Reading recommendation: Notebooks from New Guinea

BY JAN HANSPACH

After recently having two posts about a project in Papua New Guinea (PNG), people who want to know more about what research can be like in that pacific country might be interested in the recently published book “Notebooks from New Guinea”.

In short essays the Czech Entomologist Vojtech Novotny describes his experiences with local tribes, remote research stations, the spirits of the forests, driving a car when having a malaria attack and many other aspects of daily life but also deep reflections coming from ten years of field work there.

Not knowing PNG myself I can’t really judge how close it is to the reality. What I can say is that it was fun to read and offered some amazing perspectives not only about the people of PNG, but also about the Czech Republic, scientists, research and nature conservation in general.

I can only agree with the conclusion of Alan Steward in his recent TREE review on the book: “It will also generate a deep respect for the scientists who manage to carry out top-quality groundbreaking research in this most challenging environment”.

And if you ever planned to go to PNG, take Novotny’s advice: “The tropics are safer than you think. After all, most of humanity lives there more or less contentedly. So keep to the same level of caution, paranoia, and hypochondria as you are used to at home.” (Well, but don’t forget to take anti-malaria meds with you!)

Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS)

By Marlene Roellig

Almost three weeks ago I attended the SCCS in Cambridge, UK. It was the first time I’ve attended, encouraged by its reputation of extremely high quality talks and posters, as well as interesting keynotes and workshops. As the name suggests, the conference is aimed at students (mostly Master and PhD) from across the globe – this year, 63 countries were represented among the participants, and the projects presented ranged from China to Peru, via Sri Lanka, Iran, the Gambia  and, of course, Romania. All in all, the topics reached from Aquatic conservation, Climate Change to People and protection. It was interesting to see how many conservation research projects were looking at social aspects – for example concerning Dwindling traditional knowledge in western Himalaya or Social structures and microcredits – showing the importance of a socio-ecological framework for conservation projects.

One of the keynote speakers, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, was in fact an anthropologist, who spoke about Wearing too many hats? Anthropology, development and conservation. In her talk she was not only speaking about her work in Africa and the link between the cultural function of lion dancers to the protection of lions in the national park, but also showed an interesting evaluation of community-based conservation projects providing important lessons on why some of them fail and some do not (the paper from PNAS you can find here).

Cambridge is at the hub of the largest cluster of international conservation organisations in the world, including Birdlife, RSPB, UNEP-WCMC, Flora and Fauna International, as well of course as Cambridge University itself. This meant that representatives from these organisations were present at the conference, giving participants the opportunity to network and ask questions. A new conservation campus is also being built at the university to link up interdisciplinary conservation researchers and conservation organisations.

But what I also want to show in this blog entry is that out of 103 international posters, 4 presented research from Transylvania (see the pictures below). It was nice to see Transylvania that well represented at an international conference!

 Thanks to Laura and Edina for their input and also thanks to all for the permission to use the pictures of their posters.

Bee communities in agricultural landscapes, poster by Edina Mózes

Plant-pollinater networks of Transylvania, poster by Ádám Szirák

Commos governance in Transylvania, poster by Laura Sutcliffe was among the highly recommended posters.

Bear activity in traditional wood-pastures in southern Transylvania, Romania, poster by Marlene Roellig won the second poster prize on the SCCS 2013

What makes for good transdisciplinary research at the landscape scale?

By Joern Fischer

I just came across a recent special issue in Ambio, on “sustainable landscapes” and transdisciplinary research. Some nice things in that issue … and all open access, I think. I particularly liked Fig. 2b in one of Per Angelstam’s papers — note how (according to the authors) successful transdisciplinary research hinges on a lot of human factors!

 

A Malaysian perspective on oil palm agriculture

Guest post by Badrul Azhar

As soon as your plane touches down at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, you will spot your first oil palm plant (Elaies guineensis) in Malaysia. Even the airport company has its own oil palm plantation around the airport. One of the nearby transit hotels is surrounded by oil palm cultivation. Palm oil industry is still the mainstay of the country’s economy. A very successful casino company, an Islamic financing institution, state governments and public universities are directly involved in upstream palm oil business (i.e. commercial plantations). Because of that,  oil palm has become a common landscape feature in Peninsular Malaysia. I do not know for sure where you may escape from seeing this exotic crop species on the peninsula mainland (perhaps in the highlands?).

There is no doubt that oil palm forms the dominant agricultural landscape in this country, created by massive scale of forest or rubber tree conversion since colonial British rule. This tropical African-originated palm is a big success for palm oil producing countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia in terms of its economic revenues. I have studied oil palm birds since my Master Degree, and continue to work on it. First, I was fascinated by the Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus), a native game bird in oil palm plantations. Then during my PhD years, I studied the biodiversity patterns and processes in the production plantations.

I strongly believe that protecting biodiversity in human-modified landscapes (including oil palm plantations and smallholdings) is equally important as protecting native forest biodiversity. In my opinion, palm oil stakeholders could do a lot more to protect at least some farmland biodiversity in existing plantations. The current sustainable palm oil certification scheme (i.e. the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) has only emphasized the protection of rare or endangered species and high conservation value forest – but even these criteria are unmet in most plantations. In the future, an improved scheme should consider the whole animal community regardless of conservation status. In addition, the scheme should take into account biodiversity aspects (e.g. functional diversity) in the certification process. Those designing such a future scheme should assess what sort of conservation measures have been implemented by stakeholders in each oil palm plantation – clearly different measures will benefit different species, but most measures are better than none.

Recently, a research paper from my PhD thesis entitled ‘The influence of agricultural system, stand structural complexity and landscape context on foraging birds in oil palm landscapes’ has been published in IBIS (2013, volume: 155, pages 297–312). In this paper, my co-authors (most of them were my PhD supervisors) and I aimed to determine bird guild diversity in oil palm landscapes. We also compared this response metric between oil palm cultivation areas and peat swamp forest habitats. Similar to findings from studies that use bird species richness as response metric (including our earlier research paper published in Forest Ecology and Management 2011, volume: 262, pages 2306-2315), guild diversity in forest habitats was higher than in oil palm habitats.

But beyond this (somewhat obvious) comparison with native forests, our results also indicated that foraging guild diversity was influenced by stand-level attributes such as stand age, vegetation cover, epiphyte persistence and canopy cover. Each foraging guild exhibited unique responses to different oil palm management regimes and stand-level attributes.On this basis, we recommend palm oil stakeholders to implement multiple conservation measures in order to conserve oil palm bird community and functional diversity in plantations and smallholdings.

The future of sustainable development

By Joern Fischer

I’d like to highlight a movie by the Stockholm Resilience Centre to you that succinctly discusses some new challenges (and ways forward) for global sustainable development.

Counteracting the loss of collegiality in science

By Joern Fischer

Recommendation of a new paper: Kaushal, S.S.; Jeschke, J.M. 2013. Collegiality versus competition: how metrics shape scientific communities. BioScience 63, 155-156.

(If you have access to Bioscience, download the paper here; if you don’t, I suggest you email Jonathan Jeschke and ask him to send you a PDF.)

The sustainable production of new, worthwhile insights hinges on an academic culture that fosters behaviours that we would like to see more of – and that provides disincentives for behaviours that stand in the way of true progress.

Source: http://simonehappiness.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/values-cartoon.gif

In recognition of this, Kaushal and Jeschke highlight a number of current problems, and suggest various possible solutions to move forward. Their central focus is on collegiality. They argue that some current incentives actually may lead to the loss of collegiality, rather than fostering it. Being a “good citizen” might go unrecognized in a scientific world that judges our merit largely via quantitative indicators. Invariably, some things count, while others remain uncounted. Unfortunately, many of the behaviours that remain uncounted are amongst the most important for scientific progress. For example, large new research networks require collegiality and data sharing. But not everybody’s sharing is equally selfless when the incentive structure is to contribute as little as possible to as many things as possible.

Kaushal and Jeschke make suggestions that individuals can follow and also argue for institutional changes. One key point picked up by them is that the peer review system is seriously in trouble. A key problem is that finding reviewers appears to become ever more difficult. Kaushal and Jeschke highlight that there are “bad citizens” out there who review hardly anything despite publishing a lot themselves; and there are “good citizens” who accept most invitations to review. While the decision to accept an invitation to review is complex (declining an invitation could result from too many other commitments which could be other types of services to the community), it seems true that better rewarding collegiality and “good citizenship” is important (a thought also underpinning the growing Peerage of Science initiative).

In summary, this paper is one of a growing number that asks questions – and provides solutions – regarding our current academic culture and incentive systems. The bottom line that most such papers have in common is that we are now over-relying on indicators to value individual researchers. We either need new metrics, or we need to move away from a belief that quantitative measures can actually measure the quality of an individual.

In summary: A short paper on a critically important topic that is well worth a read.

"We need excellence in bringing things together" - the rise of sustainability programs at universities

Reblogged from Research for Sustainable Development:

If you look at your career path and the choices you have made to engage with sustainability, do you consider yourself as part of a larger movement or even an overall trend? Well, maybe you should, at least according to a recent feature in Nature.

Read more… 864 more words

Very nice post here at "research in sustainability" -- and a nice blog, too, worth visiting! -- Joern

Barriers to interdisciplinarity: Cultivating fluidity

Reblogged from AgroEcoPeople:

As discussed in my previous differing values post, my goal was to draw attention to the fact that natural and social sciences may actually share quite a few common values and therefore are not as different as they seem on the surface and recognizing common values can be one way to facilitate interdisciplinary bridges. The second barrier, same phenomena, different theories and methodologies exists both within and between disciplines and while all researchers possess the ability to examine values, being comfortable working outside ones theoretical and methodological framework is a skill that must be cultivated before this barrier to interdisciplinarity can be overcome.

Read more… 1,318 more words

Reblogged from AgroEcoPeople -- part 2 of a 4 part series of blogs coming out by Melissa Knudson

Moving labs for your first postdoc: to stay or to go?

Reblogged from Pia Lentini's Research:

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About six months ago, I moved back to Melbourne for my first postdoc (the job you do after your PhD). Researchers who move around institutions are said to be viewed more favourably by funding bodies, so I thought I’d offer my perspectives on how this may benefit or disadvantage an early-career academic in the long term, based on personal experience.

Read more… 867 more words

Some useful and interesting reflections by Pia Lentini, Australian postdoc working on conservation and ecology. Nice blog, too!

How to develop your thoughts towards perfection

By Jan Hanspach

Today I want to highlight a very nice blog post by Thomas Basbøll with the title “The gradual perfection of thoughts while speaking”. Thomas is featuring an essay by the German writer Heinrich von Kleist who describes the idea that while speaking we are developing, refining, perfecting our thoughts and ideas and encourages the verbal communication of all the unfinished thoughts that swirl in our brains. Additionally to reviving Kant’s text, Thomas criticizes the modern university education where he thinks that the focus has shifted too much from teaching as the process to develop thoughts to teaching as the mere transfer of  knowledge.

It’s definitely a nice read and I am looking forward to his follow up post about what that means for discussions in scientific journals.