Interesting talks/posters:
- Ethan White’s poster describing EcologicalData.org was of course awesome given my interest in getting data into the hands of ecologists over at rOpenSci.org. Ethan also has software you can download on your machine to get the datasets you want easily - EcoData Retriever. [rOpenSci will try to take advantage of their work and allow you to call the retriever from R]
- Carl Boettiger’s talk was awesome. He explained how we need better tools to be able to predict collapses using early warning signals. He developed a way to estimate the statistical distribution of probabilities of system collapse.
- Jennifer Dunne: Explained how she put together an ancient network from Germany. Bravo.
- Carlos Melian explained his model of network buildup that starts from individuals, allows speciation, and other evolutionary processes.
- Rachel Winfree told us that in two sets of mutualistic plant-pollinator networks in New Jersey and California, that the least connected pollinator species were the most likely to be lost from the network with increasing agricultural intensity.
- Dan Cariveau suggests that pollination crop services can be stabilized even with increasing agriculture intensity if in fact pollinator species respond in different ways. That is, some pollinators may decrease in abundance with increasing ag intensity, while other species may increase - retaining overall pollination services to crops.