Recently, Edge.org published a set of questions that researchers dread being asked about their field. Many of those questions were so dreadful because they are difficult to answer in a satisfactory manner (“What happened before the big bang?”), or because they forced the respondent on a trail of introspection about their life choices (“How does one justify having worked and continuing to work in the financial sector?”). This made me think what would be the dreaded question for me. Probably something like “Do you think your research is of any use in real life?”. Continue reading →

In March 19-21 2013, I made my second visit to the annual Student Conference on Conservation Science in Cambridge, UK. Here is a summary on my visit.

Plenaries

Yadvinder Malhi from the University of Oxford gave a talk on the impact of climate change on tropical forest function and diversity. He started by presenting several environmental factors that could affect the vegetation structure and the overall gain of biomass in varying ways under changing climate. Next, he pointed out that our knowledge on the overall response of the biosphere to the increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is still quite limited. He presented data on recent small-scale and large-scale studies in the tropical areas that have indicated higher-than-predicted gain of biomass in several tropical areas within the past years. (However, studies have also indicated severe periods of droughts and changes in the relative abundances of species.) Then he moved on to demonstrate how much this uncertainty affects vegetation change predictions under climate change scenarios. The scenarios he showed, with the hypothesized biomass gain response to the increasing CO2 concentrations included, gave an impression that the effects of climate change on the Amazon rainforests may not necessarily be as catastrophic as previously thought. However, numerous unknown factors remain. For tropical plants, there is very little knowledge on their thermal tolerance ranges.

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West et al. (2006). Annu.Rev.Anthropol. 35:251-77.
Summary by the journal club guest Aili Pyhälä

On the 21st of December, I was invited by the Global Change and Conservation group of Helsinki University to their weekly “Journal Club” seminar to present and discuss a paper of my choosing. In the end, I ended up presenting two papers. The first was a review paper by West et al. (2006) examining the social, economic and political effects of Protected Areas (PAs), which takes a philosophical look at the nature-culture dichotomy, and also looks at conflict and power relations related to PAs. The paper looks at two key questions: a) what are the social, material and symbolic effects of protected areas, and b) how do protected areas impact peoples’ lives and their surroundings?
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