It's been quite a good week for me. The ecology paper I've been trailing recently was accepted by PNAS, which is great news.
So what's it all about, and is it interesting/useful to anyone? Let me give a quick summary, and you can decide for yourselves.
The original idea came out of a workshop in Santa Barbara, aimed at integrating two big theories in ecology. The first of those theories proposes that while differences between individuals might seem like they should be important for understanding community structure, those differences actually don't matter for predicting certain large-scale ecological patterns. That's Neutral Biodiversity Theory, and its conclusion is that the single most important factor in determining the variety of species in a community is simply the randomness of births and deaths of individuals: demographic stochasticity.
Neutral Theory has been pretty controversial in ecology, but it's a great step forward in generating testable predictions. On the other hand, there's another big theoretical framework that a lot of ecologists have worked on in the last ten years or so: the Metabolic Theory of Ecology. Metabolic Theory emphasizes that differences between individual metabolic rates actually are crucial, at least for predicting some ecological patterns. And metabolism is closely linked to body-size, so the theory basically says that differences between the sizes of individuals in a community are essential for understanding its structure.
What we are doing in the paper is to put parts of those two theories together, and the mathematical framework is (surprisingly) somewhat related to quantum field theory. We end up with something that takes account both of demographic stochasticity and also of individual variation and ontogenetic growth. Some of our predictions agree with Neutral Theory, some agree with metabolic theory, and some predictions are entirely new, and I hope relevant for ecologists. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and all that.
Something else I want to discuss in more detail here, once I've got my head around it, is Open Access and the merits of the various publishing models we currently use. We chose to submit to PNAS for various reasons. It's the third highest-impact general science journal, after Nature and Science, so the paper should find a wide audience. It's also the only one of those three that regularly publishes pure theory in ecology, so it made sense for this particular paper.
But it also has a good open access option. We have to pay them quite a bit of cash to take up the option, but hey, it does cost money to run a good journal, and this way the science is available for all. Right?
One show down this week, one to go. On Wednesday night my dad had bought us tickets to see a famous gospel band, The Blind Boys of Alabama. Here they are, performing the awesome `Run on':
And tonight, we're off to see Andrew Bird, in Portland town. Should also be awesome, judging from the 2007 version.
RIP, John.
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2 comments:
Seven days and still no-one has made a PNAS joke.
Really, what have things come to.
It's true. People should've done better with the combination of PNAS and Open Access.
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