Today I did my invited general audience seminar at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) entitled: What can we learn from the tangled bank? The network organisation of ecological systems. After a very nice introduction by Dave Armitage, head of the Integrative Community Ecology Unit at OIST, I went right into business and gave an overview of the work we have done, and continue to do, in the lab. I drew on examples from our work on spatial scaling, terrestrial avian food webs, and the microbiome all within the context of classical ecology from Hutchinson and the niche to May and ecosystem stability. Towards the end of the talk I also presented our recent work on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of complex networks with multiple interaction types.

At the end of the talk there were many thought-provoking questions and further discussions sparked by the talk. As a result I will continue discussing this during my time left at OIST with students and staff members who expressed interest in our work!

Special thanks of course go to my friend and collaborator Nuria (Galiana), and my PhD students and postdoc: Abby, Lucie, and Gui, without whom none of what I presented would have been possible. And of course thanks to the TSVP for organising!

The research I presented in this talk was partly funded by the Leverhulme Trust.