Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
Drumroll please! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for! The votes have been cast, they’ve been counted and recounted, and we can finally showcase the entries and reveal the winner of the 4th EcoEvo blog photo competition!
This post is based on the paper ‘The avifauna of the forest mosaic habitats of the Mariarano region, Mahajanga II district, north-west Madagascar’, just published open-access in Bothalia: African Biodiversity and Conservation. The header image by Jamie Grant-Fraser shows White-faced Whistling Ducks (Dendrocygna viduata) responding to the appearance of a Madagascar Harrier-hawk (Polyboroides radiatus).
Annabel Smith and Jana Eccard on research by Riesch et al that shows how red deer grazing can help manage biodiverse areas.
Fire is an essential part of the ecology of many savannah and grassland ecosystems. In some cases, fire is the only way of removing older grasses that are no longer profitable for herbivores to consume. As well as having benefits for local ecology, grassland fires also offer great feeding opportunities. I have seen large groups …
Continue reading “Firehawks: waking up to stories of the Dreamtime”
When you live in Ireland, it’s easy to forget that a good proportion of the world’s ecosystems regularly burn. In many regions, plants and animals have evolved to tolerate or even rely on fire. My recent paper investigates the factors that drive the success of an Australian gecko after fire. I found that the geckos …
Continue reading “What happens to animals when their habitat burns?”
A recent study led by Sam Ross (Trinity College Dublin) and Dr. Nick Friedman and published in the journal Ecological Research, aims to ask how much we can learn from bioacoustic monitoring of ecosystems. Read more in the blog post snippet below, or see the full blog post on the IMECO blog: “A recent study led by …
Continue reading “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”
The environment is changing around us at accelerated rates. Scientists and policy makers have come to realize that large-scale international collaboration and global data syntheses are needed in order to understand universal drivers of current global changes. A response to this need was the emergence of several coordinated distributed experiments worldwide in the last decades. …
Continue reading “PLANTPOPNET – a global Plant Population Dynamics Network”
Nature, natural phenomena, animals and ecosystems have always inspired human beings and references to it are omnipresent in ancient and contemporary cultures. To take just a narrow example, composers and songwriters have found inspiration in Nature an uncountable number of times. Rivers, mountains, forests, sea and desert are evoked by the lyrics of songsters far …
Continue reading “The Inspirational Role of Ecosystems in Popular Music”
I’ve been studying tenrecs for almost two years. I’ve read about them, watched video clips and handled hundreds of dead specimens. However, within that time I only met two live individuals, both of which were captive zoo animals. That’s all changed. I’m now well acquainted with a variety of tenrec critters. It turns out they’re …
The Easter Bunny apparently originated in German Lutherans’ traditions before 1682 when it was first mentioned in von Franckenau’s De ovis paschalibus. In France and Belgium however, it’s not a rabbit that hides eggs in the garden for Easter morning but flying bells coming back from Rome (they went there for their holidays since the …
Continue reading “The Easter bunny’s origins are linked with climate change”