Tag: Web

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MSU arrival

So here I am in sunny East Lansing, settling into my new office at the Center for System Integration & Sustainability at MSU. As you’d expect It’s pretty much been all admin thus far, but I’m beginning to find my way around and the first real meeting in the job tomorrow should help me get to grips with the task in hand – a project to integrate ecology and economics by developing a systems model of a managed forest landscape in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that has been experiencing low tree regeneration due to overabundant deer, and declines in habitat for songbirds of conservation concern due to deer impacts and timber harvest.

Things are pretty crazy right now as you might expect having moved to a new job in a new country so I haven’t got much time to say much else right now. Rest assured I’ll keep you up-to-date on the progress of the project in the future. In the meantime why not go and check out some of the excellent articles highlighted in the fifth edition of Oekologie, this month hosted by Jeremy at The Voltage Gate.

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Adaption not Mitigation

There’s a lot written about climate change on web 2.0 – and there’s about to be a lot more written about it over the coming weeks. The impending release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report is going to have plenty for the commentators and bloggers to chew on. If you were so inclined it would take you quite a while to get through it all. But if there is one thing I think you should read about climate change in the light of the latest IPCC report it’s Maragret Wente’s piece (re)posted on Seeker.

The important point raised is that although much gets written about climate change mitigation, it is at the expense of discussion about climate change adaptation.

This is not a new point – Rayner and Malone wrote about it in Nature a decade ago, and I even got the message in my third year undergrad climate modelling course. Although reducing carbon emissions is important it may not halt what has already started, and we would do well to get thinking about the best adaptation strategies to the consequences of a changing climate. Of course, we should continue working to reduce our carbon emissions. But we need to accept that, regardless of whether the change is human induced or not, in all probability the climate is changing and we need to be prepared for the consequences.

I’ve posted what I think is the more relevant section below, but the whole thing is very interesting: read the whole article;


The climate debate focuses almost entirely on mitigation (how we can slow down global warming). But climate scientists and policy experts say that in the short term — our lifetimes — our most important insurance policy is adaptation. Nothing we do to cut emissions will reduce the risk from hurricanes or rising seas in the short term. But there are other ways to reduce the risk. We can build storm-surge defences, stop building in coastal areas and make sure we protect our fresh-water supplies from salination. We also can develop crops that will do well in hotter climates.

‘Adaptation’ is not a word that figures much in climate-change debates. Activists (and much of the general public) think it sounds lazy and defeatist. But the experts talk about adaptation all the time.

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Just Science Week

OK, so after a little deliberation I’ve signed up for Just Science week. In a response to the strong anti-science presence on the internet (global warming denialists, creationists, the anti-vaccination movement etc.), starting 5th February science bloggers will post about science only, with at least one post per day for the whole week. Issues which are favoured by anti-scientific groups (creationism, global warming, etc.) will be either avoided, or discussed without reference to anti-scientific positions.

The rationale behind this is that many science bloggers end up spending a fair amount of time combating the misinformation spread by anti-science groups at the expense of blogging about actual science. I generally don’t want to get embroiled in these sorts of arguments – I’ll leave it to those with much stronger feelings on the subject, know more about it and are generally much more organised.

What I am more interested in is the relationship between science and policy- and decision-making, specifically from modelling/environmental/resource management perspectives. I’m with Allen et al. (2001 p.484):


“The postmodern world may be a nightmare for … normal science (Kuhn 1962), but science still deserves to be privileged, because it is still the best game in town. … [Scientists] need to continue to be meticulous and quantitative. But more than this, we need scientific models that can inform policy and action at the larger scales that matter. Simple questions with one right answer cannot deliver on that front. The myth of science approaching singular truth is no longer tenable, if science is to be useful in the coming age.”

Just this week I’ve been considering how the recent work emerging from Demos, the UK thinktank, relates to my PhD research (more on this and this in the future no doubt). The Prometheus blog is great source of inspiration and for this sort of discussion too. But, in the interests of Just Science week I’ll try to steer clear of that stuff and focus on some my work on wildfire regimes (that I haven’t talked about in much detail here but have outlined on my website), recent publication in the environmental modelling literature, and also I’m thinking maybe a post on the Geography of Science (seeing as I am Geographer at heart…)

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mega moves

On of my good friends has just been putting the finishing touches on the second series of the cult engineering show ‘Mega Moves’ (‘Monster Moves’ in the UK). The series will be showing on National Geographic in the States and Channel Five in the UK. Checkout the trailer below – pretty cool eh?

View at youTube here

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Oekologie Blog Carnival

Jeremy at The Voltage Gate and Jen at The Infinite Sphere have just started the blogosphere’s first ecology and environmental science Blog Carnival – Oekologie.

Oekologie will be published on the 15th of every month, starting this month (Jan 2007), and aims to review the best ecology and environmental science posts of the month from across the blogosphere.

Submissions should be credible, science-centered posts discussing new research and ideas, reviews of the tenets of either field, or evidence-based personal opinions regarding ecology and environmental science. Specifically, they’re looking for posts describing biological interactions – human or nonhuman – with the environment. I’ll be submitting some of my musings from time-to-time I’m sure.

Direction not Destination will be hosting Oekologie in May 2007 but they’re still on the look-out for more hosts in the forthcoming months.

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google maps photo page


I’ve finally got round to tidying up and completing the photos page of my website. Click on the map markers and photos taken at those locations will appear below the map. Use the links above the map to navigate. It may take a while to load first time (so be patient) and you will need JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It took a little while to get to grips with the Google Maps API, but by viewing and ‘borrowing’ code from other websites (London Satellite Photo Map was particularly helpful) I got there in the end! Go check it out! Comments? – leave them here by clicking below.

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del.icio.us

OK, so I may be a little behind the times but I’ve finally discovered del.icio.us. In the side bar you find a link to my del.icio.us page and on each individual post page there is now a link to save that page to your del.icio.us account using the tags on that page (I’m going to slowly go back through all previous posts and add tags to them).

Also, I’ve added a del.icio.us section to the links page on my website detailing my 10 latest deli.icio.us posts…

Just doing my bit to keep the diameter of the web in check…

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photoBlogs

I’ve just discovered a couple of photoBlog directories:


Check them out – there are some cool sites out there. I’ve linked to a few of my newly found favourites.