TEREC was well represented at the annual conference from the dutch ecologists in Lunteren, a delegation of 6 people was representing the lab. Below is an account of the conference from old-time-winning-team Femke Batsleer and Lionel Hertzog.
Femke:
General thoughts:
The open, collaborative atmosphere of the conference felt very motivational for a first your PhD like me. The idea of a #NAEMbingo, to encourage early-career-scientists to make connections and be involved in the conference, showed that the organizers care about this atmosphere. The quality of the plenary speakers was excellent (more about that down below at Lionel’s general thoughts!) and I liked the focus on insects.
Talks that stick to my mind:
There was a wide variety of session topics to choose from: movement, conservation, disease ecology, decomposition, monitoring biodiversity change… I especially liked the two first talks of the theoretical ecology. The first one was from Johan van de Koppel from NIOZ. He showed how combining geophysical and ecological processes can lead to interesting and important spatial patterns in ecosystems. This spatial self-organization is something I have read a lot about and this combination of physics and ecology just makes my heart jump (as the 30% physicist inside of me wakes up at those rare occasions). The second talk was from Valérie Reijers: she modelled the formation of dunes depending on the root spatial structure of different species and their sand-trapping properties. As our lab is involved in the ENDURE-project, this modelling work can be a very interesting starting point when looking at coastal dune functioning and resilience against climate change. A second session I really liked was ecology of movement an dispersal: climate and arctic geese, color-ringed oystercatchers, individual based modelling and Maui-dolphins, morphological characteristics of invasive cane toads at their range front… It reminded me what an integrative discipline ecology is on its own.
My little contribution:
I had the opportunity to give a talk about my master thesis’ topic and the individual based modelling I’m currently working on: mechanisms of spatial clustering of nest aggregates in a digger wasp. I had the slot of the last talk of one of the last sessions. My talk went really well and there were a lot of people in the small room. The fact that the two experts on spatial self-organization were present (Johan van de Koppel and Max Rietkerk) made me very nervous in the beginning (it felt a bit surreal: like I performed my own composed song in front of two super famous pop-stars), but made me feel more confident while talking to explain clearly what I did. They gave me great feedback how I can proceed with evaluating the spatial self-organization I found in my system.
Lionel: When the small make the big moves
General thoughts:
A striking feature of the conference was the strong focus on higher-level consumers, the four plenary speakers all talked about higher trophic levels. This focus emerged from the important media attention that the recent article reporting a decline in 75% in insect biomass in western Germany spurred. This article was a great piece of work, I already blogged about it elsewhere and still have a couple of ideas to discuss. Hans de Kroon in his opening speech talked about the large impact that this study had in the Netherlands, a so-called “delta-plan” to halt declines in natural populations is under discussion by a diverse group including: farmers, companies, NGOs and ecologists. So far politics pledged to implement the recommendation from this plan, which if successful would be a huge step forward.
Talks that stick to my mind:
The first plenary by Trischa Atwood was a convincing story on the effect of predators on carbon storage in aquatic systems through cascading effects. Basically removing predators leads to a decrease in carbon sequestration or carbon stocks via changes in plant communities and plant traits. The second plenary by Hans Olff was a bit more fuzzy, but really drove home the complexity of multiple interaction networks and the dynamic nature of species interactions, something that Eric Poellmann came back to in the fourth plenary. I wonder if we will ever have the data to fully quantify these complex multi-types interaction networks, so experienced modelers or theoreticians would rather go for identifying and extracting the features that have the largest influence on the process/question of interest. Hans Cornelissnen talk revealed to me that there is abiotic pathways to litter decomposition. In dry and sunny environment photodegradation can be as high than biotic decomposition. Furthermore, photodegraded litter as lower lignin content than litter biodegraded, in other words, photodegraded litter is of higher quality for decomposers than biodegraded litter. Joslanda Verspagen gave a very nice talk on the interaction between nutrient content and CO2 on algae biomass and stochiometry. Basically, in nutrient-rich system rising CO2 will lead to larger number of (potentially harmful) algal blooms. On the other hand, in nutrient-poor system rising CO2 will lead to increase in C:N ratio in primary producers with potentially large impacts on consumers.
My little contribution:
This time I talked about a project together with Bram Sercu on the effect of tree diversity and spatial structure on litter and soil heterogeneity. The pitch is that mixing tree species does not generally leads to an increase in heterogeneity in litter and soil conditions but that clustering of tree individuals by species do create heterogeneity. It was funny to talk in the big auditorium with a huge screen and large scene. I did not get that many feedback from it but a bit of nice discussion which motivates me to continue writing this up.