A high performance of an individual researcher or a research team is of course a much-desired quality in an academic society today. We all want to produce a good science and of course, present the good side of our personality. It looks like Cheruvelil et al. 2014 might have a recipe for ecologist to achieve such excellence as a team. They suggest that success can be achieved by mixing two magic ingredients: team diversity and great interpersonal skills. They adopt this recipe from the business sectors, education and “science of team science”. They believe that such recipe should make great products in ecology too.
The topic is indeed interesting (well, if it wouldn’t, why would we even pick up this paper), but is it really so that diversity and interpersonal skills are the magic ingredients that will change how teams in ecology collaborate and perform? Continue reading →

Climate change, land use changes, and species invasions are all recognized as key threats to biodiversity but are often examined separately or at small scales.  We discussed the recent paper “Will climate change promote future invasions?” by Bellard et al. 2013 in Global Change Biology, which focused on all three of these issues by looking at the interacting effects of land use and climate change on distributions of 100 invasive species.  This study is unique because it is the first to examine land use and climate change effects on invasive species distributions at a global scale. Continue reading →

“Tropical biologists need help”. Such a strong and unequivocal statement opened last week’s Journal Club. The paper selected was Sheil & Lawrence’s 2004 opinion piece “Tropical biologists, local people and conservation: new opportunities for collaboration” (see complete reference below).

This opinion piece catches Lawrence and Sheil in service of a layered, thought-provoking article revolving around the great importance of integrating local peoples in the conservation challenge in tropical latitudes. The authors reach out tentatively into the frequently unexplored genre of scientific opinion to present the idea that tropical biologists need to start shifting their sight from conventional sampling to the new opportunities provided by working with local people in order to develop effective conservation strategies in the Tropics. To back their viewpoint, they provide an extensive list of successful experiences of local collaborations across the tropical, which constitutes most of the body of the text. Later on, they discuss some obstacles to explain the meager implementation of these approaches and their frequent out-of-sight position to mainstream biologists. Yet, the promise that this opinion entails gives way to some weaknesses, which were at the core of our Journal’s Club debate. More than concentrating on the actual opinions presented in the paper (to be honest, we all quite agreed in essence with them), our discussion glided over more stylistic issues on how to write a good opinion piece. Some points at the technical level were also discussed. Continue reading →