Seminar and Events Schedule

‘Inside Nature’ with the senior editor

Ever wondered what happens behind the scenes at Nature? On Monday, February 1st Dr. Juliane Mossinger, a Senior Editor at Nature, will discuss the journal’s aim and scope, what editors look for in a paper and the things they keep in mind when making their decisions (full title and abstract below).

Juliane Mossinger is a Senior Editor at the international journal of science Nature. She has over 15 years of editorial experience and looks after the journal’s biogeochemistry, environmental sciences, atmospheric chemistry and geomorphology content. She obtained her PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and was a Tucker Price Research Fellow in Chemistry at Girton College, Cambridge.

UC Santa Cruz

Large-scale ecological responses to climate change in space and time

Recent climate change is posing tremendous impacts on our planet, but how do Earth’s species and ecosystems respond? Here I discuss two aspects of large-scale ecological responses to climate change: geographical range shift in space and phenological shift in time. The biogeographical resurvey analysis suggests widespread upslope species migration in response to warming in North and South Americas. In particular, tropical montane plants and animals were tracking climate more closely than their temperate counterparts. The remote sensing analysis suggests an overall extension of the growing season with concurrent warming across the Northern Hemisphere, with stronger climate tracking at higher latitudes. Phenological shifts outpaced that of temperature change in natural landscapes but lagged behind those in human-dominated landscapes. Examining large-scale responses in space and time may benefit scaling ecological insights into the Earth system.

The ecological consequences of overharvesting forest resources in the tropics

Conservation biology, as a mission-oriented and crisis driven discipline, has long been concerned by the causes and socio-ecological consequences of resource overexploitation. Harvesting wild plants for non-timber forest products (NTFP) serves as a valuable source of food and medicine for local communities, and potentially contributes to poverty alleviation. However, frequent harvest at high intensity can lead to plant population decline, and jeopardize the ability of future generations to benefit from these ecosystem services. In this talk, I will discuss two emerging issues on resource overexploitation that warrant more discussion in the field of conservation biology. I will first discuss the role of individual plant level heterogeneity and temporally dynamics harvest sequence on population resilience to harvest and the implications for sustainable forest products harvest. Second, I will discuss how combined lethal (timber) and non-lethal (NTFP) harvest of forest resources may be possible in tropical ecosystems. Finally, I will discuss how an in-depth understanding of indigenous people’s behavior and their ecological knowledge of their environment can be used to ask more applied questions, develop more realistic models to answer these questions and suggest culturally appropriate and ecologically sounds sustainable management systems.

An inconvenient truth about environmental observatory networks

Environmental observatory networks (EONs) promote collection and dissemination of environmental data along with efforts towards standardization of protocols, data sharing and synthesis activities. Arguably, EONs are the proper structure to address complex, global and socially imperative issues, and value-added products from EONs have been useful for the scientific community and policy makers to assess knowledge gaps and expand the frontiers of ecological understanding. Unfortunately, we cannot measure everywhere within a region or around the world so the spatial distribution of nodes (i.e., study sites) within EONs is limited or biased. This challenge opens the need to evaluate the representativeness of EONs to better interpret their value-added products and syntheses of information. This seminar will discuss evaluation of representativeness of EONs that contribute with information of land-atmosphere water and carbon fluxes across the Americas and the world.