UT Hosts Summer Camp for Local Middle Schoolers
https://tntribune.com/ut-hosts-summer-camp-for-local-middle-schoolers/
Dr. Lou Gross named Fellow of the Ecological Society of America
The Ecological Society of America is pleased to announce its 2023 Fellows. The Society’s fellowship program recognizes the many ways in which its members contribute to ecological research, communication, education, management and policy. This year, the ESA Governing Board has confirmed seven new Fellows and ten new Early Career Fellows.
Fellows are members who have made outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA, including, but not restricted to, those that advance or apply ecological knowledge in academics, government, non-profit organizations, and the broader society. They are elected for life.
Read more here: https://www.esa.org/blog/2023/04/05/ecological-society-of-america-announces-2023-fellows/
Study Finds Protected Areas Vulnerable to Food Security Concerns
Protected areas are critical to mitigating extinction of species; however, they may also be in conflict with efforts to feed the growing human population.
Paul Armsworth, professor of ecology and researcher with the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) is the co-author of a new study showing croplands are prevalent in protected areas, which challenges their efficacy meeting conversation goals. Varsha Vijay, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) is the lead author.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that 6% of all global terrestrial protected areas are already made up of cropland, a heavily modified habitat that is often not suitable for supporting wildlife. Worse, 22% of this cropland occurs in areas supposedly enjoying the strictest levels of protection, the keystone of global biodiversity protection efforts.
In order to comprehensively examine global cropland impacts in protected areas for the first time, the authors synthesized a number of remotely sensed cropland estimates and diverse socio-environmental datasets.
Read more about the study at sesync.org.
Scientific American Blog Highlights UT Research
The popular Scientific American Blog has posted an article about bat research done by grad student Jessica Welch (McCracken and Simberloff labs) and NIMBioS postdoc Jeremy Beaulieu.
Tennessee Today also did an article covering the blog post.
Gavrilets on NPR
Sergey Gavrilets is co-organizing a workshop on warfare this week at NIMBioS, called “Evolutionary approaches to the understanding of decentralized warfare.“He was recently interviewed on NPR because of the workshop. Gavrilets’s research on warfare has attracted other media attention in the past, including Huffington Post, Popular Mechanics, and Nature.
His interview was featured in Tennessee Today.
Best Paper in Theoretical Ecology
Jiang Jiang (NIMBioS fellow and Classen Lab postdoc) and Don DeAngelis (adjunct) have received the Ecological Society of America’s 2014 Outstanding Ecological Theory Paper Award. Their winning paper, “Strong species-environment feedback shapes plant community assembly along environmental gradients,” was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution in 2013 (3: 4119–4128).
“In their clearly-written paper, the authors make direct linkages to problems in plant ecology, while building a general theoretical model that addresses a key issue, not just in plant ecology, of feedbacks between organisms and their environment. Through well-designed analyses of an elegant model, they found that “ecological engineers” (species that modify the environment to their own benefit) can affect the diversity of the competitive community they inhabit, and that the direction of this effect depends critically on the extent to which the community is closed to immigration and on the spatial heterogeneity of the environment. These novel results should are likely to foster further theoretical research and generate some fine hypotheses that will motivate experimental and field studies.”
“The Theoretical Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America sponsors an annual award for an outstanding published paper in ecological theory. Papers with a print or electronic publication date in either of the two years preceding the year of the award are eligible.”
Complex Societies in PNAS
Sergey Gavrilets has a new open-access paper in PNAS, which is getting a great deal of media attention in places like Nature (links below). The paper is entitled, “War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies.”
Significance: How did human societies evolve from small groups, integrated by face-to-face cooperation, to huge anonymous societies of today? Why is there so much variation in the ability of different human populations to construct viable states? We developed a model that uses cultural evolution mechanisms to predict where and when the largest-scale complex societies should have arisen in human history. The model was simulated within a realistic landscape of the Afroeurasian landmass, and its predictions were tested against real data. Overall, the model did an excellent job predicting empirical patterns. Our results suggest a possible explanation as to why a long history of statehood is positively correlated with political stability, institutional quality, and income per capita.
Press Coverage:
| Austrian Tribune | Nature |
| The Conversation | Pacific Standard |
| El Mundo | Popular Mechanics |
| Huffington Post | Science World Report |
| Los Angeles Times | Smithsonian |
| National Monitor | Wired |
Public debate on warfare and evolution
As part of the Darwin Day events, co-sponsored by NIMBioS, there was a public debate about the role of warfare in fostering early social evolution. See below for a link to coverage of the debate, and for the audience vote results.
Public Debate: Was warfare a creative force in early social evolution?
NIMBioS postdocs
Call for Postdoctoral Fellowship Applications at NIMBioS
The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), located at the Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, is currently accepting applications for postdoctoral scholarship at the interface between mathematics and biology. Highest priority will be given to those with explicit plans to develop their ability to effectively carry on research across these fields. We are particularly interested in requests to support research that integrates diverse fields, requires synthesis at multiple scales, and/or makes use of or requires development of new mathematical/computational approaches. NIMBioS Postdoctoral Fellows are chosen based upon indications that the applicant’s research plans are consistent with the mission of NIMBioS, the applicant has the demonstrated ability to carry out the proposed research, and the opportunities provided through NIMBioS will enhance the capacity for the research to be completed in an efficient and timely manner. For additional information on NIMBioS, visit www.nimbios.org. Support: annual stipend of $51,000, full University of Tennessee employee fringe benefits, and an annual travel allowance of $2,000. Requests for Support: Submit a brief project description, references, and CV following the guidelines available at http://www.nimbios.org/postdocs/ to Dr. Chris Welsh at cwelsh@utk.edu. Deadline: NIMBioS postdoctoral requests for support are reviewed three times per year, and the selected researchers are offered positions at NIMBioS where they conduct research that is mostly self-directed. The deadline for activities beginning in early 2012 is Sept. 1, 2011. All letters of recommendation should be submitted before the request deadline.
NIMBioS postdocs
Call for Postdoctoral Fellowship Applications at NIMBioS
The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), located at the Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, is currently accepting applications for postdoctoral scholarship at the interface between mathematics and biology. Highest priority will be given to those with explicit plans to develop their ability to effectively carry on research across these fields. We are particularly interested in requests to support research that integrates diverse fields, requires synthesis at multiple scales, and/or makes use of or requires development of new mathematical/computational approaches. NIMBioS Postdoctoral Fellows are chosen based upon indications that the applicant’s research plans are consistent with the mission of NIMBioS, the applicant has the demonstrated ability to carry out the proposed research, and the opportunities provided through NIMBioS will enhance the capacity for the research to be completed in an efficient and timely manner. For additional information on NIMBioS, visit www.nimbios.org. Support: annual stipend of $51,000, full University of Tennessee employee fringe benefits, and an annual travel allowance of $2,000. Requests for Support: Submit a brief project description, references, and CV following the guidelines available at http://www.nimbios.org/postdocs/ to Dr. Chris Welsh at cwelsh@utk.edu. Deadline: NIMBioS postdoctoral requests for support are reviewed three times per year, and the selected researchers are offered positions at NIMBioS where they conduct research that is mostly self-directed. The deadline for activities beginning in early 2012 is Sept. 1, 2011. All letters of recommendation should be submitted before the request deadline.