The theme of this year’s ESA meeting is “Ecological Knowledge and a Global Sustainable Society, and the program shows it: there are at least six sessions devoted completely to sustainable agriculture and agroforestry.  Most studies approach the problem of increasing cropland productivity while causing little harm to the environment by assessing above-ground processes, like cropland biodiversity or the use of…

Last night the worlds of science and journalism collided at the ESA Annual Meeting in a session to help scientists learn how to communicate with the media. Fittingly called Meet the Press: Talking Ecology with the Media, the interactive session played out like a science American Idol, with scientists pitching their research to a panel of “judges”: two journalists and…

Insect herbivore species often specialize on the host plants that they eat, evolving adaptations to use a plant’s unique set of resources.  But like any time you throw all your eggs in one basket, these caterpillars put themselves at risk. Michael Singer of Wesleyan University gave a talk today at the ESA Annual Meeting that evaluated these tradeoffs in caterpillars….

A pulse of midges swarms over Lake Malawi in Africa. Photo credit: The Daily Mail. Freshwater fish often rely on terrestrial insects as a portion of their food supply. In lakes, the size and shape of the lake can determine how much the fish rely on terrestrial insects for food. But with humans’ love of lakefront property, the resulting development…

Program Chair Scott Franklin and ESA President Sunny Power at the scientific plenary and ESA Awards session. This post was contributed by ESA’s Director of Public Affairs, Nadine Lymn. At the start of this morning’s Scientific Plenary & ESA Awards Session, ESA President Alison “Sunny” Power gave her State of the Society address. Much like the U.S. presidential “State of the…

The ESA meeting kicked off last night with the opening plenary session and presentation of the ESA Regional Policy Award.  ESA’s Director Katherine McCarter welcomed everyone to the meeting, citing the fact that her first ESA meeting as director was also in Albuquerque in 1997. She pointed out that the meeting’s theme, “Ecological Knowledge and a Global Sustainable Society,” is…

ESA’s 94th Annual Meeting will begin on Sunday, August 2 in Albuquerque, NM. The meeting’s theme is “Ecological Knowledge and a Global Sustainable Society,” and the program will include everything from talks on urban ecosystems to sessions about geoengineering to a workshop on improv comedy. We’ll be live blogging from the meeting, with updates, stories, photos, and (hopefully) some video….

Pearl mussels can vary greatly in lifespan over latitudinal and temperature gradients. Bergmann’s rule within physiological ecology postulates that animals get larger at higher latitudes and altitudes.  Similarly, the temperature-size rule predicts that although animals grow more slowly at cold temperatures, they reach a larger adult size (but see Angiletta and Dunham 2003).  A study published today in the Proceedings…

ESA released a position statement today on the proper place of ecological and environmental capital in the nation’s economy.  As the United States and much of the world try to recover from the current economic crisis, ESA recommends that long-term sustainability should be prioritized in the restructuring of business models and economic growth. A key to this task, the statement…

The ESA podcasts page has been revamped!  Check out the new look for your favorite ESA podcasts on the new ESA podcasts page. Or, if you’re an ESA podcast newbie,  here’s the rundown of the three series: Beyond the Frontier features interviews with the authors publishing in the ESA journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The authors to discuss…

In 1914, 53 percent of a random sample of U.S. scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of a god, a figure that rose to 67 percent by 1934. According to a July 1998 study in Nature, only seven percent of scientists in the National Academy of Sciences believed in a higher power. These statistics were brought up in…

A paper out online in the August issue of Ecology Letters presents a new index for estimating biodiversity. John Harte of UC Berkeley and his colleagues have developed a method that they say yields more precise measures of biodiversity than classic indices, such as Simpson’s and Shannon’s diversity indices. In an argument similar (but reversed) to that for quantum physics,…