Murphy and Carscallen cleaning up!

Congratulations to Grace Murphy who was awarded an NSERC scholarship for her PhD research on the effects of anthropogenic disturbances on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and to PhD student Mather Carscallen who won the InnovaCorp Clean Tech Open .

Lab at Bioball 2012

I was there in spirit (and on the placard) at least....food-web ecologists rocking it out at the annual biology dinner/dance

Binary versus flow-based webs

Estimating trophic position in marine and estuarine food webs -- EcoSphere Binary approaches to assembling feeding links are often criticized as being less powerful and accurate than flow-based methods. Our results show a high concordance between binary and d15N estimates of trophic position as well as showing that in some cases binary estimates are better predictors of d15N than flow-based estimates, reaffirming the robustness of the structural approach to assembling food webs.

Polar food-webs

Do Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice food webs differ in structure and robustness to species loss? Find out in "Structure and robustness to species loss in Arctic and Antarctic ice-shelf meta-ecosystem webs" published online in Ecological Modeling.

Summer 2012

So much going on this summer. Mather Carscallen is heading out to Germany to work with Ulrich Brose and Amrei Binzer on the Allometric Trophic Model. Tamara Romanuk is giving a CSEE symposium talk at Evolution 2012 in Ottawa "Species Invasions in Complex Food Web Networks". We are also heading out to GlobalWeb II in Barcelona in July organized by Ross Thompson.

GlobalWeb2011

Melbourne 2011...re-wiring life... one... link... at... a... time...
From left to right: front row: Ross Thompson; middle row: Neo Martinez, Tamara Romanuk, Jennifer Dunne, Bob Hall, Daniel Stouffer, Jason Tylianakis; back row: Roger Kitching, Ulrich Brose, Sally Hladyz, Heidi Rantala

A baby and the Cushman AWARD!

Jen Gaultier had her 2nd baby and won the Cushman Award which will be providing funds for helping us decipher food-web pathways in Atlantic salt-marshes...you go girl!

Honors Students 2011/2012

Trina Jolene "Response of placozoans to light"






Jess Hinch "Effects of increased temperature on salt marsh food-webs"





Alyssa Cirtwill "Latitudinal gradients in food-web structure"






Molly Whalen-Browne "Effect of increased temperature on the relation between diversity and stability in zooplankton"





Deja Gibson "Response predictability in ecosystem function following anthropogenic disturbances"




Charlotte Underwood "Food web structure of Atlantic salt-marshes"

Body Ecology

Marina Ritchie successfully defended her thesis titled "Structure and Function of the Human Microbiome"
Abstract: Humans harbour a diverse suite of microorganisms in and on their bodies. These microorganisms collectively amount to 10 times more cells than the cells in the human body, and their combined genomes have more than 100 times more genes than the human genome does. Despite our understanding of the composition, diversity, and abundance of microorganisms of the human body, it is surprising how little we know about the structure and function of the human microbiome. Here, I use network structure to describe interactions among human-associated microbiota and the human body by exploring differences in structure of human microbiomes across five regions of the body and the robustness of these networks to perturbations. My results show that positive interactions among microbiota are extremely important in structuring microbiome networks and those structural aspects of microbiome networks play a major role in their response to perturbations.