So last week we all jumped ship from Twitter and poured onto Mastodon. After my first few days there, I can see it’s more focused on inreach than outreach. I feel connected with the world when I’m on Twitter, but on Mastodon I feel like I’m sitting at the back of a seminar room at an ecology conference.
Here are a few thoughts from my first experiences.
Continue readingI’m currently collating my research outputs for a grant application, and I got to thinking about academic book reviews. I’m on the transition end of early career researchhood (where number of publications are counted and judged by funding bodies), and five of my ‘scholarly journal publications’ are book reviews – they appear in all the database publication lists, but you can’t technically count them as legitimate publications, because they aren’t peer reviewed.
If you’re not familiar with academic book reviews: publishers send academic journals copies of newly published books; the journal asks academic readers to volunteer, or invites them personally, to read and review said book in their field of expertise; the journal publishes the review, without formal peer review (unless you count the editor’s comments).
The academic reviewer gets a free book, the book author gets a (hopefully positive) review of their book, the publisher potentially increases sales, and the journal gets…actually I’m not really sure what the journal gets out of it, other than potential exposure (book reviews are free to publish, so the journal isn’t making money directly from publishing it).
Continue readingI just published this letter with Toby Smith and Romina Rader, in response to an opinion piece in Science back in January. The original paper argues that high densities of honey bees can harm wild pollinators (this can happen in some contexts).
It also suggests that a first step toward a conservation strategy for wild pollinators is that crop pollination by managed honey bees “should not be considered an ecosystem service” because those services “are delivered by an agricultural animal and not the local ecosystems”.
This highlights a common misinterpretation of what ecosystem services is all about. Services are delivered by interactions between species (including Homo sapiens) and their environments at multiple scales, not individual organisms or natural ecosystems. Continue reading
The robot bee story is back in the news. I covered some of the new research and associated media hype last year. The latest: a patent has been filed for building ‘pollinator drones’ and the media (both newsy and social) are in despair, as the end is clearly nigh.
But don’t worry. Here are a few challenges the pollinator drones will need to overcome before they can take over agriculture: Continue reading
Thank you to Remember The Wild for the opportunity to write this piece for their exciting new website!
Nature is essential to our wellbeing. There are multiple layers of complexity and nuance to that statement. But they all boil down to the fact that our lives depend on the natural systems around us. Trees, insects, birds, mammals, earthworms, springtails, bacteria, fungi, plants… Soil, water, air… Ecosystems are structured by complex and dynamic interactions between all of these components, all of which ultimately affect our survival.
This fundamental fact is the basis of the ecosystem services concept. Contrary to some popular opinions, working with ecosystem services is not all about ‘putting a price on nature’. In fact, the concept has much greater potential for improving human wellbeing and promoting nature conservation than it is often given credit for.
People often call ‘ecosystem services’ a new concept. It’s not. For centuries, human communities have known that nature provides a multitude of benefits that keep us alive and happy, from food and natural fibres to the clean air we breathe. Almost every ancient text contains some reference to the ways that nature supported human lives and communities, or provides clues to how our ancestors worked within that space to reap the greatest benefits in the long-term.
Continue reading the rest of my article at Remember The Wild…
© Manu Saunders 2017
Have you seen a patch of mature common ivy (Hedera helix) flowering near you? Do you have a couple of minutes each week to film what insects are visiting the ivy flowers?
A native potter wasp on ivy flowers.
A new international collaborative research project is looking at what insects visit ivy flowers in its native (UK) and introduced range. Ivy flowers in autumn, so it is an important pollen source for many pollinator insects as the winter months approach. In its introduced range where the plant has become invasive, information on its pollinators could help develop effective control methods.
The citizen science project is led by Fergus Chadwick (Trinity College, Dublin) and Professor Jeff Ollerton (University of Northampton). Dr Manu Saunders and Amy-Marie Gilpin (both University of New England) will be managing the Australian arm of the project.
The project needs citizen scientists to contribute weekly…
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Ecology is not a dirty word 