News from the Computational Ecology Lab

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Today Amelia defended her MRes project entitled: Changes in Community structure and dominance triggered by seasonal and abiotic differences in saline lagoons. The viva went well and the outcome was Pass with minor corrections.

Well done Amelia! Time to celebrate

This week the lab had a good representation at the Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society in Liverpool!

We had the chance to showcase our work on many different projects currently ongoing.

Lucie delivered at great talk on her work on the spatial spread of disturbances across spatially explicit food web metacommunities as part of the Thematic session on Dynamical Ecological Networks: Connecting topics and approaches. Speakers in this session included Andrew Beckerman, Elisa Thébault and Ulrich Brose. All in all a great session!

Amelia attended her first BES conference, for which she was really excited, and had the chance to talk to people about her nice research on changes in community composition of saline lagoons across tidal regimes during her poster session.

Lastly, Gui and I were happy to present our current findings on theoretical approaches to microbial community assembly across scales from local to regional. This was part of the Theoretical and Computational Ecology parallel session on Wednesday. We are thankful for the support of the Leverhulme Trust to attend this conference under the Research Project Grant “The origin of complex symbioses”.

Beyond the exciting talks and research sessions, the meeting was a great place to reconnect with colleagues and researchers from institutions across the world. It was nice to see familiar faces including Dani Montoya, Shai Pilosof, Fraser Januchowski-Hartley, Miguel Araújo, Vinicius Bastazini, Natalie Cooper, Nathalie Pettorelli, Laura Graham, Ulrich Brose, Andrew Beckerman, Elisa Thébault, Chris Clements, Jason Matthiopoulos and many others!

A great conference that we hope to attend again next year to keep showcasing the research done at the Computational Ecology Lab!

That’s TV South Wales recently approached me for an interview to learn more about how our rock pipits ringing project can yield some interesting insights for population dynamics and future conservation.

You can see the whole interview here:

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I believe in the importance of promoting awareness amongst the public on the importance of research around the factors influencing bird populations and local efforts to better understand them!

This week I am visiting Rice University in Houston, Texas. I am working with Dr César Uribe, of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and with Dr Lydia Beaudrot from BioSciences on developing potential future collaborations to better understand the changes in food web structure across spatial scales.

César is currently developing innovative ways to quantify distances between network shapes beyond changes in structural properties. These structures can in turn be related to covariates such as environmental factors to try and predict structure from contextual information on ecosystems.

I presented my work at the lab’s meeting and César has also kindly organised for me to deliver a seminar on recent work I have developed with my friend and collaborator Alberto Pascual-García, the head of the Integrative Biology Lab @ CNB on Unveiling the link between ecological and evolutionary stability in mutualistic networks.

I have also had the chance to catch up with Annie Finneran, a PhD student at Rice working with Lydia and César on the effects of ecosystem’s productivity on food web structure. We have had a couple of interesting discussions about the ways in which network structure can be quantified and how to use environmental metrics of productivity such as NDVI to assess the effects of habitat productivity on food webs. She does amazing camera trapping studies in Tanzania and other amazing locations!

Aside from the great research we have been discussing here and prospects for future collaborations, I have also had the chance to meet bird expert Professor Cin-Ty Lee, a passionate bird watcher who has kindly shown me around the Houston area, coast and the swamps in the search of new species, including some owls on campus!

Thanks César for being an excellent host and allow me to share my research at Rice, to Lydia and Annie for the interesting discussions, to Cin-Ty for sharing with me the wildlife around Houston, and to the lab members (Alex, Jhojan and Carlos) for the hospitality!