[ECOLOG-L] Need Trirhabda beetles
Hi all, Does anyone have live Trirhabda virgata beetles? I need 30-50 of them, will pay for shipping and provide all the necessary paperwork to ship out of state. Thanks! Tania Kim Florida State University
[ECOLOG-L] Institutionalized perversion of original intent? Re: [ECOLOG-L] Powdermill Nature Reserve important!!
Malcolm and Ecolog: I know nothing about the trustees, nor do I know anything about the museum's charter, but I do have a bit of experience with other museums and am acquainted with present and past (some fired in proportion to their dedication to principle) staff members of a number of museums and other institutions. There has been a trend toward populating boards and CEO positions with individuals of great political power, but with increasing rarity, any significant qualifications in fields relevant to the originally stated purposes of the institution. I will not go into a litany of horror stories that span the last forty years or so, but it should suffice to say that such boards and directors are commonly impervious to persuasion, often as a point of pride (a bunch of pointy-headed, nattering nabobs of negativism, etc. are not going to tell ME what to do; these people just don't understand how an enterprise must be run, and a museum is just another kind of business, etc.). CEO is an indicator species. I will say that once these kinds of ideologies are in place it takes more than a few letters to move them. It takes a STRATEGY, and it has to be appealing to power if it is to be persuasive. Threats are counter-productive, and placation and diversion are almost instinctive among such people (they did not get where they are without people skills); they will promise anything then morph back into their original forms when the crowd of environmentalists aren't looking. The staffs of such organizations are understandably horrified at such prospects and commonly set up quite a fuss, which gains them little but makes them feel better (or worse). Often they get laid off. Often they are replaced with more cooperative staff, especially those willing to kiss butt and screw their way up the ladder. Interim CEO's can be even worse, and writing them can often serve as useful intelligence, providing time and data for counter-insurgency planning and execution. I would get a list of the trustees, get a copy of the charter and any other governing authority (Carnegie's original will, statement of intent or purpose etc.), and a list of members, even if they can't vote. Many museum's do not permit members to vote, this right having been taken away by legal (or illegal) modification of the charter, sometimes by making associate membership only available to the general public (not part of the chosen clique). If it comes to a real (as opposed to a straw-man) showdown, then, and only then, is an all-out fight called for--but once begun must be for the duration and fought hard, letting them know that you are in it 'till the end. Even dirty tricks of a sort might be required; that's where good intelligence pays off. It's a lot of hard work, and it's often for no reward. Most people are gullible enough to buy the sweet-talk cranked out by the powerful, but enough carefully thought-out hell-raising, if it comes to that, may be absolutely necessary to amplify your power, largely through the media. The other way is through the courts, and it may be that there is enough shady stuff going on to prevail. Get to the staff (and be VERY careful WHICH staff), get them to understand that it's best for them to keep quiet and feed you information as part of a best possible strategy. That is, try persuasion, then barely evident, subtle implicit threats with any connection to the main effort concealed (e.g. public opinion), then if those don't work, go to the mat with all you've got! Don't give up, and don't be misled by smooth talk--get it all in writing. Have others had similar experiences? Other ideas? I'm reluctant to write until I know more about the strategic plan, but certainly will once I think it will do more good than harm--not that I have a dog in this fight, just because I love dogs, particularly brave underdogs. WT - Original Message - From: malcolm McCallum malcolm.mccal...@herpconbio.org To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 10:32 AM Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Powdermill Nature Reserve important!! I have recently become aware that Carnegie Museum trustees are currently considering allowing gas wells in the Powdermill Nature Preserve. (article: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/westmoreland/s_696394.html) For those of you who are unfamiliar with PNR, here is a link: http://www.carnegiemnh.org/powdermill/ This reserve in Pennsylvania has been the focus of many different kinds of field/wildlife ecology research. There has been extensive marking of wildlife on the grounds. Birds have been marked since 1961, and they have in excess of 100,000 marked at last report. I cannot over-emphasize the travesty that this decision would bring. It would be good for people to voice their disenchantment with this possible decision. Notice, they HAVE NOT MADE THIS DECISION YET, BUT THEY ARE CONSIDERING IT SERIOUSLY. I
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Powdermill Nature Reserve important!!
Dear Mr. McCallum, I can well understand why you would hate to see a nature reserve despoiled by drilling, but perhaps there is an important scientific opportunity here to affect decisions about drilling in the whole Marcellus Shales region and beyond. Has the research conducted at the Powdermill Nature Preserve produced enough data to serve as a baseline of various ecological metrics that would allow an objective and quantitative assessment of the impacts of drilling? If it seems like the pro-drilling forces are going to steam-roller the issue to have their way, perhaps you could at least hold out for concessions, such as funding for future research to gather the data needed for comparison with existing baseline data, or even to get more baseline data before drilling begins. The resulting information would be very important for other communities confronted with the issue of whether to accept or fight drilling plans, and could provide evidence to support their decisions. This would be at least as valuable a contribution to society as just looking at how gradual reforestation affects ecological metrics. Martin M. Meiss 2010/8/26 malcolm McCallum malcolm.mccal...@herpconbio.org I have recently become aware that Carnegie Museum trustees are currently considering allowing gas wells in the Powdermill Nature Preserve. (article: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/westmoreland/s_696394.html ) For those of you who are unfamiliar with PNR, here is a link: http://www.carnegiemnh.org/powdermill/ This reserve in Pennsylvania has been the focus of many different kinds of field/wildlife ecology research. There has been extensive marking of wildlife on the grounds. Birds have been marked since 1961, and they have in excess of 100,000 marked at last report. I cannot over-emphasize the travesty that this decision would bring. It would be good for people to voice their disenchantment with this possible decision. Notice, they HAVE NOT MADE THIS DECISION YET, BUT THEY ARE CONSIDERING IT SERIOUSLY. I strongly encourage people to forward letters and notes voicing your disenchantment with the proposed policy change. As the reserve does not currently have a director, you should forward letters or emails to: David M. Hillenbrand, President and CEO, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh 4400 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 hillenbra...@carnegiemuseums.org Below is exerpted from Meshaka, WE, J.N. Huff, and R.C. Leberman. 2008. Amphibians and Reptiles of Powdermill Nature Reserve in Western Pennsylvania. Journal of Kansas Herpetology 25:12-18 (available at: http://www.cnah.org/pdf_files/942.pdf). Powdermill Nature reserve (PNR) is an 890.3 ha field station located in the the Laurel Ridge of the Allegheny Mountains in w...@estmoreland County of western Pennsylvania. PNR was founded in 1956 by Dr. M. Graham Netting, herpetologist and Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh. The initial gift of 469.4 ha (1160 a) that year brought Netting's dream of a proteccted long-term research field station into reality. The reserve now encompasses 890.3 ha of mixed forests, fields, ponds, and streams located in the Ligonier Valley southeast of Pittsburgh. Netting's goal in establishing the Reserve was to provide Museum scientists and researchers from other institutions a permanent area for long-term studies of ecosystems and the flora and fauna comprising them. In addition to being a wild area for natural history research the reserve was to provide a venue for natural history eduction. In 1961, PNR initiated what is now one of the longest coninuous runnning bird banding programs in the country. Herpetologically, a demographic study of the Wood Turtle and Eastern Box Turtle has been in progress since 1960. The single greatest change to the landscape of PNR since its founding has been a gradual succession from farmland to mixed deciduous forest. -- Malcolm L. McCallum Managing Editor, Herpetological Conservation and Biology Peer pressure is designed to contain anyone with a sense of drive - Allan Nation 1880's: There's lots of good fish in the sea W.S. Gilbert 1990's: Many fish stocks depleted due to overfishing, habitat loss, and pollution. 2000: Marine reserves, ecosystem restoration, and pollution reduction MAY help restore populations. 2022: Soylent Green is People! Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message.
[ECOLOG-L] Making Species Co-Occurrence Matrix
Is there a fast way to make a species co-occurrence matrix given a site-species matrix or lists of species found at each site? I'm looking for a spreadsheet or database method (preferably OpenOffice) or R function. Thanks, Jane -- - Jane Shevtsov Ecology Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia co-founder, www.worldbeyondborders.org Check out my blog, http://perceivingwholes.blogspot.comPerceiving Wholes The whole person must have both the humility to nurture the Earth and the pride to go to Mars. --Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Making Species Co-Occurrence Matrix
Hi Jane,
I think someone may have asked something similar on the r-sig-eco email list
(which is a good resource in general:
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-ecology)
I think the answer may have been there there's a function in the vegan
package for R (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/vegan/index.html).
But it would be pretty simple to write something up in R. Here's one way of
doing it (if I'm correct in my interpretation of a co-occurrence matrix!).
The actual function (called `spp.cooc') is really only 2 lines long--the
code just looks longer from making up example data and adding in the
comments.
Hope this might do the trick for you! Note that in it's current form you
would have to give the function a matrix or data.frame of ONLY NUMBERS in
which species are columns and sites are rows. This could be changed by
manipulating the MARGIN argument of the apply command below, i.e., site.list
- apply(matrx,1,...)
Hope this helps--
Andy
# make some example data
sppXsite - matrix(rpois(15,0.5),nrow=3)
colnames(sppXsite) - paste(spp,1:5,sep=)
rownames(sppXsite) - paste(site,1:3,sep=)
sppXsite# here's what it looks like
# now make a function to compute the co-occurrence matrix
spp.cooc - function(matrx) {
# first we make a list of all the sites where each spp is found
site.list - apply(matrx,2,function(x) which(x 0))
# then we see which spp are found at the same sites
sapply(site.list,function(x1)
{
sapply(site.list,function(x2) 1*any(x2 %in% x1))
})
# the result is returned in a symmetrical matrix of dimension
# equal to the number of spp
}
# here's how it works
co.matrix - spp.cooc(sppXsite)
co.matrix
On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 12:46 AM, Jane Shevtsov jane@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a fast way to make a species co-occurrence matrix given a
site-species matrix or lists of species found at each site? I'm
looking for a spreadsheet or database method (preferably OpenOffice)
or R function.
Thanks,
Jane
--
-
Jane Shevtsov
Ecology Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia
co-founder, www.worldbeyondborders.org
Check out my blog, http://perceivingwholes.blogspot.comPerceiving Wholes
The whole person must have both the humility to nurture the
Earth and the pride to go to Mars. --Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream
of Spaceflight
[ECOLOG-L] Postdoc: models and experiments of disease in insect outbreaks
TWO TO FIVE YEAR POSTDOC - USING MODELS AND EXPERIMENTS TO UNDERSTAND THE ROLE OF DISEASE IN INSECT OUTBREAKS with Greg Dwyer, University of Chicago In this project, we will use a combination of mathematical modeling and field experiments to understand how host-pathogen coevolution and induced plant defenses affect the dynamics of a viral disease of gypsy moths. Gypsy moth populations in North America undergo boom-bust population fluctuations, and the goal of our research is to understand how coevolution and host-plant defenses modulate the effect of the virus on these fluctuations. We are looking for a field biologist with strong quantitative skills, who knows both how to execute logistically challenging field experiments, and how to use maximum likelihood and nonlinear fitting routines to fit mechanistic mathematical models to data. We do not expect a high degree of expertise in both tasks, but some experience with each is crucial. Submit a C.V., two manuscripts from your Ph.D. or post-doctoral research (in prep., in press, or already published) and arrange to have 3 letters of reference sent to: gdw...@uchicago.edu The ideal start date is roughly 1 January 2011, but if you are interested in earlier or later dates you are welcome to ask. Review of applications will begin about 20 September 2010, and will continue until the position is filled. Salary and benefits are competitive. No commuters, please. Greg Dwyer 1101 E 57th St Ecology Evolution U Chicago Chicago IL 60637-1573 USA
