News & Events: Seminar Series
Biodiversity Research Seminar Series - Hilary Term 2008
Please Note: This seminar series has finished. For information on our current seminar series please see our Seminar Series.
All seminars will be held in the Boardroom, OUCE, 1-2pm on Thursdays unless indicated otherwise below. For further information contact Prof. Rob Whittaker.
Week 1: Thursday 17 January 2008
Towards a Biocultural Theory of Extinction.
Dr Richard Ladle, School of Geography, Oxford.
Week 2: Thursday 24 January 2008
Evapotranspiration is a proxy for biodiversity, but how accurate are evapotranspiration estimates?
Dr Josh Fisher, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford.
Week 3: Thursday 31 January 2008
Is tropical forest cover declining?
Alan Grainger, Leeds University.
Week 4: Thursday 7 February 2008
Vulnerability of the Amazon forest to climate change: new insights from a recent drought.
Dr Luiz Aragao, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford.
Week 5: Thursday 14 February 2008
Evolutionary species-area curves as revealed by single-island endemics: insights for the inter-provincial species-area relationship.
Dr Kostas Triantis, School of Geography, Oxford.
Week 6: Thursday 21 February 2008
Meta-analyses and Mega-mistakes: Calling time on meta-analyses of the species richness-productivity relationship
Prof. Robert J. Whittaker, Biodiversity Research Group, OUCE.
Week 7: Thursday 28 February 2008
POSTPONED UNTIL NEXT TERM
Where do you want to go to make a difference? A review of the scope of international conservation volunteering.
Dr Jamie Lorimer, School of Geography, Oxford.
Week 8: Thursday 6 March 2008
Climate change, humans and the extinction of the woolly mammoth
David Nogués-Bravo, Department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Spain.
Abstracts
Meta-analyses and Mega-mistakes: Calling time on meta-analyses of the species richness-productivity relationship.
Prof. Robert J. Whittaker, Biodiversity Research Group, OUCE.
Since early 2001, three meta-analyses of the Species Richness-productivity relationship (SRPR) have been published in the journal Ecology. A proper understanding of the SRPR is foundational to much diversity theory and the findings of the meta-analyses are thus attracting a great deal of (mostly uncritical) attention. This seminar will demonstrate significant flaws in these analyses arising from the failure to adopt rigorous criteria within these meta-analyses, and a general lack of rigour in the extraction, compilation and reporting of the results. Could it be that such problems are inherent to all meta-analyses in ecology given that study designs - far from being standardised across the literature - are essentially unique from study to study? In addition to consideration of error propagation within the meta-analyses, I will be presenting elements of a new theoretical framework addressing the scale-dependency of the SRPR.
Climate change, humans and the extinction of the woolly mammoth.
David Nogués-Bravo, Department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Spain.
The debate about why the Late Quaternary extinctions occurred has centred upon environmental, human-induced effects, or a combination of both. We combine climate envelope models and a population model with explicit treatment of woolly mammoth-human interactions to measure the extent to which a combination of climate changes and increased human pressures might have led to the extinction of the species in Eurasia. Climate conditions for woolly mammoths are measured across different time periods: 126 kyr BP, 42 kyr BP, 30 kyr BP, 21 kyr BP and 6 kyr BP. We show that suitable climate conditions for the mammoth reduced drastically between the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene, a 90% of its geographical range disappeared between the 42 kyr BP and the 6 kyr BP periods, with the remaining suitable areas in the mid-Holocene being mainly restricted to Arctic Siberia, which is where the youngest records of woolly mammoths in continental Asia have been found. Results of the population models also show that the collapse of the climatic niche of the mammoth caused a significant drop in their population size making woolly mammoths more vulnerable to the increasing hunting pressure from human populations. The coincidence of the disappearance of climatically suitable areas for woolly mammoths and the increase in anthropogenic impacts in the Holocene, the coup de grâce, likely set the place and time for the extinction of the woolly mammoth.