing human pressure;

Wednesday 14 November 2007

Dr Colin Adams, Director - Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment, University of Glasgow, gave a seminar on "Recent ecology-driven evolutionary changes in field research facilities (and fish) in Scotland".

Summary:

The University of Glasgow has run a field station on Loch Lomondside since 1946, this facility has now evolved into a state-of-the-art sustainable field research with very significant capacity to deliver high quality field research. High quality residential field training and meeting facilities are expected within a very short evolutionary time period. One strand of work being conducted from these facilities is focused on the role of ecology in the evolution of phenotypic variation in the Arctic charr, a common fish species in Highland Scotland. This talk will focus on the development of new field research and training facilities at the Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment on Loch Lomondside and summarise our current understanding of the evolutionary processes operating on Arctic charr in post-glacial lakes.

Colin Adam’s PhD was on the regulation of smolting (the metamorphosis prior to migration to sea) in Atlantic salmon, with Prof John Thorpe at the Fishery research Service at Pitlochry (Formerly the DAFS freshwater fisheries lab). His most recent research interests focus on fish biology and freshwater ecology - but he has published on a diverse group of species including terrestrial beetles, moths, crayfish, and even the Scottish red-necked wallaby.

Thursday 8 November 2007

Dr Daniel Lawson from Biomathematics and Statistics, Scotland based at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute, Aberdeen, gave a seminar entitled "The implications of neutral evolution for neutral ecology".

Summary:

Ecological neutrality assumes that all individuals are equivalent with respect to birth and death probabilities. This assumption is plainly wrong, yet can explain many observations, such as the species-area relation and the species abundance distribution. The success of the neutral model has caused great controversy, but when examined more closely the model has several flaws. On small scales, immigration is the force raising diversity locally. However, at larger scales evolution is the cause, and in this case the very concept of "species" must change for neutral predictions to hold.

We provide an overview of neutrality both in the ecological and evolutionary contexts, and argue that neutrality cannot explain large scale diversity patterns where evolution is the driving force for diversity. Neutrality may still be important in a local ecological context, and is of particular relevance for within-species diversity, as well as speciation by neutral drift. The surprising nature of expected phenotype distributions is discussed, along with ongoing work on the application of neutrality as a null model to chemical diversity in Scots Pine.

Thursday 1 November 2007

Professor Mark Rounsevell from the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change and Sustainability (CECS), School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, gave a seminar entitled “Land Use Futures”.

Summary:

Land use is a key element of the world around us with land use change having important consequences for a range of environmental issues. The presentation will examine the use of foresight analysis and modelling in exploring future land use change. Particular attention will be paid to alternative evaluation frameworks, approaches to dealing with uncertainty and the use of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) in scenario analysis. ABM is especially well suited to linking human and natural systems at different spatial and temporal scales and has great potential for assessments that can tackle not only the impacts of environmental change, but also the capacity of individuals and society to adapt to change.

Mark Rounsevell is the Director of the Centre for the study of Environmental Change and Sustainability (CECS) and holds the Michie Chair in Rural Economy and Sustainability within the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. He has spent the past nine years as Professor of Geography at the University of Louvain, Belgium. Mark’s research focuses on land use change within rural and peri-urban environments using modelling and foresight analysis to explore the effects of multiple environmental change drivers on land use in the future. He has been active in a number of recent and on-going European Commission funded projects that are concerned with the consequences of environmental change for European policy. He has contributed as a lead author to the IPCC’s 2nd, 3rd and forthcoming 4th assessment reports (Working Group II on impacts and adaptation).