Nega attended the 22nd annual conference of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Hawaiʻi. He presented his work on the role of bird traits in predicting range shifts in response to climate change.
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| ʻIʻiwi (Vestiaria coccinea) (Source: http://newsdesk.si.edu/) |
Tak attended the Mathematical Models in Ecology and Evolution conference at the Collège de France in Paris. This is one of the world’s biggest conferences in Mathematical Biology, and is held bi-annually. At the conference, Tak presented a talk on the derivation of analytical formulae specifying species-abundance distributions and species ages for ecological communities under coloured environmental noise.
Collège de France (Source: Wikipedia Commons)
Ryan and Tak are currently attending a Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) workshop at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Panama is the site of the original CTFS forest dynamics plot, established in 1980 on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal.
Photo credit: David Kenfack
Catharina spent 2.5 weeks in Borneo at the beginning of June. She attended the International Conference on Rainforest Ecology, Diversity and Conservation in Borneo. She met with local collaborators to develop contingency plans for her fieldwork following the earthquake that struck Mt Kinabalu on 5 June.
Polypedates colletti
Catharina has just come back from a three-month lab exchange in Australia. She spent seven weeks with Mick McCarthy at QAECO from the University of Melbourne and five weeks with Don Driscoll at the Australia National University in Canberra. She worked on developing frog detection models for her Mount Kinabalu data. The trip was funded by CEED/QAECO.
Litoria fallax
Deepthi received a grant from the Ruffords Foundation, a UK based charity, that will support her PhD field work conducting water bird surveys in artificial wetlands of Peninsular India. She will also use this grant money to conduct workshops and training sessions for local communities in order to establish a long-term avian monitoring and conservation program.
Fish provide essential minerals and proteins for humans, but unsustainable fishing practices have to led to severe declines in fish populations and loss of fish species at local and regional scales. A better understanding of how this species loss affects fish production in marine communities is important for better fisheries management. In Tak’s new paper, dynamic food-web models were used to examine how species loss affects fish production under a variety of scenarios of species loss. Fish production followed a unimodal relationship or a monotonic concave or convex decline with species loss; interestingly, prey of deleted species tended to respond with an increase in production, thus mitigating loss of production in the deleted species.
Photo credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce; Danilo Cedrone; United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
Trophic connections in an example food web generated using the model in the paper
Brenda, Lena, Jessica and Xue Qin have submitted their Honours theses. Brenda analysed patterns of species invasion in cities and nature reserves across the world. Lena examined whether particular traits make bird species more adaptable to urban parks in Singapore. Jessica conducted an analysis of ecosystem services in Sabah, Malaysia. Xue Qin estimated the indirect economic value of Southeast Asian ecotourism to Singapore. Congratulations to all of them!
The annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Tropical Biology & Conservation was held in Phnom Penh from 30 March to 2 April. Ryan give a plenary talk “Mathematics in the jungle: informing tropical conservation with quantitative theory”, emphasising in particular the need for a greater focus on mathematics in biology curricula in the Asia-Pacific region.
Ryan visited Vishu Guttal’s lab at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore to present a seminar and give workshops on forest modelling. He also presented a seminar at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and visited the Mudumalai Center for Tropical Forest Science plot with H. S. Suresh and collaborators. Mudumalai was the third CTFS plot established (in 1987) and is unique in that it is subject to regular disturbance by elephants and fire.
Chisholm Lab 