Our new book chapter on Sustainability and Biodiversity has just been published in the 2nd Edition of Simon Levin's Encyclopedia of Biodiversity. This paper emerged from an NCEAS Distributed Graduate Seminar that students and I participated in while I was at Florida International University. The chapter is aimed at a sophisticated lay audience, and discusses various definitions and components of sustainability and their relationship to and dependence on biodiversity. I can't link to the specific article, but you can obtain one by contacting me directly.
Relationships between young scientists (undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, even junior faculty) and their mentors are complicated and varied, in terms of how and how well they work, how influential a particular relationship is on one's career, and in countless other ways. But most of us are deeply shaped by the people who help us mature as scientists. The particular importance of one's PhD advisor is reflected in large and small ways. One example is that NSF considers students and their PhD advisors to be in life-long conflict of interest, which means that I can never review one of my advisor's or students' grants. Another indicator how important these relationships are is the interest of scientists (and other scholars) in their academic geneology, or who begat whom. I recently kick-started documentation of my own academic family, which you can see here. I am hoping that my friends and colleagues will be able to help build this into a reliable database on the academic history of limnology.
The danger of delving into academic lineages is that can (and sometimes does) reinforce insider-ism, distinguishing those with and without prominent scientists in their academic roots. One might certainly object to delving into history because of this possibility. Can't we just measure contemporary scientists by the novelty and rigor of the work they do? Vanity aside, is there a good reason to think about these things? While it would be dishonest of me to deny any pride in my own academic heritage, which includes some very prominent scientists, I think the answer to the latter question is, Yes. Academic lineages help us remember that we are all of us standing on the shoulders of giants. They remind us that many ideas and approaches are old, and that the history of ideas, and the people who developed and evaluated them, continue to shape contemporary science. And they help us understand where whole disciplines and strains of thought arise. After all, 100 years ago ecology was barely a scientific discipline. Who were the (then mostly) men who shaped the application of scientific rigor to the study of natural history? Some lineages in ecology trace back to early physiologists, chemists, even theologians. How often do cross-overs occur in more recent times? With the present emphasis on interdisciplinarity, isn't this something we want to know more about? So while it is crucially important to separate our assessment of scientists from assessments of their academic lineages, it is also essential to our understanding of how science and mentorship work to understand the basic facts of our own academic history. Ecosphere has just published a new concept paper, led by Ryan Sponseller, with myself and our graduate advisor Stuart Fisher. The paper is titled 'On the multiple ecological roles of water in river networks.' It addresses how the diverse effects of water (as a resource, habitat, vector for material transport, and agent of disturbance) shape downstream change in drainage networks, and how the interactions among those roles vary within catchments and across biomes. We contrast patterns in Sycamore Creek, AZ with prevailing models of how streams change as they get bigger, and argue that the interactions among drying, flooding, and changing connectivity are needed to explain how systems change. Part of the rationale for this is that many streams are likely to see increased drying stress as climate, land use, and water management change. This paper emerged from the synthetic chapter of Ryan's dissertation, and we have been working on it off and on for the last six(!) years. So it's great to finally have it out.
Dr. Julian Agyeman of Tufts University came to Duke to give a talk today, hosted by the Nicholas Institute and the University Program in Environmental Policy. Dr. Agyeman's talk ('Just Sustainabilities: Re-imagining (E)quality, Living Within Limits') addressed the need to integrate concepts of social equity and environmental sustainability, in theory, practice, and politics. Ideas like walkable cities, urban agriculture, and the design of green space all fundamentally link the cultural, economic, and ecological processes. He writes a thought-provoking blog that covers these same issues. Lots of food for thought...
This brief tour of Durham in the NY Times gives some sense of how much is going on here. And they didn't even do it during baseball season. I'll also say that 36 hours is not nearly enough time to visit all of the great places to eat in town. But they do mention some of my favorites.
Our new Ecological Monograph on diel variation of phosphorus in the Ichetucknee River is available online as an unformatted pre-print. I am really excited about this paper, which was led by Matt Cohen at the University of Florida. Basically this paper extends our previous research on diel variation in NO3 to estimate P uptake by vegetation in a spring-fed river, but with several interesting wrinkles. First, to understand how biotic processes influence diel variation in P, we had to correct for the precipitation of calcite in the water column, because P binds strongly to it. Second, the P budget for the Ichetucknee River suggests that there are unaccounted inputs, which is consistent with what we have found based on other elements. Third, the diel variation of P is out of phase with that of O2 and NO3, which may represent differential timing of the cellular processes that metabolize these different elements. Nonetheless, the stoichiometry of C,N,and P uptake that we estimate based on diel variation matches pretty well with the stoichiometry of the dominant plants in the river. With all these different as
Some overdue news prior to the start of the semester:
Last year, the Bernhardt Lab initiated the greatest idea ever - Lab Olympics - and invited your humble PI to serve as assistant judge (under the mentorship of young Hannah Bernhardt). This year, we build on that storied tradition with the first ever inter-lab Lab Olympics. This year's events included the ever-popular Awkward Field Equipment Carry; Ecology Concepts Charades; and Speed Soil and Litter Sampling. Taking Tests for Fun made its debut as a full event after many years as an exhibition event. Participants were drawn from all four River Center labs (Bernhardt, Doyle, Heffernan, and McGlynn), plus the Wright Lab was invited for some reason. The Bernhardt lab played the role of Greece (founding nation) and the Wright lab starred as East Germany (Lab Olympic automatons). The Doyle and McGlynn labs were beset by injuries, pride, and holiday travel plans, so their members defected as dictated by numerical balance. I think that makes the Doyle Lab Cuba, and the McGlynn Lab might be Romania. Sadly, the Heffernan lab was cast in the role of Moldova, plagued by bitter disappoinment at the podium. Your humble PI, in particular, was even more so at the end of the day. Nonethless, a good time was had by all. Full results here. Two pieces have just been published about our Urban Homogenization work. The first, by science reporter Maggie Koerth-Baker, provides a layperson's overview of the urban homogenization hypothesis and some of the patterns that initially motivated our proposal. It will be published on Sunday in the New York Times magazine, and is online here. The second piece is an article written by Laura Ogden, an anthropologist and one of our collaborators on the project. Laura's piece addresses the peculiar social and ecological geography of south Florida, and the differences between front yards and back yards. The article was written for Miami Rail, a local alternative newspaper, but you can read it on the Art Practical website here.
Anna Braswell (PhD student) and I just got back from the American Geophysical Union Chapman Conference on tidal freshwater wetlands. At the upstream most end of estuaries, these ecosystems are influenced by the tides, but are not (or at least haven't been) exposed to salinity. The rationale for the conference was to better understand what will happen to these ecosystems as sea levels rise and other changes occur upstream within watersheds. Because these systems are understudied, they invited researchers from salt marsh and riverine systems to widen the exchange of ideas and approaches considered. Anna presented the results of her MS work on coastal marsh responses to fire and hurricanes, and I gave a talk that synthesized our work on wetland resilience and biogeomorphic feedbacks in desert wetlands and in the Everglades. I hope our presentations were useful and interesting, but I know for certain that I learned a lot about hydrology, geomorphology, and ecology of these coastward ecosystems. It was also really neat to see a community forming around shared interests in these ecosystems, and I certainly hope our lab remains engaged in this line of work. But for now, back to the semester!
I am quoted very briefly in a recent Nature article about changes to NSF grant review. Check it out here.
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Welcome!This is the homepage of the Heffernan Lab at Duke University. Here you can find all sorts of information about our research, teaching, and outreach. If you have any questions, contact Dr. Heffernan. Dr. Jim HeffernanI am an Assistant Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. My research is focused on the causes and consequences of major changes in ecosystem structure, mostly in streams and wetlands. Archives
May 2018
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