Symposium summary: Recent views from the macroscope

Abstract

ISSN 1948‐6596 news and update symposium summary Recent views from the macroscope Inaugural meeting of the British Ecological Society Macroecology Special Interest Group – London, UK, 20 th June 2012 In the decade since the British Ecological Society (BES) Symposium Macroecology: Concepts and Consequences (Blackburn & Gaston 2003), the field has continued to expand and develop. Mac‐ roecological literature is burgeoning and the field has steadily moved to a central position of influ‐ ence within ecology (Beck et al. 2012). Continuing this momentum, a new BES Special interest group (SIG) has been established, and the inaugural meeting, What is Macroecology? was held on June 20th in London (Keith et al. 2012). Attended by around 100 researchers from 11 countries, the meeting was a great opportunity to review pro‐ gress in the field, identify new opportunities and outline a focus for future efforts. The SIG chair Nick Isaac (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford) opened by introduc‐ ing the aims of the SIG, which included the pro‐ motion of data access and standards, the show‐ casing of methodological advances and the facili‐ tation of interdisciplinary collaboration. Ian Owens (Natural History Museum, London) fol‐ lowed with a personal account of progress made in the field over the past decade, highlighting a number of hot topics which dominate present macroecological efforts. These themes permeated proceedings throughout the day, not only through the seven invited presentations summarised be‐ low, but also through the 16 or so poster presen‐ tations. These posters provided an innovative op‐ portunity for researchers at various career stages to present their take on the meeting’s primary questions—via 60‐second presentations first, fol‐ lowed by the ‘typical’ poster session. The presen‐ tations emphasised the breadth of macroecology: from palaeoecology to predicting future responses to climate change. Growing opportunities In his keynote address, Owens discussed how macroecology has been evolving, and its scope expanding, as a result of the compilation of mo‐ lecular phylogenies, high‐resolution records of spatial distribution, increased computing power and new analytical techniques. In particular, he highlighted important initiatives undertaken to collate and make data available such as the Na‐ tional Biodiversity Network 1 , the Global Biodiver‐ sity Information Facility 2 and the Map of Life 3 . The opportunities emanating from the accu‐ mulation of diverse biological datasets were ech‐ oed by a number of other speakers. Nick Dulvy (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) described his group’s work which makes use of compilations of experimentally derived thermal tolerance data, records of latitudinal distribution and evidence of recent biogeographical shifts, emphasising the advantages of adding temporal dynamics to mac‐ roecological analysis (Sunday et al. 2012). Like‐ wise, Katrin Bohning‐Gaese (Biodiversity and Cli‐ mate Research Centre, Frankfurt) showed how large data sets generated by recent studies of bi‐ otic interactions have facilitated the comparative analysis of local feeding networks across latitu‐ dinal gradients. These analyses led to the interest‐ ing and counterintuitive finding that tropical plant –frugivore networks were significantly less spe‐ cialised than temperate networks and composed of fewer modules. Owens, however, cautioned that there is still much work required to increase data access and complementarity. Additionally, macroecologi‐ cal studies continue to be seriously biased taxo‐ nomically, particularly towards birds, mammals and plants while invertebrates (particularly in‐ sects) and marine systems (Raffaelli et al. 2005) 1. http://www.nbn.org.uk, last accessed 19/09/2012 2. http://www.gbif.org, last accessed 19/09/2012 3. http://www.mappinglife.org, last accessed 19/09/2012 frontiers of biogeography 4.3, 2012 — © 2012 the authors; journal compilation © 2012 The International Biogeography Society