Sciencetalks

Interesting talks/posters: Richard Lankau presented research on trade-offs and competitive ability. He suggests that during range expansion selection for increased intraspecific competitive ability in older populations leads to loss of traits for interspecific competitive traits due to trade-offs between these traits. Ellner emphatically states that rapid evolution DOES matter for ecological responses, and longer-term evolutionary patterns as well. [His paper on the talk he was giving came out prior to his talk, which he pointed out, good form sir]...

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....

Monday was a good day at ESA in Austin. There were a few topics I promised to report on in my blogging/tweeting. …focused on open source data. Carly Strasser’s presentation on guidelines for data management was awesome (including other talks in the symposium on Creating Effective Data Management Plans for Ecological Research). Although this was a good session, I can’t help but wish that they had hammered home the need for open science more....

I will be blogging about the upcoming Ecological Society of America meeting in Austin, TX. I will focus on discussing talks/posters that: Have taken a cool approach to using data, or Have focused on open science/data, or Done something cool with R software, or Are just exciting in general I will also tweet throughout the meeting from @recology_ (yes the underscore is part of the name, recology was already taken). The hashtag for the meeting this year is #ESA11

Here is one of the talks by Thomas Brouquet, and see the rest here. Thomas Broquet by mez_en_video