AgriPop Community Ecology Working Group

Hey, you know what? Apparently there have never been so many people working on community ecology in our team as this year. Yeah, that kind of dudes contemplating entangled banks, making it sound that everything in ecology is inextricably complex -- or just a complex pattern produced by simple general laws (depending on one's preferences) -- and getting into heated debates if 'competition' or 'facilitation' is driving everything.

Now, slightly more seriously, today we've decided to form a working group on community ecology, with 3 aims:

1. Meet once every week to discuss in depth a paper on community ecology
2. Collect and share in a common repository (DropBox & Mendeley) the pdfs of papers
3. Join our efforts in surveying new papers of common interest to us.

 The papers we will aim to discuss will comprise theory, methods, review papers, as well as empirical papers. The format we aim for is more that of a workshop than a typical journal club. Cool idea, isn't it? So, after a brief bout of email exchanges today four of us (Nico, Ronan, Laura and myself) decided that we will meet every Wednesday @ 13:30. If you like the idea, please come and get in touch with us! Yep, we are thinking also about you, the new M2 students!

We will start it by discussing an apparently cool paper by Rzanny et al. currently in press at Oikos, based on experimental data from the fancy Jena Experiment:

"Bottom–up and top–down forces structuring consumer communities in an experimental grassland"

And Oikos has been nice enough to put up also a blog post about this paper, so please go and take a look here!

So, don't be shy and join us!