Recently in General Category

I've just finished yesterday (just on time, as usual!) grading the final assignment of undergrads from the "Université du Québec à Rimouski" for a fall session class entitled "Functioning of Marine Ecosystems".

And yesterday something stroke me. When I was producing a report (not so long ago) supposed to describe the patterns and processes prevailing in a marine ecosystem, I had David Attenborough's voice in my head chanting "The sun shines relentlessly over the blue sea, providing a tremendous amount of energy capable of moving water masses and make microscopic life bloom..."

But I think that my students heard a David Suzuki of some sort warning "There is an urgent need to describe and understand the current state of the marine ecosystem in order to face the impacts of global change and the ever increasing human pressure over the ocean..."

The vast majority of those 20 pages reports supposed to describe some specific marine ecosystems (The Gulf of Maine, the Baltic etc) were presented that way, to the point where some almost lost sight of the purpose of the assignment and spent more pages listing the current threats to their systems than characterizing its state and dynamics.

During the past session we had a variety of lectures and discussions, they did several presentations on various relevant topics. I did my best to put forth a balanced approach, but these students definitely learned ecology in a context radically different from what prevailed until the end of the last century. Canadian Conservative Ministers of natural resources will have to learn living with those new "radicals"!

First off, let me introduce myself.  I'm Pam, I've been a GMRI intern for the last 5 months or so and have been lucky enough to be part of the salmon team here.  It's been a great experience and I've definitely learned a lot! 

 

There's a couple of salmon-related projects going on at GMRI, I've been involved with work studying Atlantic salmon migration in the Gulf of Maine.  In the Gulf of Maine, salmon begin their migration when they enter the marine environment.  This initial migration phase occurs as they move through the Gulf of Maine to the coast of Nova Scotia by Halifax (they then continue all the way up to Greenland).  However, we don't know where in the Gulf of Maine the salmon are moving through, how they're finding their way through or how the variability in the Gulf of Maine physical environment (currents and temperatures) affects them.  I've spent the last several months trying to address these questions using what's known as "individual-based modeling" (IBM).

 

IBMs let us simulate individual fish.  We can give the fish different sets of rules to define their behavior.  This is neat because it lets us experiment with different orientation methods to see what methods might be plausible and lets us simulate the path an individual fish follows through the Gulf of Maine.  Then by using physical conditions from different years, we can see how these paths change due to differences in temperatures and currents. 

So I guess this is the day, I launch into the lab blog! First let me introduce myself. My name is Sigrid, I am a post-doc freshly arrived in the lab last February (so "fresh" refers more to the weather at the time than to the duration of my stay). I am a modeler, defended my phD last November dealing with the assessment of impacts of marine protected areas on the anchovy fishery in the Bay of Biscay. I am currently working on the interaction between herring and lobster in the Gulf of Maine. Last thing you need to know and you may have already noticed, I am French, so please forgive my potential mistakes in English. Voila! Everything's said, we can go.

I guess it's good form to start with a copepod joke...

OK copepod joke: done

More seriously, I had the opportunity to travel to Seattle last week to attend the 141th conference of the American Fisheries Society titled "New frontiers in fisheries management and ecology: leading the way in a changing world". This was an exciting event I wanted to share: 4 days, 94 symposia and about 4000 participants among them some of the most famous fisheries scientists, I felt in the Hollywood of fishery science! Consequently the organization comity was forced to move the plenary sessions to the Paramount Theater, a magnificent performing arts venue built in 1929 and that hosted famous names such as Madonna for her first concert and of course the best of the Seattle grunge stage such as Soundgarden and Nirvana.

There was thus a big pressure on the plenary speakers who certainly made it by reminding us how Fisheries science rocks! The essence of the talks pretty much fits GMRI's vision, see yourself:

Dr. Randall Peterman from British Columbia's Simon Fraser University gave a talk titled An optimistic view of challenges facing fisheries scientists and managers. He emphasized the need for multidisciplinary approaches (from ecologists to social scientists) to address the complex interactions between human and natural systems. He also pointed out the necessary communication between scientists and managers that would require the acquisition of new skills on both sides to address the question of risk assessment and risk management conjointly.  He listed his reasons to be optimistic concerning the future of fisheries, among others, the rising development of certification and sustainable seafood labels, the increasing inclusion of uncertainty at every levels of the management decision process, and the potential represented by young scientists increasingly trained in all aspects of the field (ecology, physics, economics, communication, quantitative methods).

Dr. Robert Lackey retired from Oregon State University then dissected the underlying implications of this 141th AFS conference theme: leading the way in a changing world. He stressed the necessity to look forward to the problems that fisheries will face in the next years giving the important changes we experience and will experience in climate and economics. He said that "there is no "good all days" and there won't be any in the future". He discussed the role of scientists in management decision accenting their duty of neutrality and the risk of scientist corruption. He finished by emphasizing the need to "reject pessimism and optimism and embrace realism!".

Finally Dr. Jesse Trushenski from Southern Illinois University - Carbondale gave a metaphoric talk titled The Ecology of Fisheries Education -- Are We Adequately Preparing the Next Cohorts for a Field in Flux? cleverly transposing ecological concepts to principles in the education of young scientists. She stressed the need for specialized generalists able to adapt quickly especially to work with imperfect data. She also emphasized the need to keep students connected to the field, ready to "get dirty! " and to recognize than science is "half brain, half gut! ". She promoted the development of a balanced r/K strategy as a parallel with selection theories that would produce high quality students, in reasonable number given the limited professional opportunities but with good adaptive skills to face the rapid changes experienced in our field.

To get some taste of the best I grabbed from the symposia, have a look at the figure below. Aside from the conference I get the chance to see fish flying... at pike place market, chipmunks eating grapes on the sides of Mont Rainier and marine scientists excited about touching sea urchins and starfish at Seattle Aquarium touch tank!

Doing my part to fill the internet-void of copepod jokes.

Q: Why does a copepod have one eye?

(click for answer)

So I realize that my 10th and final week at GMRI is a bit late to be writing my first EML blog post, but as they say, better late than never!

Hmmm...

(Mathematicians) (Oceanographers) sin θ ?

Something about a "sine wave"?

I'm sure there's a punchline there somewhere.

At any rate, I recently returned from a great workshop where a subset of mathematicians and a subset of oceanographers intersected in the same pool.  It took place at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State.  The mix of people and perspectives was great, and the atmosphere was one of learning and brainstorming.  There is certainly a need for more integration of these two fields.

The talks spanned a range of topics, ranging from mathy to oceany.  Many of the presentations were live-streamed, and can be downloaded here.  My talk, "Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Copepods" is posted here:

Before you click, be warned: it's nearly an hour long.  Make certain you have some time--you might not be able to tear yourself away.

-Nick Record, signing off.

After being in the ecosystems modeling lab for over a month now I have (believe it or not) started to learn a few things.

 

As I'm new to the blog I guess I should introduce myself a bit.  My name is Dom and I graduated from Bowdoin College in 2009.  I am just starting a MS in Oceanography at the University of Maine and will be doing most of my study/work remotely from the EML.  In undergrad I majored in physics with a minor in math and somehow found myself at GMRI.  I am new to ecology and ecosystem studies. I have taken biology courses in the past, but never really studied anything about fisheries before now.  Here are some thoughts I had piling up since I've started...

 

Like Nick got into in a recent post, it has been interesting to see the degree of uncertainty so far.  I knew the ocean was relatively unexplored and is known as a "mysterious frontier" (at least to me), but some of the unknowns caught me by surprise.  Things like fish mortality rates and egg production rates are very difficult to find.  Migration patterns for species are modeled, but it seems to change from year to year, especially as the environment changes... so how useful are our models. People are tagging fish, weighing samples, measuring lengths among other data collection methods, but even with all this data we still have to extrapolate and fill in blanks.  Maybe this makes everything more exciting...

 

Going along with that idea is the significance of assumptions.  Some how we have to use what we have and try to make predictions.  "We don't know it?... Let's assume this for now and we'll go from there..."

 

The data and its use have been interesting to me so far. I should have seen this coming, but trying to make predictions with the data we have is a tough task.  When you think about predicting the dynamics of a populations of herring in the GOM, consider the circumstances: there is only data from the last 20 years, individuals could be 10, 12 or even 20 years old, they can swim in and out of this region at any point, stocks can take decades to shift and cycle... It just seems as though there are so many variables that it is impossible to know where to start. 

 

Data is collection is difficult and data collected is difficult to work with.  External conditions can create holes (i.e. a study can miss a measurement of copepod abundance during a given winter in the GOM).

 

From what I have seen so far it seems that everyone is trying their best with the resources and information we have available to us.  I guess this is all we can do.  It's easy to see how these obstacles can seem overwhelming.  I think the idea is to make sure we have short term, attainable goals and remind ourselves of the big picture from time to time.  It is undeniable that everything we are working on is important and relevant.  Keeping this in mind is key.

 

This is what I have picked up on so far.  It may seem a little dreary, but I think it also excites people... I'm excited... I think.

 

Always learning

I've just opened an email form a colleague informing us that from today onward, the National Academies Press will offer its electronic books and reports for free.
They even provided the code to embed in anybody's webpage. It's neat, as you can see by yourself. Go there and browse the catalog. There's definitely something for you.

Last week I attended in UQAR a long presentation given by a climate modeler from the OURANOS consortium on regional climatology and adaptation to climate change, based in Montréal, Québec. I picked among the wealth of information provided a survival kit to use in any occasion you face a so-called skeptic. They are inconveniently widespread now, even among your family, friends or neighbors, the federal government, and worse, they are spreading outside of the US into Canada as I'm writing this blog entry...

So, skeptics cherish a handful of "arguments", which are not (only) bad or misunderstood science, but are essentially outdated science, and when you'll face it you'll have to debunk it! The skillful skeptic will probably not deny the global increase in atmospheric CO2 since the beginning of industrialization (Documented first by Callendar in 1938), as Andy recently pointed out, but rather deny its impacts on climate through a short list of arguments, some of them being:

"Climate changes are forced by the sun (not my SUV)"

This argument is incomplete and out of date. This was a legitimate scientific hypothesis formed by Milankovic in the 40's. He thought that the intricate interplay of the precession, obliquity and eccentricity of the earth altered the radiative forcing from the sun, and thus the climate. However as early as the 70's with the help of the first ice cores (some made by Milankovic himself...), it was proven that this effect would essentially modify the seasonality of the sun forcing, and not the total quantity of radiation reaching the earth which is what is important in the radiative balance of the planet. Moreover it could not explain a number of fast historical climate changes events, nor the warming trend of the last 30 years.

The more subtle skeptic will try to ensnare you in some apparently complex issues like:

"H2O vapor already blocks infrared wavelengths, so an increase in CO2 (by my SUV) won't change the earth's radiative balance"

This argument is of the oversimplified type, and is actually wrong. To better get the importance of infrared absorption by gases, please refer to this pages for a quick introduction of radiative balance of the planet and greenhouse effect. Basically, H2O doesn't absorb at all the infrared wavelengths that CO2 can absorb. So despite water vapor being overwhelmingly abundant, there is still room for an increase in heat in the atmosphere solely due to increased infrared absorption by increased atmospheric CO2. Plass realized this in the early 50's after a careful study of infrared wavelengths absorption by water vapor and other gases. He published as early as 1956 all of the major figures now confirmed by measurements and advanced numerical models in the most recent IPCC science reports: temperature increase by year 2000, temperature increase if doubling of CO2, etc. Plus, as Andy has just shown, an increase in heat due to CO2 will lead to an increase in water vapor, ad hence a positive (more warming) feedback...

And about feedback and climate numerical models, what about:

"Models are oversimplified, don't take in to account water vapor (!) and overlook feedback."

Well nowadays climate models are FAR from simple, and beyond their physical and numerical structure, the way they are used presently (ensemble approach, with powerful statistical methods to get meaningful confidence interval etc.) are far more advanced than usually thought. There is a widespread misconception equating the problem of predicting weather (a chaotic monster) and climate (the statistical resultant of many weather events)...

For water vapor, it was first modeled in 1967 by Manabe & Wetherald, and there is simply NO modern model that overlook it. Finally, most climate models now incorporate feedback from land (including vegetation, wild fires, volcanoes etc.), the ocean and the cryosphere (ice).

I leave you with a very nice animation presenting the current state-of-the-art climate modeling. This animation was made for the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute of France, so the comments are in French, but I can assure you it's a great piece of climate modeling for the layman!