Predator (red) -prey (blue) dynamics generated when predator’s capture rate is 0. Sorry Wile E.

It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

A good friend of ours,  Dave Armitage, created a couple of free apps to simulate Lotka-Voltera and Predator-Prey dynamics.

Rafael Loyola discusses the inconsistent environmental actions taken by Brazilian policy makers  (I recently wrote a post about some of these problems here), and  their consequences for conservation and in the international political arena, in a new article titled “Brazil cannot risk its environmental leadership“.

A  preprint in arXiv used different methods in order to estimate the size of Google Scholar (unlike other bibliographic databases, Google Scholar does not offer tools for bibliometric analyses). Although all the methods used by the authors showed “great inconsistencies”, they estimated that Google Scholar harbors ~ 160 million documents, including journal articles, meeting abstracts, books, case law, etc. If you are interested in that matter, see also a good article published last week in Science reviewing this paper and some of the issues associated with using Google Scholar.

David Warton, an associated editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution, recently interviewed professors Alix Gitelman, Geof Givens, and Janine Illian, whom organized a conference called “Modern Statistical Methods for Ecology”. Among other things, they discussed the current trends in statistical ecology. Here is a link to the video.

At last, here are a couple of very interesting articles about stochasticity in community ecology:

• Assessing the relative importance of neutral stochasticity in ecological communities;
• A stochastic biodiversity model with overlapping niche structure;

 – Vinicius Bastazini

• A really cool article on maximising the phylogenetic diversity of seed banks.
• An interesting study on how the degree of species’ specialism affects the species-area relationship.
• An article from Conservation Magazine on how people’s climate change attitudes vary with the local weather they are experiencing.

– Benno Simmons

Jason Fridley and Dov Sax propose a new use for the beleaguered phylogenetic diversity as indicator of genetic potential in their early view GEB paper that formulates an ‘evolutionary imbalance hypothesis’ to explain global patterns of species invasions. I look forward to the ensuing commentary and discussion.

-Jes Coyle

• Rare long-distance dispersal events might actually be really important in explaining biogeographic speciation patterns on islands.
• Pretty sobering news for Earth’s wildlife: World Wildlife Fund reports that populations of wildlife have been reduced by half in the past 40 years, with the greatest losses in freshwater systems, and in Latin America.

-Emily Grason

ScienceWatch posted their predictions for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine, Economics, Physics, and Chemistry, which will be announced next week.  Though I’m still debating whether to start James Darnell or Michael Wigler in the Medicine group, my Nobel fantasy team is looking sharp for Tuesday’s announcements. – Nate Johnson

October 3, 2014