Scholarship

By Nadine Lymn, ESA director of public affairs Say you’re a plant biologist who wants to devise educational components for your research project but you’re not sure what might work well for high school students.  Or say you’re a high school biology teacher looking to ramp up how you challenge your students with the latest research findings and tools.  Enter…

Open access to scientific journals is a contentious issue in the sciences. A recent article in the (open-access) journal PLoS Biology makes the case that open access is the way of the future and is good for science, scientists and universities alike. In his essay, David Shulenburger of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities says that limiting access to…

Nancy Grimm welcomes attendees to the first ESA Millennium Conference. ESA’s first Millennium Conference kicked off today in Athens, GA. The meeting is bringing together ecologists and social scientists to engage in conversations about one of the most dramatic emerging challenges in ecology: that of clean water and water scarcity.  While ecologists’ main expertise is in providing and maintaining adequate…

The first conference in ESA’s Millennium Series begins on Monday at the University of Georgia in Athens. The conference, titled “Water-Ecosystem Services, Drought, and Environmental Justice,” will bring 100 scientists and land managers together to work on the resolution of social issues related to localized drought. The conference will focus on issues surrounding one of the biggest emerging environmental issues…

Lawrence Slobodkin, a revolutionary ecologist who played a major role in bringing the science of ecology into the quantitative realm, died last Friday. He was 81. Slobodkin’s most famous paper, titled “Community Structure, Population Control and Competition,” showcased his wide-aspect thought processes. The paper, sometimes known as “The World Is Green,” purports that because vegetation is abundant on Earth, communities…

If you haven’t yet taken the time to check out The EEB and Flow blog, make today the day. Marc Cadotte, who has quite recently moved from a postdoc in sunny California to a professorship in chilly Toronto (a metaphor here, maybe?), and his colleagues maintain an excellent blog on all things ecology and evolutionary biology. Their blog posts center…

Academics are like turtles, pulling their heads in when reporters come knocking. An article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has the best metaphor for this syndrome that I’ve heard: Scientists become turtles. They’re discouraged from media relations, and thus never get better at it, and they don’t think it’s their job.  As author Michael Munger, professor of political…

In their Huffington Post blog, Todd Palmer (University of Florida) and Rob Pringle (Stanford/Harvard Fellow) took on Paul Basken of the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, who was interviewed on NPR’s Marketplace.  Palmer and Pringle say that Basken didn’t defend science’s place in the stimulus bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), even going so far as to…

Nature announced today that it is modifying its authorship policies for submission to its journals. The two major changes are that one senior author will be required to take “responsibility” for the paper, and that an explicit list of each coauthor’s role in the paper must be submitted. In a November 2007 editorial, the leadership at Nature suggested that a…

In mid-February, George Will, resident Washington Post conservative and climate-skeptic, wrote an editorial denouncing “Dark Green Doomsayers.” The editorial was filled with anecdotal references of news articles from the 1970’s that declare widespread climate cooling and exclaim that the world will soon find itself in the next ice age. The piece outraged the environmental community and sparked a flurry of…

Emilio Bruna of the University of Florida wanted to assign students in his graduate seminar on plant -animal interactions something different than a term paper.  So he devised a novel plan that would help them learn some crucial concepts while writing concisely: rewriting Wikipedia entries.  I caught up with Emilio and student Kristine Callis, who is the first author of…

Tracking citation data (i.e., which papers cite which other papers) has traditionally been the method for understanding the interconnectivity of different fields and subfields of research. But in the age when most researchers access their information online, the printed word can sometimes be years out of date. In a paper published this week in Public Library of Science ONE (PLoS…